A Healthier America? We’re Aiming at the Wrong Target
Quick: how is basketball like America’s healthcare system? In basketball, teamwork tends to win games—but a college player who sinks 40 points a game is more likely to get noticed (and drafted) than a player who feeds his teammates the ball. We can’t really blame the ball hog. It’s human nature to focus on the behaviors that reward us. That was the message of Jack Welch’s Chief Learning Officer Steven Kerr in his classic essay, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping For B.” And yet, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for decades with America’s health and…
What the Longest-Lived People in the World are Doing Different than Most Americans
Excerpt adapted from The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer: Lessons From the Healthiest Places on Earth by Dan Buettner, a beautifully illustrated and informative guide to the places on Earth where people live the longest—including lessons learned, top longevity foods, and the behaviors to help you live to 100—plus a surprising new blue zones longevity hotspot. Most of what we think will help us live longer and healthier is misguided or just plain wrong. It’s common sense to get on a diet regimen, join a gym, and get our vitamins, right? Let’s take a closer look. In 2021, Americans spent…
Cooking Tips for Eating to 100
Excerpt adapted from The Blue Zones Kitchen by Dan Buettner, which captures the way of eating that yielded the statistically longest-lived people and explains, in some detail, why that food has enabled populations to elude the chronic disease scourge that has befallen Americans. The longevity phenomenon is disappearing in blue zones, but its secrets survive—mostly in the kitchens of older people. People who’ve grown up eating the foods of their ancestors aren’t looking to trade them in for packaged junk. Older people who possess the skills, recipes, and culinary wisdom of previous generations carry forth a tradition that is…
The True First Thanksgiving
Dan Buettner, Blue Zones founder, National Geographic explorer and fellow, New York Times bestselling author Excerpt adapted from Blue Zones American Kitchen by Dan Buettner, which uncovers the traditional roots of plant-forward cuisine in the United States and celebrates the chef and cooks who’ve passed recipes from generation to generation across the regions and cultures that have shaped America’s healthiest food landscapes. In late fall 1620, 102 sea-weary Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, mostly sick and suffering from malnutrition. After 55 days surviving on rations of dried meat, hard biscuits, and beer, they reached a cold, strange world where they had little…
