Dan Buettner, an expert on longevity: “Intermittent fasting should be at least 12 hours long, and then you should have a good breakfast”

Few people understand longevity better than Dan Buettner. The journalist, author, and researcher has spent more than two decades studying the phenomenon of the Blue Zones, regions of the world where populations are especially long-lived and tend to enjoy longer life expectancy.

Buettner points to Okinawa in Japan, Icaria in Greece, Sardinia in Italy, Loma Linda in California, and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica as some of these places. As a result, studying their habits and customs is well worth the effort.

According to Buettner, the real key is that these people are not actively trying to live longer. Their unintentional daily routines are what ultimately lead to longevity.

“It turns out that none of them are consciously adopting a new healthy routine for the morning. They just live their lives. Longevity is much better if it ensues than trying to pursue it,” he said on the ZOE podcast. He emphasized that attempts to change routines that seem effective at first rarely work in the long term, because they also require “changing your environment,” which ultimately helps make unconscious decisions better.

The importance of diet

As expected, one of the factors shaping this unintentional routine is diet, which typically relies on local foods. According to the expert, switching from a typical Western diet to one that prioritizes plants and natural products can extend life by up to 12 years, as long as the change is made early. “It drops to about six years for a 60-year-old, but even an 80-year-old could get an extra three years. And those are valuable years where you’re likely to be more free of a chronic disease and feel good and feel better,” he explains.

One key conclusion of his research is that people who live the longest tend to align with natural circadian rhythms. They eat during the day and rest at night.

“The debate is ongoing, whether or not we should be intermittent fasting or restricting our calories,” Buettner acknowledges. From his perspective, however, “most of the data would suggest that 12 hours is a minimum.” In practical terms, he advises that if you finish dinner at 8:00 p.m., you should not eat again until 8:00 a.m. The first meal of the day, breakfast, then becomes the most important.

“It tends to be savory. They’re not having cereal and milk, or a smoothie or eggs and bacon like we have in the United States,” he says of breakfast. In Icaria, for example, they might eat olives with a piece of sourdough bread and feta cheese. In Costa Rica, breakfast often consists of “beans and rice and avocado and some fruits from their gardens.”

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