#321: Dan Buettner - Live to 100 with Blue Zones One Pot Meals
Dan Buettner of
He’s back for the fourth time!
Dan Buettner—National Geographic fellow, explorer, longevity expert, and creator of the Blue Zones—returns and this time we’re diving into his brand-new New York Times best-selling book: Blue Zones: One Pot Meals.
Dan and Rip roll up their sleeves and go page by page through his delicious new recipes—from savory Tex-Mex breakfast skillets to mushroom walnut bolognese, roasted cauliflower, creamy mac ‘n cheese, and even chewy oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.
They talk about:
Why long-term consistency is the only real longevity “hack.”
How the world’s longest-lived people eat (and why beans are still king).
The flavor “secrets” revealed by analyzing 650,000 top-rated recipes with Stanford’s AI lab.
How Dan is bringing Blue Zones wisdom into kitchens, frozen food aisles, and even entire cities.
Why all five original Blue Zones are sadly waning—but also, the exciting announcement of a brand-new Blue Zone that’s on the rise.
This conversation is equal parts mouthwatering, inspiring, and hopeful—and if you’re ready to supercharge your longevity with easy, affordable, maniacally delicious meals, you’re in the right place.
Episode Resources
Order The Blue Zones Kitchen One Pot Meals: 100 Recipes to Live to 100
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Epsiode Transcript via AI Transcription Service
I'm Rip Esselstyn, and you're listening to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast.
Introduction to the Blue Zones
[0:04] He is back for the fourth time. My good friend, Dan Buettner, author, explorer, longevity expert, and creator of The Blue Zones, returns to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast. And today, we're diving into his brand new New York Times bestselling book, Blue Zones One Pot Meals. We'll dig in right after these words from PLANTSTRONG.
[0:37] PLANTSTRONG family, buckle up, because today we are back in rarefied air with one of my all-time favorite guests, Dan Buettner, and he is back for the fourth time. You probably know Dan. He's the National Geographic Explorer and author who discovered the infamous Blue Zones, those magical pockets of the world where people live the longest and healthiest lives. And perhaps you've even seen Dan most recently on the hit Netflix series, Live to 100, Secrets of the Blue Zones. Well, Dan just dropped his latest masterpiece, Blue Zones, One Pot Meals. And I got to tell you, these recipes, they look easy, affordable. And as Dan says, they are maniacally delicious. So just to give you an example, we're talking about recipes like Tex-Mex breakfast skillets, West African peanut stew.
The Power of Positive Thinking
[1:40] Middle Eastern roasted cauliflower, mushroom walnut bolognese, and even chewy oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. But beyond the food, Dan and I dive deep into what really drives longevity. Why, sadly, the Blue Zones are disappearing, and what it means for us to build our own Blue Zone lives right here, right now. So this one is loaded with wisdom, fantastic energy, and lots of hope. Let's get after. All right, Dan Buehner, welcome to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast for the fourth time.
[2:22] Well, I come up with new things to say every time, so this will be like the first time all over again. Dan, you really are now in rarefied air. I think there might be one other person that's been on the PLANTSTRONG Podcast four times. And so I love that you're back. I have a question before we dive into some things that I want to talk about with you. The first thing is, you are such an optimistic guy through and through. I mean, every time I've seen you, you just lay down this positive, optimistic attitude. Let me give the listeners an example. You came to Plant-Stock several years ago. You got stuck in the airports, flight delays, and I think you maybe got two hours sleep. And I said, I'm so sorry. He's like, no, I got all kinds of great work done. You know, I was on your podcast the other day and I'm like, oh, you're going to do another one right after that. And you're like, yeah, I'm just getting warmed up. And I'm like, where does this guy get this positivity from? Like, where does that come from, Dan?
[3:34] The early realization that adulthood is overrated. In other words, I don't, you know, I have the sort of the emotional intelligence of about a 15-year-old or the maturity anyway. So I just don't get too, I don't get too wrapped up about things.
Launching the Dan Buettner Podcast
[3:55] Well, it has served you well. And I think those around you. You just launched the Dan Buettner podcast, and it is kicking some major butt. Like major but like number one in health and fitness i don't even know all the stats i just know that it is rocking uh tell tell the PLANTSTRONG audience a little bit about the podcast why you started it what's your goal.
