Researchers have discovered that there are five Blue Zones in the world. These are places where people commonly live to be more than 100 years old. These five places are Nicoya in Costa Rica, Sardinia in Italy, Okinawa in Japan, Loma Linda, California, and Icaria in Greece. The Blue Zones were discovered when a team from National Geographic began studying longevity, or what makes people live longer. They discovered that people living in these five Blue Zones had a 10 times greater chance of living to age 100 than people in the rest of the world.
Once these Blue Zones were identified, the next question for researchers was what exactly made people in these zones live longer. They already knew that 20% of what makes a person live a long time is determined by their genetics, but 80% comes from their lifestyle. Lifestyle includes things like diet, exercise, and environment. A team of scientists and researchers went to the Blue Zones to see if they could figure out what specific lifestyle elements were helping people live so long in those places.
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ME OH-MAYA!
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