It’s a cold winter morning in Davos, but the pictures on the screen are aglow with warmth  – a 100-year-old man cuddling an infant; ancient women with faces wrinkled in laughter; aged men sharing a flask of local red wine;  and an extended family gathered around a Mediterranean meal of chickpeas, cheeses, salads and seafood. 

These are everyday scenes from the world’s best known “Blue Zone” communities – far-flung regions of the world with huge cultural, economic and geographic differences that share something deeply in common. 

In these Blue Zone communities, longevity is common and chronic disease is less prevalent, explained Dan Buettner Jr, executive vice president of the Blue Zones Initiative, at a session of the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative during the 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF). 

What are blue zones?

The term Blue Zones refers to “geographically demographically defined places of longevity,” explained Buettner, at the session in the DAC “Brain House”, which hosted a series of WEF side events  that zeroed in on the growing relevance of brain health to global health and economic policy. 

“These are longevity hotspots, places even at 10 times the rating we get in the United States.”

People in Blue Zone communities maintain the “longest disability free life expectancy in the world, seven good years longer than most Americans,” alongside “one-fifth the rate of dementia and a sixth the rate of cardiovascular disease,” he said.

Perhaps most striking is that wealth is not the driver: “Four out of five of these places are places that are at or below the poverty line, so they don’t have big pharmacies, billion-dollar health systems, big health plans, and yet they’re getting what we’re talking about right here.”

Flipping through scenes as diverse as Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; Costa Rica and Loma Linda, a community of Seventh Day Adventists in Southern California, Buettner talked about their differences – but also what they still have in common. 

Sardinia, noted for its high number of centenarians, largely relies on a plant-based diet and strong social fabric.  Loma Linda, a tightly-woven community of Seventh-Day Adventists, emphasises a diet straight from the Bible, leading to a longer, healthier life. People in the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica and Ikaria in Greece, a relatively poor Aegean Sea island, also have a high likelihood of reaching age 100, with a focus on natural movement, community connection, and celebrating life.

“Take Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica,” said Buettner.  There is abject poverty, and yet, according to the World Health Organization, if you can reach age 50 here, you have the highest likelihood of making it to 100 anywhere else on planet Earth. 

“And again, we see communities that are well connected, families that are nearby, people who are engaged in a purpose and a mostly vegetarian diet with lots of beans, beans, beans. So this idea that you have to be elite in order to afford good, whole food that’s healthy for you, is a myth.”

Even more revealing is the mindset of the people who live in the Blue Zones. Of the hundreds of centenarians in diverse communities surveyed, “not a single one pursued health, not a single one pursued fellowship or purpose or love for all of them, ensued as a byproduct of where they lived, that’s environment, and who they lived with, the culture, the rituals, the lifestyle,” Buettner observed. 

Those insights flip conventional wellness culture on its head. Longevity is less about individual discipline and more about the visible architecture of communities – the spaces where people move, as well as the foods most available for people to consume – and the invisible architecture of social connectivity.

Lessons from longevity hotspots

Across diverse regions of the world, patterns repeat with surprising consistency. Their lifestyles are not extreme; they are embedded.

“They all lived in environments and had hobbies, were they able to move a little bit every day, as opposed to the sedentary life that we have,” Buettner said. Social rituals matter just as much: “It is about the ritual of a glass of red wine over a healthy meal with friends… and of course, it all sits on a bedrock of connection.”

Purpose also plays a measurable role. “Purpose is good for four to six years of added life expectancy.”

The takeaway is clear: health is not pursued. It emerges from what Buettner calls the “Power Nine” best practices of Blue Zones, including: moving naturally, managing stress, eating a plant-heavy diet, living in a well-networked community with social rituals, and having a sense of purpose.

“None of these people was pursuing health or longevity or long life,” Buettner observed. “Ït ensued as a byproduct of where they lived, the culture that they belong to.”

Asked what people truly need in life, one 98-year-old grandmother offered a simple formula, Buettner recalled: “We all need four things: someone to love, something to do, some way to give back, and something to look forward to.”

He believes communities that deliver those essentials can transform public health. “If we can give that to people… they will do the transformation for us.”

Designing communities for brain health

“For decades, Blue Zones have shown real-world evidence that everyday environments supporting movement, connection, purpose and lifelong learning can prevent cognitive decline, dementia and preserve independence,” said Rice University’s Provost, Amy Dittmar, who moderated the discussion at the DAC Brain House in Davos. 

