The Blue Zones: What Still Holds Up After the Controversy

Hi, it’s Diana from We Get Better with Age, and this is another book in my series on the ones I’ve actually read and genuinely enjoyed.

My parents turned eighty this year. When I visit, my father still walks down to buy the bread — not for his health, he’d wave you off if you called it exercise, but because that’s simply how the bread gets to the table. My mother has a handful of women she has spoken to nearly every day for forty years. When one of them goes quiet for a morning, the others know by lunch.

For most of my life I filed those two things under “just how they are.” Then I read a book that spent three hundred pages arguing that habits exactly like those — the walk, the phone calls — might be doing more for my parents than anything in the bathroom cabinet.

The book is The Blue Zones, by Dan Buettner. And I want to tell you about it honestly, which means telling you two things that sound like they don’t belong in the same letter: why I loved it, and why last year I nearly stopped …