About
Where you live can make for better living. Blue Zones Project makes healthy choices easier where you live, work, learn, and play.
Rather than relying on individual behavior change, Blue Zones Project focuses on creating surroundings that default to healthier behaviors.
Healthier Environments Naturally Nudge People Toward Healthier Choices.
Residents of the original blue zones areas make healthy choices because those choices are easy—even unavoidable—in their surroundings. That’s why Blue Zones Project focuses on influencing the life radius, the area close to home in which people spend 90 percent of their lives. In Blue Zones community transformations, we optimize the built environment, municipal policies and ordinances, restaurants, schools, grocery stores, faith-based organizations, and workplaces, social networks, habitat, and inner selves.
Our work is rooted in lessons learned from the world’s longest-lived cultures. We translated these lessons into environmental changes that strengthen social ties, reshape places, and sharpen policies to support healthy choices.
Life Radius Model
Community
Certified Blue Zones Communities have populations with greater well-being, improved health outcomes, reduced costs, and increased civic pride, all of which support healthy economic development.
Campus
Worksites: Certified Blue Zones Worksites have healthier employees with higher well-being who are more productive and less costly.
Universities: Certified Blue Zones Universities have healthier students with higher well-being who are more engaged and have greater long-term life satisfaction.
The Power 9®
Residents of the blue zones live in very different parts of the world. Yet they have nine commonalities that lead to longer, healthier, happier lives.
Move Naturally The world’s longest-lived people don’t pump iron or run marathons. Instead, their environments nudge them into moving without thinking about it.
Purpose Why do you wake up in the morning? Knowing your sense of purpose is worth up to seven years of extra life expectancy.
Downshift Stress leads to chronic inflammation, associated with every major age-related disease. The world’s longest-lived people have routines to shed that stress.
80% Rule “Hara hachi bu” – the Okinawans say this mantra before meals as a reminder to stop eating when their stomachs are 80 percent full.
Plant Slant The cornerstone of most centenarian diets? Beans. They eat a primarily plant-based diet full of whole grains, nuts, seeds, beans, and greens.
Wine @ 5 Moderate drinkers outlive non-drinkers, especially if they share those drinks with friends.
Right Tribe The world’s longest lived people chose or were born into social circles that support healthy behaviors.
Loved Ones First Centenarians put their families first. They keep aging parents and grandparents nearby, commit to a life partner and invest in their children.
Belong Attending faith-based services four times per month – no matter the denomination – adds up to 14 years of life expectancy.
Make The Healthy Choice The Easy Choice
Blue Zones Project is a community well-being improvement initiative designed to change the way people experience the world around them. Because healthier environments naturally nudge people toward healthier choices, Blue Zones Project focuses on influencing the Life Radius® — the area close to home in which people spend 90 percent of their lives. Blue Zones Project best practices use people, places, and policy as levers to transform those surroundings. Our communities have populations with greater well-being, improved health outcomes, reduced costs, and increased civic pride, all of which support healthy economic development.
