Hey, everyone. It is a great honor to have one of my favorite people on the planet back on the show for his fourth appearance.

He's the creator of Blue Zones and the number one New York Times best-selling author, the one and only Dan butiner.

Dan, welcome.

Thank you very much.

Four times a charm. Thank you for letting me warm up those first three times. So now I'm ready.

You're always ready and always welcome. You're here to chat about your latest new book, which will surely be a best-seller of the Blue Zones Challenge.

And I love the book and you start the book by saying, quote, I'm just going to say it. If you're overweight, suffering from diabetes, heart disease, or even several kinds of cancer, it's probably not your fault.

Politicians like to shake their finger at us and tell us our health is up to us. That it's our individual responsibility. I don't buy it.

And quote, I love it, but I'm going to have to ask you to elaborate. That's a big one.

I know it's disruptive, but let's look at the facts. And in 1980, 15% of Americans were obese. And now 45% of Americans are obese.

What is that because we have somehow lost self control as a population or we have lost sense of responsibility or we've lost discipline or we are parents love us less than we love.

We love our children less than our parents love us. You start asking yourself, what's changed?

And I don't think humans have changed. I don't think I don't think our bodies have changed. When I do think it's changes is our environment.

You the number of fast food restaurants has gone up by about a factor of 20 over 50% of all retail outlets, including where we get our tires changed and where we pick up our diabetes medicine as a gauntlet of salty snacks, candy bars, and sugar sweet beverages.

And we're genetically hardwired to create sugar, fat and salt near an environment where you can't escape it. And you have the Madison Avenue getting paid over 11 billion dollars a year, the sharpest minds, advertising minds in the world, shaping messages and over 300 messages, rents over our psyche every single day, reminding us that this food is delicious.

In many cases, this food is fortified with vitamins. Very hard to beat that. Very hard to beat your genes and the onslaught of a message, you know, all day long every day.

And we had a beating more. We had a beating the wrong things. And that's what I believe got us to this place we are right now.

If you know any mentioned politicians and I'm not going to go out in the COVID rabbit hole, but during COVID, there was a lot of messaging from the CDC from politicians about what to do.

You get a social distance, you got a mask and you're going to get vaccinated, take all these precautions and all those points for valid.

However, there wasn't any messaging about, hey, you got to get out there and take this opportunity, maybe move a bit, maybe eat some more vegetables, eat some beans.

And what's so disappointing is I feel like there was a, we squandered a massive public health opportunity within this public health crisis to talk to people about getting healthy or taking care of themselves.

And the government could have helped message that the government could have helped subsidize it. We didn't really do anything.

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