Dan Buettner

The longest-lived people eat a plant-based diet. They eat meat but only as a condiment or a celebration. Nothing they eat has a plastic wrapper.

Kids in a home with grandparents are healthier.

Black beans and soy beans are the cornerstones of longevity diets around the world.

Select your friendships carefully. Gather people around you who will reinforce your lifestyle.

The secret to longevity, as I see it, has less to do with diet, or even exercise, and more to do with the environment in which a person lives: social and physical. What do I mean by this? They live rewardingly inconvenient lives.

I know exactly what my values are and what I love to do. That's worth additional years right there. I say no to a lot of stuff that would be easy money but deviates from my meaning of life.

You rarely get satisfaction sitting in an easy chair. If you work in a garden on the other hand, and it yields beautiful tomatoes, that's a good feeling.

I think we live in a culture that relentlessly pursues comfort. Ease is related to disease. We shouldn't always be fleeing hardship. Hardship also brings people together. We should welcome it.

Deepen your existing spiritual commitment.

Serve yourself, put the food away, then eat.

Inconvenience yourself: ditch the remote, the garage door opener, the leaf-blower; buy a bike, broom, rake, and snow shovel.

The name of the game is to keep from pushing the accelerator pedal so hard that we speed up the aging process. The average American, however, by living a fast and furious lifestyle, pushes that accelerator too hard and too much.

The brutal reality about aging is that it has only an accelerator pedal. We have yet to discover whether a brake exists for people.

I have always followed exactly what interests me and never really worried about the money. And when you think about it, to be able to travel the world... on an expense account and do exactly what interests you, it just doesn't get much better than that.

The luster of an experience can actually go up with time. So, learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language - those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come.

I live on the water. I live in a neighborhood that's consummately connected to my neighbors. I bump into them every day. I can bike to work.

Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world's longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don't use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden.

None of the longest-lived people ran marathons or pumped iron. They live exactly as their grandparents before them - surrounded by family and friends.

Have fun, be active. Ride a bike instead of driving, for example.

One of the big things I've learned is that there's an advantage to regular low-intensity activity.

Centenarians are still living near their children and feel loved and the expectation to love. Instead of being mere recipients of care, they are contributors to the lives of their families. They grow gardens to contribute vegetables, they continue to cook and clean.

Of course, Minneapolis, we think, 'Oh well, it's cold there, lethally cold.' But the reality is you adapt to weather... Humans are consummately adaptable creatures.

People who are making it to 100 live in environments where they are regularly nudged into physical activity.

The newness effect of a new thing wears off in nine months to a year, but financial security can last a lifetime.

Diet and supplements and exercise programs aren't what is achieving longevity. Having a faith-based community can add four to 14 years.