LESS LAYERING: LEARNING FROM BLUE ZONES
“I believe it’s not by trying to prevent death, it’s by learning how to live.”
-Dan Buettner, explorer, author & film maker
This quote by Dan Buettner in his Netflix series “Live to 100: The Secrets of the Blue Zones” sort of sums up how I feel about healthcare in America… and relates to almost everything I discuss in my blog. It encapsulates, for lack of a better term, what I refer to as “layering”.
Layering, to me, refers to all of the things we do—and later undo—that take a mental, emotional, financial, and physical toll on our bodies and minds. Removing layers is part of the simplification I think about in “Living Simply” and it’s part of the revealing I think about in “Dreaming Big” and what it really amounts to is removing things that are getting in our way. The more layers we peel away, the more simply we live, the more access we have to our core—the essence that is truly ours—which makes achieving our dreams that much more effortless and fulfilling.
The full quote by Buettner is from the first episode of his series about the Blue Zones and it reads:
“Every year Americans spend billions of dollars on diet plans, gym memberships and supplements, but it’s clearly not working for us. The fact of the matter is that most of us are leaving good years on the table. Worldwide about two-thirds of the eight billion people on this planet will die prematurely from an avoidable disease. In America for the first time in a century, life expectancy is dropping. So how do we fix this? I believe it’s not by trying to prevent death, it’s by learning how to live.”
In this context, Buettner’s point indirectly refers to the healthcare system in America, addressing how the shortcuts (conveniences) we take in life contribute to our poor health. We pile on with equally detrimental solutions (also shortcuts) meant to prevent death, which not only exacerbate the problems, but inadvertently make them worse by not addressing the root of the original problems that the shortcuts were meant to fix. This results in a layering over of problems, and those layers create more problems that further layer over the real solutions we need to fix ourselves—and ultimately fix healthcare in America. Here are some examples of how our food industry is directly contributing to our healthcare crisis:
Example 1: Favoring Consumerism Over Health
- The Shortcut: Creating highly processed, shelf-stable products using additives, refined flour, oils, and sugars.
What It Conceals: These products lack fiber, micronutrients, and protein—key for nutrient sufficiency. - The Health Impacts of These Layers: Daily intake of just 500 extra calories from ultra-processed foods leads to about 1 lb weight gain weekly resulting in 17% higher risk of cardiovascular disease for the highest consumers, and 10% rise in consumption linked to a 12% increase in Type 2 diabetes risk. Higher consumption is also linked to increased risks of cancer—including breast cancer—and all-causes of mortality.
Example 2: Increasing Shelf Life and Ignoring the Harmful Impacts of Cancers that Result
- The Shortcut: Curing meats with sodium nitrite/nitrate enables mass preservation.
- What It Conceals: During curing and cooking, these generate carcinogenic nitrosamines.
- The Health Impacts of These Layers: Processed meats are classified by IARC as Group 1 carcinogens (carcinogenic to humans). Eating just 50 g/day raises colon cancer risk by ~18%.
Example 4: Choosing Mass Production and Lower Cost at the Expense of Antibiotic Resistance and Gut Health
- The Shortcut: Administering antibiotics/ “growth enhancers” to animals practices faster production.
- What It Conceals: Residual antibiotics promote microbial resistance, dietary antibiotic exposure, and alters gut microbiomes.
- The Health Impacts of These Layers: Chronic exposure may reduce microbiota diversity, increase asthma/allergy risk, and diminish therapeutic antibiotic efficacy.
The simple solution to all these problems is outlined in Buettner’s television show and in the “blue zone” approach to living, which amounts to:
- Whole-Food First Approach – Prioritize fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins over ultra-processed items.
- Tighter Regulations – Independent safety assessments for food additives and stricter packaging standards, which currently exist in other countries and in select parts of the United States.
- Responsible Animal Farming – Reduce antibiotic use and eliminate non-essential growth promoters.
- Support Local Organic & Regenerative Farming – Encourages nutrient-rich food production and decreased chemical dependency.
Taken one step further and in a broader context when applied to industries beyond food and healthcare, Buettner’s point about living instead of preventing death can illuminate how society creates layering in so many aspects today. Layering occurs not just in healthcare, but in many systems in America—be it social, economical, psychological or environmental—which often intersect and create further problems in layering as they extend beyond their industry or silo going beyond the initial scope of the problem, which makes them hard to triangulate and solve for.
Take social media, which (not to bite the hand that feeds me) adds so many layers between us and our original intentions by steering us away from original thoughts or intentions with commerce and click-bait. My blog A Dumpster for Mother’s Day discusses this a little. This results in constant task-switching, reading articles we never intended, making purchases we never intended, engaging in online conversations (actively or passively) we never intended, bring us down rabbit-holes which result in multiple more of these actions we never intended. This has as great an impact on our ability to think critically and make decisions for ourselves as the food choices we make everyday have on our health.
Perhaps the most menacing aspect of all this, is that our culture has made these layers so expected—even acceptable-–that we barely think twice before engaging them, not realizing that we aren’t giving thought to how our actions ultimately connect to what we (truly) want or need.
The layering issues prevalent in healthcare and social media are simply a micro-or not so micro-cosm of the layering challenges we face with social culture generally. Like Buettner’s point underscoring the harm we are causing by trying to PREVENT death by never actually living life, in this larger example, these layers are preventing us from tapping into our own natural instincts or inclinations. They are keeping us from ourselves, and are self-perpetuating the more we allow them in (kind of like cancer), constantly keeping us further from:
- building the critical thinking skills necessary to hone our own conclusions
- following our intuition, or tuning into our kids’ natural intuition, when parenting as I’ll explore further in discussing Michaeleen Doucleff’s book Hunt, Gather, Parent.
- understanding how to fully connect to one another when building relationships or connecting, even, to our own selves, as I talk about in my discussion of both Kimberly Snyder and Cathy Heller.
Simple Life Big Dreams discusses un-layering in many aspects by exploring ways to live as simply and as consciously as possible, and tapping into that consciousness to uncover what we are truly meant to do.
NOTE: This article is not intended as medical advice. I draw this information from my own research and base it in further research supported by the internet and sources I gather using AI. Here are some of the sources I used to compile these facts. Please contact me if you have questions or see inconsistencies. Thank you!
