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 Blue Zones 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 Blue Zones 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.
If you're young, even though old age seems infinitely far away, remember that the habits you develop now will pay off in a big way thirty, forty or fifty years from now.
Dan Buettner is a world explorer who for the past seven years has been studying the longest lived regions in the world, or Blue Zones. Buettner’s book The Blue Zone is fast-becoming the “must read” book on longevity and living longer, better.