[4:23] Well, at National Geographic, my expertise is finding extraordinary populations and learning from them. And that's what Blue Zones was all about. And so was the cover story in books I've done on happiness. But I've realized that there are other sources of expertise that I like to harness. And over the years, I've been in a unique position to meet some of the most extraordinary experts in both longevity and happiness. And, you know, I've tapped them to come on. And we, all of our guests, talk about their expertise through the lens of longevity and happiness. And, you know, I'm pleased to report to the audience that one of our biggest gets was Rip Esselstyn, who came on and unleashed a tsunami of plant-strong wisdom. And right after that was Matthew McConaughey.
[5:24] Right after that was Adrian Grenier, who's the star of the show Entourage. And all these people, believe it or not, have extraordinary insight, I think, into a different facet of longevity. And um they it yeah we we we we film on location we make people be there in person which i think adds a level of personability i think that's helped and um yeah my job over the past 20 years has been to interview people and and um, I'm pretty good at it, I think. So it's worked. I think you're remarkable at it.
[6:07] And you know what's interesting, Dan, is after I was on your podcast, I was talking to my parents and they said, what's going on? I said, oh, I was just on Dan's podcast and how it's really kind of centered around kind of longevity and little things you can do. And it got me thinking, you know, my parents, Dan, my mom just turned 90. My dad's going to be 92 in December.
[6:34] And to the best that anybody can recollect, they are the longest living Esselstyns, which is my father's side of the family, and then Krile, which is my mom's side of the family that they know of. So I think it's a testament to the PLANTSTRONG lifestyle, the movement, the socialization and all that. Well, you guys also have a strong family. I know on your Instagram feed, you're frequently featuring your mother and the exercises you do with her and how she cooks. But I think that without question, the Blue Zone diet is PLANTSTRONG. And the fact that your family has been living it for most of your life, it's not a coincidence. By the way, Rip, you're the only other person I know who's in my age group who has both of their parents. My parents are still alive, too.
Family and Longevity
[7:23] Wow. Yeah, they're not quite as old as yours, but it's such a blessing to have them. And, you know, I have kids and I have grandkids even, and that to be able to harness their resilience and their wisdom, I'm sure not only favors my life, but favors my kids and my grandkids. And you have that same thing going. Yeah, feel so blessed. Absolutely.
[7:50] Yeah. And, you know, and my parents have been following this lifestyle since 1984. So what is that? 41 years, if my math is correct. Yeah. See, that's the thing. The important thing that people forget, you know, we're constantly sold quick fixes for longevity. Stem cells, rapamycin, resveratrol, longevity hacks. There's no short-term solution for longevity. It's got to be something you're going to do for the long run. Yeah. And, uh, the fact that your family's been eating this way for 41 years, it makes absolutely no, yeah. I mean, you, we could read your very good books and start eating, uh, a PLANTSTRONG diet for three months and it makes zero impact on your life expectancy. Uh, unless you're going to do it for the long run, uh, it's, it's, uh, don't even waste your time. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. All right, Dan, let's get into, if I'm not mistaken, is this your third or fourth cookbook that you have? Third. Here she blows right here, guys. Look at that. One pot meals, 100 recipes to live to 100 if you do these for 41 years.
The Blue Zones One Pot Meals
[9:06] Yeah, even 20. Yeah, even 20. I love it. Well, the whole thing behind that, you know, my daytime job is working with cities to help lower the BMI, essentially raise their life expectancy. I get paid by insurance companies. And to telegraph to them, what is a blue zone diet?
[9:29] It's basically whole food plant-based, but you always get pushback on people. Number one, it's too expensive. I can't afford you know organic food from home number two the big one i don't have time uh number three i don't know how to do it number four i don't think it'll taste good so to overcome all of those this book was really designed to number one all the recipes require only one pot one pan one one sheet which is really there you can cook them all in under 30 minutes number two uh that they're they're um uh cheap almost all the uh recipes cost less than a few dollars a serving but the most important uh feature of this book we worked with uh uh stanford to analyze 650 000 recipes we isolated all the recipes with a hundred or more five-star reviews so we know that these were recipes that americans love and we analyzed them for the flavor patterns and seven very clear patterns emerged so this the blue zone one pot meals all of the recipes are built with that insight in mind and um so we reverse engineered taste and i'll just tell you this is kind of fun This is 650,000.
[10:58] These are the most popular flavor categories. Okay. Number one.