But after years of studying natural Blue Zones, researchers have begun asking a harder question: can such conditions be recreated in places where they haven’t emerged organically?

If Blue Zone communities could also be engineered, then the implications for healthier minds and dementia prevention could be enormous.

“Healthy neighborhoods lead to healthy neurons,” added Buettner, summing it all up.

Buettner believes they can, but only by shifting the focus away from the individuals and to the community settings. 

“Individual discipline is a muscle, and muscles always fatigue,” he said. “It’s hard to always make the right choice.”

Instead, success depends on structural change. “You don’t rely solely on individual discipline. You have to set people up for success. You empower them… with the invisible hand that nudges all of us all day long around food systems, tobacco and the built environment.”

When these elements align, Buettner argues, “you can literally engineer the effect of living in a Blue Zone anywhere in the world.”

To test out his theories, Buettner’s initiative has already linked up some 90 communities around the United States in a network of Blue Zone project communities. 

Communities in the network engage to promote healthier foods, more physical activity and ‘natural’ mobility via walking paths and bicycle lanes, as well as fora for social connectivity. 

Taken together the strategies mean that “when you step out of your door for your life mindlessly, you’re being inundated with a few more choices that are the healthy choices and they’re the easy choice,” as Buettner describes it.

Landmark collaboration 

But if Blue Zone communities can be engineered, can their health benefits also be measured more conclusively by researchers?  That question is now driving a landmark collaboration between Buettner and the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, Texas.

UTMB is now partnering with the City of Galveston as well as Buettner’s Blue Zone network of some 90 US cities, to study the physical and human ecology of Blue Zones, and how they can improve help, said Jochem Reiser, President of UTMB at the session.  

“One of the biggest pushbacks we have got… is, where is the scientific evidence?” said Reiser. “Everybody believes it, but what’s the evidence?”

“We are going to create a research institute that studies the biological and the genetic underpinnings of Blue Zone,” Reiser explained. The effort aims to “define biomarkers and spark innovation as well as extending research beyond laboratories to “have impact in the communities.”   

Rice is also a part of the action, Dittmar observed, noting that the two universities are also collaborating in the context of the Rice Brain Institute – an interdisciplinary hub uniting experts in engineering, natural sciences and social sciences to advance brain health.   

Mapping longevity in Galveston

The new UMTB partnership is focusing first on the city of Galveston, Texas, a diverse coastal community seen as an ideal testing ground.

Buettner described the project’s ambition: “What we’re looking to do is to take a deeper clinical  dive into how environment and lifestyle can be expressed in the human body, whether it’s biometrics, whether it’s epigenetics.”

The approach breaks new ground. “What if we baseline people not with a program, a lifestyle program, but with an environment, and then had them just live their lives in that environment and then show that their lifestyle shifted?” Buettner asked.

Reiser sees Galveston as a microcosm. “We have a mix of people from all kinds of backgrounds… We also have centenarians, and we have people who die early. So we will study all of that.”

The UMTB collaboration also includes what Buettner called a “brain trust” compact with UTMB that will link their research and science powerhouse… with the Blue Zone Project’s international network of longevity experts and community experts to further advance the science of implementing lessons of the Blue Zones.”

Ultimately, the work aims to scale the insights “for everyone, whether they live in a Blue Zone project city or not.”

The added value of prevention

While the innate appeal of the Blue Zones is longer, healthier and happier lives, a stark financial reality is also a driver. 

“We spend seven times more on health care than any other nation, arguably not getting a very good return on investment,” Buettner warned. 

“Of that $4 trillion a year, which represents 20% of the American GDP, the predominance of it is spent on chronic disease, preventable chronic disease, and a fraction is spent on prevention. 

“And that [prevention part] is typically spent on diets, supplements, exercise, medication – short term wins, long term failures. Why is that? It’s because individual discipline is a muscle, and muscles always fatigue.

“The puck is moving,” Buettner said. With rising labor costs, inflation, and growing disease burden, the current system is “utterly unsustainable.”

“You’re a single mother, you’re a firefighter, you’re a nurse. Crap happens. It’s hard to always make the right choice. 

“But if you can get to a tipping point of people, places and policy, you can make the healthy choice, the easy choice, you can literally engineer the effect of living in a Blue Zone anywhere in the world.” 

Image Credits: Health Policy Watch .