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The Solution to Make America Physically Active
In the places around the world where people live the longest, they don’t actually pursue health.
They live longer because health ensues from the right environment.
That is according to Dan Buettner, Blue Zones founder and National Geographic fellow, who has spent the last 15 years studying the five places around the world — dubbed Blue Zones — where people live the longest (into their 100s) and are healthiest: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California.
I had a chance to catch up with Buettner earlier this week, and he told me that in all five Blue Zones, people do not proactively exercise or seek health. Instead, physical activity just happens naturally as a result of their surroundings.
In the Blue Zones — just like in the US — Buettner says people go to work, over to their friends’ houses, out to eat, and get their kids off to school.
But in the Blue Zones — unlike most places in America — those daily commutes all represent occasions to walk. Residents of the Blue Zones are also known to grow gardens in their yard, and their houses are not full of mechanical conveniences. All of this means that these longest-lived cultures have made a habit of moving naturally every single day. And they don’t even think…