[11:06] Stir fries and curries. It's always stacked to deck in favor of people liking. Number two, Tex-Mex flavors. Not a hard sell in Austin where you are. No. Three, traditional Italian flavors. Not necessarily the bougie stuff, but the stuff Sugu and Grandma's made. Number three, cheese. Now, we don't cook with cheese in the Blue Zones, or at least in my books. But there's ways to get cheesy flavors by using brewer's yeast and other sort of flavor hacks. This one surprised me. Broccoli and mushrooms. Some of the recipes with broccoli and mushrooms are lemon and herbs, the other one. And then the last one is spiky flavor combinations. It turns out, and this isn't true in Asia, we like to have high-tension foods. So things that are crunchy mixed with something that's comforting.
[12:08] So soup with croutons or an Oreo cookie is the best example because you have the crusty, the crunchy wafer that's actually kind of bitter, chocolate bitter. And then that soft, comforting, light stuff in the middle. I'm not a fan of processed food, but they are vegan, by the way.
Flavor Profiles of Blue Zone Recipes
[12:34] But anyway, so we use that as a guideline to reverse engineer taste. So these are 100 recipes, all formulated from ingredients from the blue zones and formulated to be maniacally delicious. I was a maniac about it. And it became a New York Times bestseller immediately. Oh, my gosh. So easy to make and maniacally delicious. And did you say do you somehow get stanford to to involved with yeah the book yeah so it's a.
[13:07] Stanford's ai lab this is one of the advantages i'm i do i'm a friend of the guy who runs the lab johannes eikstead and he agreed to put one of his uh his graduate fellows on it and he worked, And they came up with this process, and it involves scraping these recipes from the Internet. We scraped it from Epicurus and the New York Times and several other. So we grabbed 650,000 recipes, and then you get them in a database, and then you say, I only want the ones with more than 100 five-star reviews. And then we know we code all of the ingredients and we can analyze them using AI. It's something that would have taken months, two years ago, and we did it in about a month. Yeah, yeah. Brilliant, brilliant.
[14:03] Well, so Dan, one of the things that you throw out there to the reader is to take the Blue Zone One Pot Challenge and to pick 12 recipes and make them. And so I was going through the book with my family at home last night, and we picked 12 recipes that we are going to make over the next month. And I'd love to just kind of show you and the audience the recipes that we picked out.
[14:36] And then and then if it makes sense for you to talk about them but i'm gonna go first dan i'm gonna go to page 61 and here it is and and i gotta say dan uh who in the world is oliver barth because he did an amazing job with these photographs can everybody see that dan see that That's the Tex-Mex breakfast skillet. You're right. In Austin, we love Tex-Mex. And there's nothing hard about this recipe. It's all food you can buy in a second-tier grocery store. You know, potatoes and peppers and corn and taco seasoning and black beans and cilantro. Maybe that's a bit of a challenge sometimes. And six servings is probably two or three bucks a serving, and the whole recipe probably takes 10 minutes to assemble and about 10 more minutes to cook.
[15:48] And I love the fact that you can you whip this up and then for with leftovers, you can throw it into a burrito, corn burrito, whole whole grain, you know, taco. And you've got tacos. You've got burritos. Very, very versatile. So that one that one caught the eye of the kids. I like to make the point as well that, you know, we make the mistake here in America of thinking breakfast is eggs and bacon, you know, which is or cereal. And actually, the vast majority of cereal is highly processed and full of sugar. And either one of those two traditional American breakfast is a mistake. So in blue zones, you often see people starting their day with a savory breakfast, a minestrel in Sardinia, in Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. It's almost always beans and some vegetables and beans and rice.
[16:50] Pico de gallo or gallo tinto, they call it. And this is a great Americanization of a blue zone breakfast. Yeah. It's savory, and you've got your fiber in here. You've got about a dozen different plants in there, and quick and maniacally delicious. Well, and everything is very, very nice on the gut microbiome and loaded with, as you just said, with fiber. So next, Dan, let's go to page 92.
Cooking with Family
[17:23] It is this is something we want to try kind of as more of a a snack item and this is the crispy roasted chickpeas here's the photo of it for everybody and what i'm looking at here is a it's a big wooden bowl that's got these roasted chickpeas and you know we love hummus we love chickpeas on salads but i have never roasted chickpeas before and it looks like it's a great snack.
