Enter the Blue Zones

The Blue Zones are areas in the world where populations of people live to be 100 years or older. So, what is their secret? In this collection of articles we take a trip to Okinawa (Japan), Ikaria (Greece), Sardinia (Italy), Loma Linda (California, US), and the Nicoya Peninsula (Costa Rica) to discover the lifestyle habits that are linked to longevity.

In this introductory article, we learn about the 5 areas across the world that are known as the “Blue Zones,” and the nine lifestyle habits that link Blue Zone inhabitants.

In this article, we focus on the Blue Zone of Okinawa, Japan, shining a spotlight on the lessons that these beautiful islands can teach us about living long, healthy lives. We will take a closer look at their traditional diet and explain why Okinawan longevity is now a thing of the past.

In this blog post, we focus on a Blue Zone based in Loma Linda, California: a community of around 9000 Seventh-Day Adventists who live as much as a decade longer than the average American. We will examine the scientific studies of this population since 1960 and conclude with lessons learned about the Seventh-Day Adventists’ secrets to longevity.

While the population size of Nicoya is too small to track longevity with statistical significance, scientists have used an analogous indicator and calculated that the probability of a 60-year-old Nicoyan male becoming a centenarian is SEVEN times that of a Japanese male. The obvious question is why? We explore the answer in this article.

Sardinia is a population that enjoys nearly ten times more centenarians per capita than the US, and is the home to the world’s longest living men! In this article we discuss how the Sardinian Blue Zone was first found, discover the truth about the Mediterranean diet, and share some of the Sardinian secrets to longevity.

Ikaria, Greece is known as ‘the island where people forget to die.’ Ikaria boasts a population that is almost completely free of many chronic diseases and, as a result, a whopping 30 percent of people make it to their 90s! Why? Let’s find out together.

As luck would have it, I found myself traveling through the Mediterranean region a few weeks after concluding our Blue Zones series—including long stays in Italy and Greece. In this article, I share some of my first-hand observations of the region’s eating and lifestyle habits today.