Blue Zones eyeing NWA

Project’s goal to boost health

ROGERS — Pursuing good health is too often a lonely path of dieting and working out, about 100 Northwest Arkansas community leaders were told Wednesday. A healthy community improves lives much more effectively, they were told.

“If you get together with friends who are sharing healthy meals, you’re more likely to eat healthy,” said Ben Leedle, president of Blue Zones LLC. At the other extreme, “if your three best friends smoke, you are 160 percent more likely to smoke,” he said.

The initial community meeting between the Blue Zones company, based in Minneapolis, and regional leaders took place at an introductory meeting Tuesday evening and a bigger presentation Wednesday, both at Embassy Suites in Rogers.

The Northwest Arkansas Council, the University of Arkansas and other groups interested in the state of health in the region invited Leedle and his team. The council is an association of regional business and community leaders. Nelson

Peacock, president of the Northwest Arkansas Council, introduced Wednesday’s speakers. The council and others are interested in improving the health and quality of life in the region because of the related benefits of lower health care costs and greater productivity, he said.

Organizers are evaluating whether Northwest Arkansas will try to become the first “Blue Zone” project region in the state. Blue Zone LLC will provide an initial proposal within the next month. Blue Zones started as a research project focusing on which regions in the world had the best health, measured by such metrics as the portion of the population living to age 100 years or more, remarkably low incidences of cancer, freedom from chronic diseases and other objective criteria. The project grew into a group advising participating cities in the United States on how to recreate the conditions found in healthy places such as Sardinia, Italy and Greek islands.

Northwest Arkansas’ participation will depend on whether enough local sponsors agree with and support the six- to eight-month process of crafting a specific plan for the region, organizers said. Whether the region will participate depends on if there is enough local support, including financial, volunteers and a willingness to participate by local businesses and governments.

Cost of a Blue Zones project wasn’t discussed at the forum and would not be clear until and unless a plan was in place, a company spokesman said. A Blue Zones project in Fort Worth, Texas, costs $50 million, all paid for by local sponsors, according to news accounts. Fort Worth, however, is a city of more than 800,000 people compared to Northwest Arkansas’ 500,000.

Data collected by the Blue Zone team shows this region is above average in health and quality of life for the United States, but substantially ahead of the rest of Arkansas.

Implementing a Blue Zone project would take three more years after formulating a local plan. Blue Zones has implemented 48 such projects, spread among 11 states. What the project would do depends on the community, organizers said. Similar projects elsewhere have made recommendations ranging from suggested menu items for restaurants to helping designs for downtown projects to encourage walking and community groups.

Blue Zones started as a research project focusing on which regions in the world had the best health, measured by such metrics as the portion of the population living 100 years or more, remarkably low incidences of cancer, freedom from chronic diseases and other objective criteria.

The project found a lot of local variation on the same shared traits, which included strong family and friend connections. For instance, families taking care of their elderly has clear benefits for the elderly, said Tony Buettner, a senior vice president for business development for Blue Zones. Research found those same families show lower rates of infant mortality too, he said.

Other factors identified were healthy diets and active lifestyles — not necessarily intense effort, but where walking and getting outdoors was natural, expected and frequent.

What form the plan takes varies widely with local conditions, Blue Zone presenters said. For instance, it’s more challenging to find ways to encourage people to be active in the winter in the north than it is in the south, and vice versa in the summer.

Jordan Carlisle of Bentonville, founder of a software development company, said he was pleased to hear the Blue Zone presenters emphasize communities fostering a sense of purpose are healthy. His company, Strengthen, was founded in 2015 to write software for coaches and has expanded into software for wellness coaches at companies to benefit those companies’ employees, he said.

“Mental wellness is a huge, huge part of overall wellness,” Carlisle said. Other aspects of the Blue Zone program are important, but more commonly known. Encouraging a sense of purpose for people is often neglected, he said.

“Their emphasis on changing habits is absolutely the right approach,” Carlisle said. “I’d love to be a part of this.”