[17:49] Yeah, so as you know, beans are the food most strongly correlated with longevity. A cup of beans a day associates with about four extra years of life expectancy. And this recipe is fewer than a dozen ingredients. Most people have all of them already in their home. It takes a little more than 30 minutes on this one. But it'll give you a great snack or a side dish for your meals. Or, you know, I mentioned that tension. So if you take this crispy roasted chickpeas and you add it to hummus, you get the tension I'm talking about. You get the gooey, comforting hummus, but then the crunch from the roasted chickpeas. And you've just amped up a hummus by 100%.
[18:44] All right, let's go, Dan. And we're going to page 110, which is in the soups section. And yes, so this is the West African peanut stew. Here's what it looks like, everybody. And it is got sweet potatoes. It's got peanuts on top. It's got some greens. I think it's some kale. It just looks absolutely maniacally delicious. You know, for those people who don't want to add oil, and I don't know if you know any of those people. One or two.
[19:27] Well, I guess there's some olive oil. I mean, avocado oil. You don't have to put it in there. But it does contain peanut butter. And, you know, in my earlier years, I bicycled from the top to the bottom of Africa. And throughout central africa peanut butter is all they they call ground nut there but peanut butter is used in all kinds of soups and stews and it's used interestingly with with a pepper and it makes this deliciously rich uh and i i don't know why we overlooked that flavor combination but that that peanut butter along with the sweetness from the from the uh onion and the and the bell pepper and the sweet potato and then the the spiciness in there i'll tell you what that comes together and creates a a tsunami of deliciousness all right dan let's go to page 163.
Exploring Unique Recipes
[20:25] And um this is a mushroom you talked about mushrooms being popular these days mushroom and black bean burrea and um you know for people that don't know a burrea is a slow-cooked mexican stew and this just looks so thick and hearty and flavorful and so the kids and i were like let's let's make this one too so this was kind of um you know i i started a frozen food company you know i i, I always get inspired by you, Rip. Yeah, keep it up.
[21:10] But it's one of the best-selling frozen foods in America, Blue Zone Kitchen frozen foods. And we have a Biera in that, very similar to this recipe. So we riffed off to the one we use in our frozen food to something you can make at home. Now, there's a few, you know, we put this in the slightly more advanced because you got to get your hands on pasilla and ancho chiles or chiles de arbols. You can get them online easily. But it does produce this umami flavor that you don't, that is beguilingly delicious. And if you have guests over there, they're going to say, oh, my God, I don't know this flavor. But somehow, you know, you're romanced by it. You know, it's like you romanced your wife, like when they saw you, you know, when she saw you at first, she probably wasn't that impressed. But then after a while, she, oh, my God, this is the man that's going to make beautiful children. And voila, voila, voila. Just like on page 172, Dan, we're going we're going hard with the mushrooms. This is a mushroom and walnut bolognese. You mentioned umami. I would imagine that that walnut added to this sauce really gives it a nice umami kind of flavor and mouthfeel.
[22:36] Somewhat, but, you know, mushrooms are the, usually if you want to add umami, it's low-hanging fruit, so to speak. Okay.
[22:48] You think that the consummate example is truffles. You know, you're shaving a truffle on something and it's a tsunami of umami. Mushrooms possess the same sort of quality. And you also see that in miso. And you see it in tomatoes. People don't realize a lot of recipes call for tomatoes because it gives it that flavor-enhancing umami flavor. Umami, I guess, element. And so here we rely on mushrooms and walnuts. Yeah. Well, we are such a fan of pasta. And so that just caught our eye. What do you say to those people? Oh, my God, pasta is high carbs. They're going to make me fat well you know i say listen if you look at the calorie density of pasta it's actually low i mean how do you cook pasta in water and that water brings down the calorie density tremendously so it's like like bread bread for example you don't have the water element and so bread's about 1500 calories per pound pasta is about 500 so it's you know one third less calorie density than bread. And then, yeah. And then we're always looking to, when we do pasta, ideally we're doing a whole grain pasta or a red lentil or a chickpea or something like that instead of white, right?
[24:14] Dan, I'm going to go, I want to go to this, this is page 175. The recipe is on 177, but it's your Middle Eastern roasted whole cauliflower. For people that are not able to see this on video. This is a whole cauliflower that looks like it's absolutely perfectly roasted. I would love to dive into this with a knife and make cauliflower steaks. But Dan, I think in reading the recipe, it looks like one of the secrets is you have to steam, steam this whole cauliflower first before you, I think, put it into the oven.
