Journalist Dan Buettner (born 1960) first became known for his explorations of the world by bicycle – whose exploits are listed in the Guinness World Records. He then became interested in the cases of populations in which many individuals often exceeded 100 years of age.
These regions of the world are called blue zones, an expression that we owe to two European researchers, the Italian academic Gianni Pes and the Belgian demographer Michel Poulain, who discovered in Sardinia, in 2000, a community which then included the largest number of centenarians.
Since then, other regions of the world have been identified: some were known, such as the Japanese island of Okinawa or the Greek island Ikaria, others less so, such as the Nicoya peninsula, in Costa Rica, or the community of Seventh-day Adventists from Loma Linda, California (United States).
Dan Buettner has made a specialty of the subject, publishing a series of works since Blue Zones: where do we live best and longest? (It interests me, 2010), many translated into French, and even a book of cooking recipes applying the rules followed by most of the populations observed.
Diet
Netflix offers the television version of the vein that Buettner exploits with a documentary series in four episodes, during which he returns to the places he had already visited, focusing on cases of nonagenarians and centenarians, their diet food, their physical expenditure and their respective sociability.
We don’t discover much other than what has been known for a long time, with the famous Mediterranean diet, the concept of which was defined and promoted by the American nutritionist Ancel Keys from the 1950s: complete and unprocessed ingredients. , little meat and cow’s milk products, lots of vegetables and legumes, olive oil, a little wine. In other words, what many doctors recommend and which few patients respect.
As for physical exercise, it naturally does without a gym, as is often said, and could even be limited, if Buettner is to be believed, to household chores and travel within the community. community (the Sardinian village stairs make all the difference). This all makes common sense.
But we cringe when Dan Buettner adds to the rules of life that he recommends – and which he has applied in different North American cities and tries to export abroad, as in Singapore – that of a spiritual and /or religious, on the Loma Linda model, going beyond a research framework (also criticized by scientists) and joining the more or less vague regions of American-style wellbeing.
In the same way that Ancel Keys selected the countries which corroborated his theories, Dan Buettner sticks to those which serve his own: France, a notable exception and paradox, is, for example, absent from the words of the scientist and the journalist. However, our country is, in 2023, the European country with the most centenarians in proportion and in absolute number…
