What Are Blue Zones and Could They Help You Live to 100?
Over the past two decades, the Blue Zone Project has morphed from health guidance into a for-profit branded juggernaut owned by the largest U.S. digital health business
Are there really secrets to living to 100 in good health, and do people need to live in specific communities to accomplish this goal? In the early 2000s, the Blue Zone Project tried to answer these questions by studying and reporting on five world regions with higher-than-average numbers of healthy centenarians.
Blue Zones emerged into public consciousness as interesting tourist destinations and cookbooks with healthy recipes, but today, they’ve become a heavily-branded for-profit business owned by the largest digital health corporation in the United States.
The Blue Zone concept began two decades ago as a research project sponsored by the National Geographic Society and AARP. Blue Zone research has inspired a series of NYT bestselling cookbooks and the health-influencer career of their author, Dan Buettner.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I grew up living near one of the original five Blue Zones. Coincidentally, I also learned that I live in a newly-certified Blue Zone Community in…