[24:54] Yeah, and that softens it up, and it also makes it easier to absorb the spices, which are allspice, cloves, cinnamon, paprika, very sort of Middle Eastern, Northern Africa, turmeric.
[25:08] For people making the transition to plant-based, they often want something at the center of their plate. You know, they're used to a meat, you know, roast or a chicken or something to being at the center. The beauty of this dish is you take this cowl forward, And it looks like you're serving a big centerpiece feature to your meal. It's something to put in the middle of your plate that's tasty and that's satisfying. And then you can put your other accrutaments and vegetables around it. And it really, you know, you're always looking for, especially people who aren't completely plant-based, you want to give them meat substitutes. And this is a really good one. It's beautiful on the table. Your guests will be impressed and it really dresses up a cauliflower. It's so gorgeous. This next recipe, Dan, is on page 180. The photo is on 181. And I don't ever do enough risotto. And this combination, it's a broccoli and lemon risotto. And so you talked about that snap, right, the snap of the broccoli, the creaminess and the comfort of the risotto. And then that lemon pop, I mean, this just caught the eye of our whole family.
[26:28] Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the other thing is we mentioned that sort of cheesy place. You know, traditional risotto is almost always made with Parmesan cheese, but we use that nutritional yeast. You really can't tell a difference. Yeah. And it's just better with that. And also miso, once again, miso is a very strong umami element. And it intensifies flavors, especially if you're going low oil. You want to make up for it by other ways to enhance flavor. And the umami family does a very good job at that. Dan, how much do we love the three sisters? I love them all. You know, I've dated all three of them separately, but I love them all. I just have them all over, spend a night with all three together. Absolutely. And that's why we want to gobble up the three sisters pot pie on page 192. Look at that, people. I mean, this looks like, I mean, I don't know what to say, except it just looks so creamy and delicious. It almost looks like a shepherd's pie, but it's not.
[27:49] Yeah, we use semolina flour. But for those people who don't know what three sisters are, and there might
The Three Sisters Diet
[27:58] be two people left, but it's the Mesoamerican genius of three of corn, squash, and beans. And I argue it's the greatest diet the human species has ever invented.
[28:14] They grow completely sustainably, symbiotically, I might add. They come together to give all the complex carbohydrates you mean you need and all the amino acids so you get a whole protein from these three sisters it probably get you know i would argue you need to get some greens into your diet but other than that it gives you about 95 percent of the nutrition you need and it's satisfying and it's again maniacally delicious um the three sister's pot pie was our effort to to to integrate it more into kind of a european milieu yeah and yeah it's a popular one dan let's let's move on to creamy mac and cheese with with with a uh you know apostrophe around cheese or quotations rather um and you know our our home loves a, PLANTSTRONG mac and cheese. You talk about the ultimate comfort food. And this looks incredible. And I believe, if I'm not mistaken.
[29:24] Yeah, this is, you're using durum wheat pasta here and nutritional yeast. Silken tofu helps create the wonderful sauce. Some white wine vinegar. Acorn squash. That's pretty cool. Acorn squash. Yeah. Yeah, so here are the things that...
[29:46] Lipov, this nutritional yeast is a really great way to mimic cheese flavor. And also the vegetable stock. You know, I start a lot of soups. You know, most of my friends are not vegan. So when they come over to my house, they're eating plant-based. But in order to kind of yield to their palate, I cook a lot of my pastas and soups. I start with a vegetable stock. So you're intensifying the flavors before.
[30:26] Meat kind of napalms your taste buds. I mean, if you put oil and fat, I mean, fat and salt on cotton balls, they taste pretty good.
[30:37] So you know to get meat eaters to be satisfied with plant-based you need these sort of flavor enhancers and this creamy mac and cheese we achieve it with vegetable stock and to your point the silken tofu and then the the nuge i think you guys call it the uh the the nutritional yeast yeah and it really works i you know i'm very proud of this one as well yeah well and then that acorn squash gives it a really nice i'm sure also kind of creaminess um dan how much do you do you enjoy cooking well if you maybe see behind me i got uh i got a bean dish on the a cabbage bean dish on oh i can see yeah yeah back there so yeah so last night i've been well you know it's kind of of heresy but um i'm a big fan of rancho gordo beans yeah and i he had me on his podcast and and inspired me and i went to his bean book steve sando and um he has all these um rancho gordo has all these artesian beans gourmet beans so i order those and then i like to do interesting things i'm kind of a bean fanatic actually that's that's that's not a big surprise here, all right and we're gonna we're gonna finish up these recipes with page 220 and 221 which is your chewy oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.
