Recipes for Long Life

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dan Buettner believes that "when a ritual lasts for hundreds or thousands of years, like prayer before a meal, it serves some purpose". Dan is the best-selling author of and founder of The Blue Zones; five parts of the world where people tend to live much longer and healthier lives, many into their hundreds. In this programme, Leyla Kazim finds out more about the culinary aspects of his research, discovering what is eaten in the Blue Zones, what isn't being eaten, and some of the practices that exist around meal times.

She also meets two academics whose work focuses on how to help people living in the UK live longer and more healthily. Liz Williams from the Healthy Lifespan Institute at the University of Sheffield explains that although the current life expectancy for people in the UK is just over 81 years - our average 'healthy life' expectancy is much lower, at around 63. Dr Oliver Shannon from The University of Newcastle explains how some of the Blue Zones observational findings are consistent with research they have been doing into the impact of the Mediterranean diet on brain health.

The promise of a long healthy life is all well and good - but as we know the reality of diets is that they are impossibly hard to keep to. So could choosing to make a 'lifestyle' change be any easier to stick with? Leyla hears from Jean Newton who in her 70s has done just that.

Presented by Leyla Kazim Produced by Natalie Donovan for BBC Audio in Bristol.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.3	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:19.8	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.4	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.7	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:44.5	Are you interested in living a particularly long and healthy life?
0:50.5	I mean, who isn't? I may certainly am it turns out there are people in specific
0:57.0	areas of the world who are managing to achieve just this But how are they doing this? What are their secrets? I'm
1:07.6	Leila Kacim and this is what we explore in today's episode. I am a big believer that when a ritual lasts for
1:16.4	hundreds or thousands of years like prayer before a meal, it serves some purpose.
1:27.0	A lot of what I've observed in the blue zone, especially when you see it in five disparate parts of the world,
1:30.0	you start to say, hey, maybe we ought to pay attention to that.
1:35.0	This is Dan Butner, a National Geographic fellow and a best-selling author and expert on the Blue Zones. These are five parts of the world where people tend to live longer
1:47.5	and healthier lives often reaching their 100th birthday.
1:51.7	In other words, these are people who are achieving the
1:55.4	capacity of our human machine. They're living into their mid 90s without diabetes or
2:01.8	heart disease or or certain types of cancers or even dementia.
	...

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