The Think Piece Interview: Dan Buettner

It’s hard to picture Dan Buettner sitting. After all, this is the guy who traveled the globe for several years searching for the secrets to longevity and happiness, and turned his findings into the best-selling The Blue Zones. He also owns three endurance bicycling world records. This is one peripatetic fellow. But sit he did for us, for which we’re grateful. We asked him about his legendary travels and adventures, mental health issues, what he’s working on next, and how he navigates his literary life. We were delighted to learn George Plimpton has played a role.

TP: How long did you work on the The Blue Zones?

DG: Well, I started in 2002, and the book came out in 2008. And I learned a few things along the way. George Plimpton taught me the importance of keeping a daily journal. You think you’re going to remember things, but you don’t. So, when I was in the field doing research, I was trying to synthesize it every night into notes, which were really important foundations for the book. And I had a great editor at National Geographic, Peter Miller, who is just an old-school wordsmith—pencil-behind-the-ear kind of guy—and he … I remember writing the first chapter about Sardinia and thinking that this is Finnegan’s Wake. Brilliant. And I sent it to him, waiting for him to just kind of dot the i’s and cross the t’s and rubber-stamp it, and he very gingerly wrote back and said, “This is a really good first draft. And for your next draft …” [laughs] And he basically suggested a complete rewrite. Every chapter pretty much went like that.

TP: What a process. But you were pleased with where the book ended up?

DB: The book, I think … you know, I hear all the time, “Oh, it was such a fun read” and “Oh, it’s such common sense,” but there’s no common sense in there at all. Every point I make is a distillation of research. A lot of it, when you think about it, is uncommon sense. It’s not a bunch of anecdotes. It is a first, very thorough analysis of what explains longevity in an entire culture. And you get that through anthropology, epidemiology, and research, and then once you get the cake recipe, or the statistically average profile of the behaviors of someone who reaches age 100, then you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the prince that represents the culture. You can’t just find a 100-year-old … most journalists, they find a 100-year-old, they say, “Oh, my god, what do you eat for breakfast?” and “How much exercise did you do?” and “What was your favorite vegetable?” and then they print that, as if that’s the secret to longevity. That’s meaningless. You can’t find an example of one and then extrapolate for the whole population. [It’s] the combination of doing the research on population and then finding a character who emblemizes that paradigm, that statistical average. And then, as most people quite rightly sense, you need to be able to tell a good story. People get bored in a hurry when you talk about science, figures, and facts. People want a human being. They want emotional content. They want to be taken along a story arc. Now, as you’re taking them, you can also be plying them with science and insight and prescriptives, but a story’s got to drive the narrative.

TP: Did you do all your research before writing, or did you interweave the writing with the field research?

DB: Well, it was more or less a year here and a year there. It was 2003 when I went into the field, and I spent a year going back and forth between Okinawa and Sardinia and Loma Linda, California. In 2005 I wrote a cover story for National Geographic, which did really well. Then I spent 2006 and 2007 writing the book.

TP: How much material do you have that didn’t make it into the book?

DB: I probably have about 2,000 pages of notes that didn’t make it in. You over-research about a factor of ten to that one distillation that you put out there for publication. It’s curating the best.

TP: When do you write?

DB: In the morning. I like to write with white noise, so I go to the same Caribou Coffee every morning, sit in the same chair. They all know that I have a small light-roasted coffee in a large cup, topped off with hot water and a little bit of cream. They have that ready for me, and I grab that and I sit in the same chair. And sometimes people come up, but most of the time it’s just that nice hum of humanity that overcomes the noise in my head and creates an optimal concentration condition for me. So much of writing is applying the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair. It’s like I force myself to sit there until noon, whether or not the words are coming. You never know when they’re going to come. The rest of my day is usually dictated by how well the morning went. So if it’s a good writing day, I’m usually in good spirits. If not, I’m kind of a grump. I’m in good spirits today.

TP: You’re one of the most famous adventurers in the world, so I imagine the sitting must be arduous. What does writing give you that keeps calling you back to the chair?

DB: It’s a proxy for thinking. It forces you to think clearly and think complex ideas and develop them and make them clear in your own head so that you can explain them to others.

TP: That’s well put. So you’re working on this new book …

DB: It’s a book on food. It’s not a cookbook or a recipe book or a diet, but I’ve amassed all the research … the dietary surveys of all five Blue Zones over the last 100 years. So what were 100-year-olds really eating? And then once you identify that, then how do you transmit that eating prescriptive to Americans? And the way we think of it is diets, kind of individual responsibility, but I argue that longevity happens to you; it’s not pursued, but rather it ensues. None of these people making it to 100 around the world ever tried—they never got on diets, they never got on exercise machines—but they did live in environments where they were nudged into doing the right thing. The best food was the easy, affordable food. So, based on that, I’m writing a book about how America could eat better, feel better, look younger, and do it painlessly, based on what I learned in the Blue Zones.

TP: I liked that in The Blue Zones it wasn’t necessarily a lesson that we should all work less and relax more, which would seem kind of obvious. A lot of the elderly subjects in your book worked their asses off their whole lives.