[32:05] Yeah, I'm kind of a cookie monster myself.
[32:11] So am I, which is one of the reasons why I have to be careful about having cookies in the house or making them too often. Yeah, me too, because I'm on what I call a seafood diet. If I see it, I eat it. You know, we intentionally use maple syrup here because it has a slightly lower glycemic index number. And there's actually nutrients in a good maple syrup. It's a little bit more expensive. You know, I know you're not going to love the coconut oil in here, but you need something to hold it together. Maybe there's a way to get it without oil. So, but again, I put this in a, you know, I'm once a month, I'll bake a batch of cookies and they're going to be gone instantly. I have no willpower.
Baking Healthy Cookies
[33:00] I want to treat myself once in a while, damn it. I mean, you know, I like cookies and I eat them. I hear you. I hear you. Dan, I got a couple of questions for you as we, as we head on out here.
[33:13] But everybody look at that one pot meals. um it's just it's so gorgeous and i don't know if you i think i asked you but maybe um i don't think you answered tell me about the photographer that took these photos.
[33:27] Well national geograph you know i this is a national geographic book, and um it's number one in vegan cooking in america right now yeah and they they have a stable of the best photographers so we hired him and i hired uh yeah you know i'm a i'm a journalist really and i create an idea i have an idea and i uh make the idea come together but part of the team was a new york times um a recipe writer a recipe developer so you know it was a whole team uh we had an editor at national geographic who helped too so it's you know it's ai it's anthropology it's food science um it's uh the visual arts i mean a good chef will tell you We eat first with our eyes and then with our taste. So we tried to make these recipes look on the page here, look as delicious as they're going to taste once you make them. And I think he really achieved it. So smart. It's such a confluence of factors that came together.
The State of the Blue Zones
[34:36] Dan, there's five blue zones. Would you say right now they are waxing or waning?
[34:46] They are waning, all of them. Yeah. How does that make you feel? It makes me feel terrible because it's the diseases of affluence, mostly the diseases of America lifestyle. As soon as these blue zones start adopting the standard American diet with its processed foods and prices of meat and cheese and eggs have come down so they eat more of those. As soon as they get off their feet and behind a wheel, their physical activity drops. As soon as they get on Instagram and all these other social medias, the amount of face-to-face time that has served them so well over the centuries diminishes. It's sad. The good news is next month I'll be announcing a new blue zone that is waxing. We found one where over the past 20 years, longevity has actually gone up, and this provides a hope. And I'm really interested to discover what this place has done to really stave off the ravages of the American culture. I hate to say it, kind of all here, and then we get to make the rest of the world sick.
[36:11] Dan, this is my departing question for you. And that is, you know, you are all about finding populations that have the most centenarians living to 100 and past that. You know, I've heard a lot out there about how if you can be alive for another 5, 10 years because of all of the medical technology and advances that are taking place, we potentially...
Future of Longevity and Technology
[36:42] We'll be able to live to 150, 200, 250 years old. It sounds so far-fetched, my brain can't really get wrapped around it. But I'd love to know your thoughts about that. And if you had the ability to live to 200, would you take it?
[37:03] I'll add those are two questions. Yes, yes. The first question is, the pace of discovery with AI is such that we may have an intervention within the next two or three years that makes a difference. That doesn't mean that FDA will approve it. It'll be widespread, but we'll know it. On the Dan Buettner podcast, you'd do me a favor if you'd subscribe to that. But I interviewed Dr. David Agus, who runs a huge AI lab, and he interestingly found the correlation between the shingles vaccination and Alzheimer's, that people who take the shingles vaccination, both of them, have about 50% lower incidences of Alzheimer's. It's an association, not very well understood. But that episode with Dr. David Angus and I, he really unpacks the potential of AI and raising our life expectancy.
