Pros: Tells why some people live to 100 and beyond in decent health with positive attitudes.
Cons: The book needs at least four maps. It has none. Some science. Much speculation.
The Bottom Line: THE BLUE ZONES ends with nine lessons from four widely scattered concentrations of centenarians. Read them! From going to church more often through staying slim to eating more nuts.
aohcapablanca's Full Review: Dan Buettner - The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living ...
Popularizers sometimes do no more than make the work of their betters more widely known. Their betters may be too busy doing science or medicine or original research to rethink, simplify, popularize their results down to the level of the masses. But good stories deserve telling in fresh ways and that is where popularizers come in.
Dan Buettner is a famous popularizer and a darn good one. That's one reason his 2008 work, THE BLUE ZONES: LESSONS FOR LIVING LONGER LIVES FROM THE PEOPLE WHO'VE LIVED THE LONGEST, adorned the New York TIMES best seller list. Buettner commands the common touch. He brings ordinary 100 year old people in four different parts of the globe to pulsating, three dimensional life. To do so he first draws upon the work of others: e. g., the barely remembered 1958 work by Philip Wagner, NICOYA: A CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY. But Buettner doesn't stop there. He absorbs Wagner and incorporates his insights of half a century earlier into his own original research into the still only lightly visited Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica.
With funding from the National Geographic Society in Washington, D. C. journalist Dan Buettner assembled research teams to visit Sardinia, Okinawa, Loma Linda, California and Costa Rica. These larger areas contained smaller, concentrated pockets called "blue zones," chock full of contented people a hundred years old and older. Buettner wanted to see them, hear them tell their own stories. He would test whether lessons could be drawn from them for us stressed, burnt out Americans how to slow our headlong race to early, unhealthy deaths.
At book's end, Dan Buettner distills nine "lessons" for aging happily and healthily. There are readers (not I) who wished he had skipped all the stories and science that had led up to those nine conclusions. Who cares about Sardinian shepherds who drink red wine? What are Okinawan vegetable and herb gardens to us busy Americans? The Costa Rican men centenarians were sexual tomcats in their youth, a lifestyle totally at variance with the their fellow countrymen's. Loma Linda Seventh-day Adventists are, admittedly, Americans. But their most orthodox examples will not touch tobacco, single malt whiskey or hamburgers. How un-American is that! How can four widely scattered sets of such weirdos, many ask, be relevant to all us Faustian American 21st century strivers and ultra-achievers?
I first read in the order presented Buettner's description of lifestyles of geographically isolated, old timey Sardinians and Okinawans who had aged happily and healthily. I found myself asking: but did any of these desperately poor shepherds and farmers accomplish anything great or original? Did any at least go to college? Not that I remember. And what American does not ask more of life? Like Achilles, many of us choose to live briefly but gloriously rather than riding moderation to contemplative life's end sunsets. "Live fast! Die Young! Leave a beautiful corpse!"
Things became different in the third group studied: the 100-year olds among the several thousand Seventh-day Adventists clustered in and near Loma Linda, California. These Americans shared much with the other three groups (including Costa Ricans): love of family, a strong religious faith, temperate diets, active work, a sense that they are needed by and important to others, the habit of hanging out with small groups of friends and peers very much like themselves.
But, beyond all that, Adventists were also achieving Americans. One Loma Lindan still practices open-heart surgery at age 91. At 100 retired registered nurse Marge Jetson looked back on a life in which she worked hard to put her husband through medical school. Nowadays, widowed and living in Linda Valley Villa, a typical day begins for Marge with 15 minutes riding a stationary bicycle at between 25 and 30 miles an hour. Then come complex sets of exercises with five pound weights.
My hunch is that author Dan Buettner pins his hopes on high-achieving American Adventists as the closest models he has found in any blue zone yet to non-Adventist Americans. Thus he and his medical sources in Loma Linda and its famous Adventist university stress that many Adventists are former smokers, that not all are vegetarians, that not all are teetotalers.
Buettner himself seems unusually drawn to Adventist achievers. He presents (p. 137) a nearly full page photo of pioneering Adventist Mrs Ellen G. White. He tells at some length her story and that of her ailing husband, and of sea Captain Joseph Bates and other Adventist founders. Ellen White had visions from God. She believed that God wants people to be healthy. She also decided that modern medicine is good and that good doctors are produced by great educations. With that in mind she put young John Harvey Kellogg through medical school and later in charge of a health spa she had created in Battle Creek, Michigan. Do you like your breakfast corn flakes? Thank the Kelloggs and, behind them, Ellen G. White.
THE BLUE ZONES makes people think. Its author appears on Oprah and Good Morning America. Dan Buettner's book is lauded by Dr Mehmet Oz. Some people kick smoking or become vegans after reading THE BLUE ZONES. It is definitely worth reading at least once. I do not myself, however, plan to read it twice, because I suspect that it will soon be surpassed either by Buettner himself or others discovering new Blue Zones in Outer Mongolia or Bhutan or the Bronx. There will soon be new science on aging, fresh theories of whether genes account for more than 25% of aging gracefully. And on and on.
What I will do is read into Buettner's well selected bibliography of books and articles, especially the history of Seventh-day Adventism. In less than two weeks my wife Mary and I will be back for our second elderhostel at Adventist Cohutta Springs conference center near Chattanooga. The topic is Crime Scene Investigation (CSI); we elderhostelers will solve a fake murder together. This time, as an experiment, I have signed up for vegetarian meals!
What bothers me about THE BLUE ZONES? Mainly and strongly: this well illustrated book has no maps and it needs them. Four widely scattered parts of the globe: where precisely are they? A second quibble: the author loves the word "preventative." What is wrong with "preventive?"
For some wider, in places more combative perspective on aging, read Robert Browning's RABBI BEN EZRA, to include
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in His hand Who saith 'A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'
Over to you for happy, healthy aging. May you start your own blue zone! Thanks for reading. -OOO-
National Geographic explorer Buettner has traveled the globe to uncover the best strategies for longevity. The Blue Zones reveals the surprising secre...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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