Blue Zones Diet
With this diet you will live to be 100 years old
© Dan Negureanu / Shutterstock
Author Dan Buettner has studied dietary habits in the places where people are most likely to live to be 100 years old. This is how you can reach old age!
Ever heard of the so-called “Blue Zones”? Those are them five regions in the world where people are most likely to live to be 100 years old – and are also very healthy. The locations are the island of Ikaria in Greece, Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Loma Linda in California and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. Many experts have already looked for the reason for the extraordinary longevity of the people in the “Blue Zones” – the result is a colorful mixture of healthy lifestyle habits, which, in addition to lots of exercise in the fresh air and close social contacts, of course also include a special diet .
How to live to be 100 on the Blue Zones diet
The “National Geographic” author Dan Buettner has also dealt with the longevity of the people in the “Blue Zones” and has now written several books on the subject. One of them: The “Blue Zones” diet, in which he gets to the bottom of the foods that are particularly common on the menu in the regions concerned. These include:
- beans, e.g. B. green beans, kidney beans and snap beans
- Green vegetables, e.g. B. spinach, lettuce, peppers, cabbage or cucumbers
- Cereals, especially whole grain products, but also rice, millet and rye
- nuts, e.g. B. walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds
Doesn’t sound like a huge selection at first. But: “The people there know how to make these foods tasty and how to optimize them for their own health,” Buettner told “Today”. The author himself visited several of the “Blue Zones” and reported on his experiences in an interview.
For example, on the Greek island of Ikaria, boiled dandelion is a common side dish. The plant is full of healthy antioxidants that fight dangerous free radicals in the body and can thus prevent inflammation, for example. And that works: On Ikaria, 97 percent of all people are over 70, Overall, Buettner found only three documented cases of dementia on the island during his research. For comparison, Americans have a 50 percent risk of developing dementia by age 85.
beans and chickpeas
An equally great health miracle that is used a lot both on Ikaria and in other “Blue Zones”: the chickpea. Like beans, it is used in many rice dishes on the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, for example. In this “Blue Zone” about one in 250 people live to be 100 years old. In the US, only one in 4,000 people can do it. Buettner’s guess: “If the typical American were to add a cup of beans to their diet every day, they could extend their life by four years.”
In this case, the nutritional recommendations that Buettner gives can also easily be applied to us Germans. That means: The above foods should be on our menu as often as possible if we want to live long – preferably daily.
temptations of everyday life
However, one has to admit that the people in the “Blue Zones” have an advantage over us: They hardly use industrially processed products with a lot of fat and sugar or soft drinks, because there is almost none of it. Instead, mainly plant-based food is consumed, with the ingredients being seasonal and regional and freshly prepared. With us, on the other hand, there are sweets and ready meals on every corner – so a bit of discipline is also required with the “Blue Zones” diet.
Have you ever heard of the buttermilk diet? Here we also explain the car diet and the pineapple diet.