[38:07] I'm not going to tell you I can help you live to 100. What I can tell the average person listening to us right now is that if you're a man, your life expectancy is about 93. If you do everything right and you have an average set of genes, you should be able to make it to 93. If you're a woman, you should be able to make it to 96. Wow. Average. Now, there's outliers. There's people who at the end of the distribution curve who will make it to a hundred or, you know, one out of 10 million will make it to 110. But those people won the lottery and you can't expect it. On the other end of the spectrum, there's people who do everything right. They'll sign up for the PLANTSTRONG Diet. They'll exercise. They'll be socially connected. And some weird ass cancer will kill them at age 35. So can't promise people anything. But you can tell them how to stack the deck in favor of, you know, mid-90s.
[39:09] And if an intervention comes along that increases life expectancy, it probably is just going to maintain what we have. It's probably not going to reverse. So the best strategy right now is a PLANTSTRONG blue zone strategy. So your body is as in good a shape as possible. So when that intervention comes, that preserves us. We're going to be preserving ourselves at a high level, not with type 2 diabetes or some cardiovascular disease or excessively wrinkled or broke down. That makes a lot of sense. And what are your thoughts on you personally at this point? Are you 61, Dan? 60, 62? What are you? Thank you very much. I'm 65. Seriously? Okay, good. Well, how about that? So, but if you had your, you know, your way, like, would you like to live to 150 or 200?
[40:09] Yes. I like my life. I don't see it. And I like it increasingly more. So yeah, I would. But I don't get involved in any of the rapamycin or metformin or stem cells or resveratrol or any of that other snake oil. That's a mistake. The anti-aging life extension industry has produced exactly zero interventions that will stop slow or reverse aging that have been clinically proven on humans. You're using yourself as a guinea pig and the downside could be just as great as any upside so keep yourself healthy now wait and maybe in the next four or five years we'll see something that offers some real hope of a significant life extension we don't know what it is yet, but don't get ahead of yourself have you thought of having brian johnson on your podcast, I like Brian Johnson. People badmouth him, but I think he's an earnest individual. Yeah. He's a vegan.
[41:15] He exercises. I think, you know, he's built a really interesting social network around himself. And a lot of people who are like him, who are searching and, you know, may not be completely comfortable in their own skin or whatever, he's done an okay job. Where we diverge is this idea of, you know, getting infusions of your son's plasma and these experimental genetic interventions. I think those are very dangerous and not things that we should be trying at home. Yeah. Dan, once again, huge congrats on One Pot Meals, your third cookbook, already a New York Times bestseller. Incredible.
Closing Thoughts and Gratitude
[42:02] And, Dan, you know what? I'm going to see you at 100, my man, my PLANTSTRONG brother. Boom! Hopefully some PLANTSTRONG conferences before that and on the pickleball court, although that's always an exercise in humiliation when I play you, Rip. They don't call you Rip for nothing. Any of you who've seen Rip serve a pickleball, you know what Rip means.
[42:31] All right, Dan. Thank you, Mike. Thank you for your generosity. And for those people who listen, thank you for your time. I know there's lots of other things you could be doing with your time. If you have any follow-up questions, I'm at Dan Buettner on Instagram, and I'd be very happy to answer any of your questions. And Rip, again, thank you for your generosity of the spirit and all you're doing to make the world a healthier place. You are a true evangelist, true profit. And I thank you personally. Right back at you, Dan. Thanks.
[43:02] Man, every time Dan joins the PLANTSTRONG podcast, I walk away fired up. And I hope that you guys do as well. What I love about Dan is that he doesn't just study longevity, he lives it. And he makes it practical, one pot, one pan, one sheet at a time. If you're thinking about upping your game, go ahead and grab a copy of The Blue Zones, One Pot Meals, and take the challenge, just like my family is, pick 12 recipes, cook them for a month and then watch how easy and delicious this lifestyle really can be. Remember, longevity isn't about quick fixes or hacks. It is about being consistent. It's about community and the food that we put on our plates every single day, meal after meal. And when that food is whole, PLANTSTRONG, and simple to make, you are stacking the deck for a long, vibrant, and powerful life. And that's what we love here at PLANTSTRONG. Until next week, keep eating those beans, stay consistent, and always, always keep it PLANTSTRONG.
[44:23] The PLANTSTRONG podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, and Ami Mackey. If you like what you hear, do us a favor and share the show with your friends and loved ones. You can always leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And while you're there, make sure to hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. As always, this and every episode is dedicated to my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. And Anne Crile Esselstyn. Thanks so much for listening.
