5 ways to make your holiday meals ‘blue zone’-friendly

The food people consume has long been understood to shape them in some way.

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote in 1826.

How you choose to nourish yourself plays a large role in health and even longevity, modern-day studies have shown.

National Geographic fellow and best-selling author Dan Buettner knows this as well as anyone, and he has tips you can use — even for holiday feasts. For two decades, he has been studying “blue zones,” places around the globe where people live the longest and healthiest lives. Diet is one of the major reasons why these folks have an edge.

People in blue zones, including Okinawa, Japan, and the island of Sardinia in Italy, eat plant-based diets that prioritize whole foods. “These simple peasant foods taste maniacally delicious,” Buettner told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently on his podcast, Chasing Life. “That’s the word I like to use.”

Buettner’s latest cookbook, “The Blue Zones Kitchen One Pot Meals: 100 Recipes to Live to 100,” puts a spin on the healthy ingredients people use in these far-flung places so that they appeal to the American palate.

Buettner collaborated with Johannes Eichstaedt, who directs Stanford University’s Computational Psychology and Well-Being Lab, using artificial intelligence to analyze 675,000 recipes from popular websites including Food Network and Allrecipes. “We found that most of the most popular recipes in America followed one of seven different patterns,” Buettner explained. “And then we kind of reverse engineered deliciousness.”

Additionally, the recipes have other virtues to overcome common concerns.

“When you have the competition from fast food and processed food, one of the biggest objections you’re going to get is, ‘I don’t have time. No. 2, ‘I can’t afford it.’ No. 3, ‘I don’t know how to do it.’ No. 4, ‘I don’t think it’ll be delicious,’” he explained.

To develop a cookbook of one-pot recipes, Buettner said, “I started with these criteria: that every recipe had to take less than 20 minutes to combine, it had to cost less than three bucks a serving, and it had to be maniacally delicious.”

You can listen to the full episode here.

Holidays meals in the United States apparently did not get the longevity-promoting memo, since many of the dishes Americans typically love to devour during the Thanksgiving and Christmas are a few sticks of butter in excess of being health-promoting.

But that doesn’t mean you have to toss the turkey out with the gravy. Small tweaks can help you align your holiday meal with blue-zone eating patterns. Here are Buettner’s five tips.

Invite the three sisters

The original Thanksgiving staples — beans, corn and squash — are also three of the most longevity-boosting foods on the planet, Buettner said in an email.

He noted that versions of this nutrient-packed trio are not just part of traditional Native American diets, but also those of people living in the blue zones of Costa Rica’s Nicoya region and the island of Icaria in Greece.

“Build your menu around these, and you’re already eating like centenarians,” he said.

You can do that for the December holidays as well.