DB: When it comes to work, I wouldn’t say they work their asses off. I would say they work their whole lives and they found meaning in work, but it was low-intensity, purposeful work, and the work often brought joy. It wasn’t work to make a bunch of money or work to get to the next status level or work to impress your friends or work to achieve something. It was … candidly, they had to work to survive, but they managed to, whether they were a shepherd in Sardinia or ran a garden in Okinawa or were spear fishermen or artisan tofu makers, there was a certain purpose to why they were doing it. By many of our standards, they work a lot less than we do. I mean, a shepherd kind of wakes up late in the morning and walks a couple of miles, has lunch, takes a nap, spends a few more hours with his or her animals, and calls it a day. Farmers or shepherds … most of the year, it’s just a few hours a day. But it’s sort of a constant, little bit all day long—it’s not sit on their duff all day and then go to the gym for an hour.

TP: Can you tell us more about George Plimpton?

DB: Sure, I worked for National Public Radio on a celebrity croquet tournament, and he was the celebrity host, and the lead producer set it up so that … well, we had to be in New York for two or three days a week, so we always stayed either near or with George in his Upper East Side apartment, for a whole year, and we got to be friends. In fact, three weeks ago, I just went to his son’s wedding, Taylor Plimpton. So I’m still friends with the family. Over the years, I wrote about him, and he wrote about me, and he mentored me. And I would say five or six times a year, I would go stay with him in New York. The last time I saw him, I met John Kerry, who was running for president, at his apartment, and then we went out … it was George, Cheryl Tiegs, and Hunter S. Thompson. We all met at the Carlyle. And it was almost Forrest Gump-ish, the way that he would … hanging out with him, you just ran into the Who’s Who of the twenty-first century.

TP: Oh man, you, George, Cheryl and Hunter S. Amazing. And George was as charming as he seemed?

DB: He was. I went to his memorial, which was the de facto fortieth anniversary of The Paris Review, and of course, there were a hundred other people like me who thought that he was their best friend. But he was. I think he really, genuinely drew energy from cultivating relationships with younger people, men and women, and mentoring them. I tell this story of Dr. Elisworth Wareham. He was the surgeon who was still doing twenty open-heart surgeries at the age of ninety-six, and I got Dr. Oz into his operating room. Dr. Oz looks astounded that this guy can still do open-heart surgery at ninety-six, and Oz asked him, “What’s your secret?” And Elisworth said, “I don’t hang out with old people!” [laughs] Of course, the word old is relative. And I don’t know if that’s a blanket, but I think constantly cultivating, staying connected with younger people—and older people. It’s important to have a diversified portfolio of friendships.

TP: When was the last time you saw George?

DB: George came here with Norman Mailer and Norman Mailer’s wife, and they were reading down at the Fitzgerald or something, and I was hosting George that weekend, and I got to meet Mailer. He was on a cane—you know, that big, tough, gruff guy got a hobble because he had bad knees or something. He was on crutches.

TP: What’s the best piece of advice George gave you?

DB: Think big. He was the guy who taught me … you know, he was supposed to be a lawyer, and he wanted to be a participatory journalist. Before I met him, I kind of thought of doing a bike ride—I loved cycling, and I thought, I’m going to bike across America. And after spending a year in association with George, my trans-U.S. ride became a 15,500-mile world-record ride from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. I think in Minnesota, we tend to think parochially, and we tend to just step gingerly out of the small pond that we live in, and he taught me to take a huge leap across the ocean.

TP: And has The Blue Zones been bigger than you would have thought?

DB: Way bigger. Yes, not only has the book sold about a million copies, but more importantly, we have fifteen cities right now who are using the tenets of the book as a citywide public health initiative. It started in New Orleans and now it’s in about three cities in Los Angeles and ten cities in Iowa. We’re starting work in Fort Worth, Texas, and Hawaii. It’s satisfying to see the wisdom of places like Sardinia and Okinawa make a difference in the lives of middle Americans. In Los Angeles, we measured our progress very rigorously—Gallup did, not us—and in two years we brought the obesity rate down by 14 percent in the cities that we work in—there’s 120,000 people—so that equates to 1,600 fewer obese people because of the project. That’s saving hundreds of heart attacks, hundreds of cases of diabetes, thousands of added years of life expectancy and many millions of health care cost savings. And that was just with a population of 120,000. In Iowa, we have 3.2 million people under the Blue Zones project. So … that’s very satisfying.

TP: What are you most proud of about the The Blue Zones?

DB: That it’s working in new communities. You look at the environmental factors that explain better health around the world and apply it to new places. The ingredients are there to see. In the communities we studied the healthy food is accessible, it’s cheap, the kitchen is set up so it’s easy to cook it, the time-honored recipes make things like beans taste good. The social networks—that’s when everybody is eating. People can’t go to a grocery store or to church or to a friend’s house without having to walk. Their houses aren’t filled with electronic conveniences. It’s impossible to be alone. You live in a village where everyone requires you to show up at the local festival. So we start realizing those factors and then say, OK, how do we apply that to America? It’s a very different way to think about health and mental health.

— This interview has been edited and condensed for publication.