Blue Zones photographer talks healthy lifestyle challenges

The big picture: Over the past two decades, National Geographic journalist Dan Buettner has identified five communities with the longest-living people.

• He took lessons learned from centenarians (people older than 100) there and established the "Blue Zone" model for longevity, which focuses on community change — like creating walkable neighborhoods and easy access to fresh vegetables — instead of individual behavioral change.
• These centenarians and their lifestyles were photographed by McLain and published in National Geographic in 2005 — catapulting the Blue Zones lifestyle worldwide, including with a Netflix series and even a five-year initiative in Iowa.

Flashback: In 2011, then-Gov. Terry Branstad announced his goal of making Iowa the healthiest state in the U.S. through a partnership among the Blue Zones Project, Healthways, and Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which invested $25 million into the project.

• By providing health experts for selected Blue Zones communities, Branstad said the state could save $16 billion in health care costs over five years and improve Iowa's Gallup Well Being Index ranking, which was No. 16 in 2011.
• But by 2016, Iowa had fallen short of that goal and had slipped to No. 19 in the ranking. By then, Wellmark's contract had ended, including its funding for the program, and most communities had dropped the initiative.

Between the lines: In 2021, Iowa ranked No. 30.

We chatted with McLain about why states like Iowa struggled to become Blue Zones and the challenges of healthy living in a post-pandemic world.

What makes it difficult for some places, like Iowa, to incorporate and execute the Blue Zones?

McLain: "It is very important to recognize the importance of incremental, smaller change. We're so unhealthy that moving the needle even a little actually does have a significant impact."

• "There's a reason America's so unhealthy, and fighting that is a huge lift. Maybe he just overpromised a little, or maybe you have to overpromise a little to move things along."

What is something you learned from documenting these centenarians that people have not read or watched in the Blue Zones documentary?

McLain: "We tend to silo things in America, like, 'Oh, I'm going to change my diet.'"

• "But food — the Blue Zones — it never gets disconnected from having a garden, which gives you exercise and gives you healthy food, and then it's never, usually, cooked alone, so you're cooking with other people, and you're visiting and you're chatting and you're laughing. So you're never eating alone in front of your iPhone."

Did you expect the Blue Zones concept to become so popular?

McLain: "No, I didn't. In retrospect, it's obvious, right? Who doesn't want to know how to live a longer, healthier life?"

• "I always viewed my job for that story visually is to make old people aspirational. Like in Asian cultures, elder [respect] is a very real thing. It's just the way the culture is. America is like the opposite of that. Old people are invisible."

The other side: There have been questions about whether Blue Zone designations are accurate or based on poor record-keeping in communities around the world.

The bottom line: "It's not a super secret — all this stuff. We kind of intuitively understand that it's good, it's just really hard to do it," McLain says.