Blue Zones: Live Longer, Better

Grow Your Own Pesto

Growing herbs on your windowsill or in your garden is a great way to add extra flavor to favorite recipes and add a boost of immunity-supportive nutrients and antioxidants to your diet.

Basil is a frequent guest in my kitchen. I love the flavors of basil-infused scrambled eggs with grilled tomato and sautéed onion. I also love fresh basil in pasta sauce or wrapped around a pork loin next to applewood-smoked bacon strips. Yum... A Thai chili basil sauce is great on fish, especially delicate white fish like Chilean Sea Bass, Walleye and Tilapia.

Basil is rich in antioxidants. In a 2007 Brazilian study, researchers added essential oil of basil to drinking water and found it had antimicrobial qualities. In other words, basil may help kill common parasites that contaminate water, in turn, fighting human infection. Basil is also said to have calming and bellyache-reducing qualities.

How to Grow
Plant basil seeds, readily available, in a sunny location. Potted basil accents any windowsill!

How to Eat: Basil Pesto

FEATURE: Four Healthy Behaviors Might Add Fourteen Healthy Years!

	Even if you're no spring chicken, you can adopt life-lengthening habits.

Four simple (not to be confused with easy) behaviors might add fourteen extra healthy years to your life!

The four behaviors are not smoking, moderate alcohol intake, regular exercise and a healthy diet filled with lots of fruits and vegetables.

People who consistently demonstrate these behaviors live an average of fourteen additional years compared with people who don’t make these healthy choices.

What are great ways to start adopting these behaviors today?

The Importance of Purpose in Longevity.

When people think of living longer, they think about their body.They think about exercise, diet and nutrition. But research shows that state of ones mind is as important, if not more, than the state of ones body.

Dan Buettner and Dr. Tom Perls were interviewed on CBS' Early Show and they talked about the importance of mental states in increasing one's longevity. Dr. Perls mentioned the importance of the cognitive condition in increasing longevity. Research in the Blue Zones has shown that people with a close-knit support system who have found some higher purpose, be it though spirituality, religion or even volunteering, live longer than the average person.

Watch the segment here: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=4282088n?source=search_video

It's Never Too Early to Start Good Life Habits

It's usually not the young among us who are focused on improving their lifestyle and achieving longevity. Why? Simple: longevity's just not on your mind at a young age.

But our research in the BlueZones has shown that it's never to early to start developing healthy habits that will pay off much later in life.

We used a forensic approach – looking at how BlueZones centenarians lived the first half of their lives. Uniformly we found that the people who survived into their 100's had solidified their lifestyles early on. Take Okinawan women over 70 – the longest-lived population on the planet. After the US Base was established in Okinawa following World War II, the food culture completely changed – from plant based to, quite literally, Spam-based. Today, men under 55 (reared immediately following WWII) have the shortest life expectancy in all of Japan's 43 prefectures while women just 15 years older (reared before WWII) have the highest in the world.