[Lifestyle] What 'Blue Zone' city Loma Linda, California can teach us about living longer

[Teacher™]

When researcher, author and explorer Dan Buettner was first developing the concept of the Blue Zones (the five regions in the world where people live the longest), he realized he was missing one thing: a city in the U.S. that made the cut. Determined to find an American region that met the Blue Zones criteria, Buettner and a team of demographers dug deep into data on Loma Linda, a city in San Bernardino County, California, with a po[CENSORED]tion of roughly 24,000 people. Touting the tagline “A city focused on health and prosperity,” Loma Linda is home to one of the largest concentrations of Seventh-day Adventists in the world. It was this religious po[CENSORED]tion that drew Buettner to further investigate the city as a Blue Zone contender. “I found that Seventh-day Adventists lived between seven and 11 years longer than people in its Northern American counterparts,” Buettner tells NBC News BETTER. “The highest concentration of them is in or around Southern California, specifically Loma Linda. I [qualified] it as a Blue Zone namely because these were verifiably the longest lived Americans, given available data in 2005.” Like the other Blue Zones Buettner discovered, Loma Linda excelled in several aspects which contribute to longevity in Buettner’s estimation. “In all five of these zones, the reason they're living long is not because of one special diet or one other thing; they're living longer because of a cluster of mutually supporting factors than enable [residents] to do the right things long enough and avoid doing the wrong things long enough so as to [lower risk] of developing a chronic disease.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/what-blue-zone-city-loma-linda-california-can-teach-us-ncna989661