Beach Blue Zones miracle: Beach Cities show big health gains
Lisa Santora, the chief medical officer of the Beach Cities Health District, with her daughter, Maia. Photo by Tom Sanders The Blue Zones Project arrived in the Beach Cities a little more than two years ago with an intention as audacious as it was well intentioned. Its goal was to give people longer, better lives. The project grew out of National Geographic explorer Dan Buettner’s investigations into the longest-living, healthiest peoples on the planet. Partnering with the cutting-edge employee well-being company Healthways and the powerful data-gathering of Gallup Polls, Buettner sought to apply health and longevity lessons derived from these geographies – called Blue Zones by demographers – to a population within the United States. The U.S. is in the midst of an epidemic of ill health. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Obesity rates among children have nearly tripled since 1980. Twenty percent of kids aged 6 to 11 are now classified as obese, resulting in an uptick in childhood diabetes and cardiovascular disease. A 2010 study by the Center for Disease Prevention discovered that Americans had begun to reverse a more than century-long trend towards higher life…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com