Dan Buettner studies Blue Zones, areas where people tend to have the longest lifespans. In this article and video he explains some of the things he’s discovered.
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.
There’s more, but you probably want to walk around the block a couples times before reading it.
