Editor 's note : Dan Buettner is the author of `` The Blue Zones : Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who 've Lived the Longest . '' He spoke at the TEDxTC Event at the Science Museum of Minnesota in September , 2009 . His Web site is http : //www.bluezones.com/ For more TED Talks , click here . In the same way organisms select for characteristics that favor the survival and well-being of its species over successive generations , so too do cultures . With organisms , we call this process evolution and it represents a sort of accumulated wisdom . There is no word for this process in cultures , but there is one for the result . And that word is tradition . For that past eight years , my team of scientists and National Geographic researchers have explored five parts of the world -- `` Blue Zones '' -- where people live measurably longer lives . Compared to American averages , we found a bronze-age culture in Sardinia 's interior that produces about 10 times more male centenarians ; a remote peninsula in Costa Rica where 50 year-olds have a three-fold better chance or reaching age 90 ; a Greek island completely free of Alzheimer 's ( about 50 percent of Americans over age 90 suffer from dementia ) ; and islands in southern Japan where people suffer one-sixth the rate of heart disease . How do they do it ? The Danish Twin Studies established that only about 20 percent of average lifespan ( within certain biological limits ) is dictated by genes . Lifestyle explains most of the rest of the longevity formula . We found that all five Blue Zones possessed the same nine lifestyle characteristics . Among them : a low-meat , plant-based diet ( all of them ate a lot of beans ) and a ritual of `` downshifting '' each day . They experience the same stresses we do -- kids , health , finances -- but they managed it through daily prayer , meditation , ancestor veneration or city-wide happy hours ( like the Sardinians ) . The secret to longevity , as I see it , has less to do with diet , or even exercise , and more to do with the environment in which a person lives : social and physical . What do I mean by this ? They live rewardingly inconvenient lives . They walk to the store and to their friends ' homes and they live in houses set up with opportunities to move mindlessly . They do their own yard work , hand-knead their own bread dough , and , in the case of Okinawa , get up and down off the floor several dozen times a day . They live in strong families that keep them motivated to support loved ones . Centenarians are still living near their children and feel loved and the expectation to love . Instead of being mere recipients of care , they are contributors to the lives of their families . They grow gardens to contribute vegetables , they continue to cook and clean . This has a powerful two-fold effect : Children and grandchildren in these families benefit from their grandparents ' wisdom and care while the centenarians feel the motivation to stay active , to get out of bed in the morning , and live for a purpose . They live in cities where it is easy to walk to their friends ' houses , to the store or to church . So , we figured they get about 105 minutes of physical activity everyday -- and no health club membership ! We know from the Framingham studies that happiness , smoking and obesity are all `` contagious . '' If your three best friends are obese , there 's a 70 percent better chance that you 'll be overweight . People in the Blue Zones either proactively surround themselves with people who practice the right behaviors or are born into communities of people who do -- or people whose idea of fun is gardening , or bocce ball or swimming ; people who eat meat sparingly , who have faith , who are trusting and trust-worthy . Why is this so important ? No supplement , hormone , antioxidant or pill of any sort has been shown to reverse , stop or even slow aging . The problem is two-fold : to do the study properly , you 'd need to follow two groups of people for life : one who takes the pill , the other that does n't . Then you 'd have to control for all other factors and compare the average age of death for each group . No such study has ever been done on a `` longevity '' supplement . The second problem is adherence . People in general just do n't stick to doing anything for very long . Are you taking supplements ? How long have you been taking them ? I 'll bet not more than a few years . Science ( and hucksters ) have offered us countless diets but research done by the University of Minnesota 's Dr. Robert W. Jeffrey has shown that fewer than 2 percent of people adhere to diets for more than two years . For anything to really impact your life expectancy positively , you need to do it for most of your life . Friends , unlike pills or diets , are much more likely to be much longer-term undertakings . The secret to solving much of America 's health care crisis and battle with chronic diseases lies in emulating the environment in Blue Zones . Is it possible ? Last year , my partners and I made Blue Zones-inspired changes to the environment of an entire American town -- Albert Lea , Minnesota , ( see AARP Magazine article ) . We made the town more walkable and bikeable , dug public gardens , made it easier for kids to walk to school and people to expand their face-to-face social networks to include more people motivated to change their health habits . The results were astounding . If the trends continue , life expectancy for the average participant would rise about three years and health care costs for city workers would decrease by 48 percent . The wisdom of the world 's Blue Zones represents centuries or even millennia of observed human experience . As Democrats and Republicans argue over how to solve the health care crisis , perhaps they should take a moment to consider the wisdom of their grandmothers . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Dan Buettner .
Researchers looked at regions where people live long lives . Dan Buettner says they found common practices in these `` Blue Zone '' regions . People live longer when they have active physical and social lives , he says . Buettner : Pills , diets are n't as important as having purpose in life .