The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A GOAL OF LONGEVITY
Physician introducing Middlesex County to Blue Zone Project in hopes of fostering lifelong wellness
Can the greater Middletown area re-engineer its municipalities to model those of socalled “blue zones” — pockets of the world where its residents naturally live longer, higher-quality lives?
Family practice physician Dr. Michael J. Kalinowski of Middlefield thinks Middlesex County has that very potential.
The Blue Zones project, based on a decade and a half of longevity research sponsored by National Geographic and the National Institute on Aging, studied people in Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California; to “find the longest living populations to figure out why they’re living so long without the chronic diseases that we face,” said Tony Buettner, Blue Zone senior vice president of new business development.
“I think our community is really in a great place to try to do this because so many of us work on aspects of this [already],” said Kalinowski, who practiced medicine in the Higganum section of Haddam for 11 years.
"I think our community is really in a great place to try to do this because so many of us work on aspects of this [already]." — Family practice physician Dr. Michael J. Kalinowski of Middlefield
Kalinowski, who has been devoting all his professional energy to this concept for the last few months, began thinking about how the area is ripe for this sort of idea.
“We’ve got the Complete Streets project, farmers markets and improving nutrition, we’ve got folks working on social interconnected, but I want to try to bring a unifying vision to the community so we’ve almost got a central theme that people can feed their positive efforts into,” said Kalinowski, who has lived most of his life in Middlesex County.
And so Kalinowski is holding a Blue Zones Project presentation at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Middletown High School on LaRosa Lane during which Buettner will explain the plan’s basic concepts.
Kalinowski is a former Middletown resident who graduated from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in 2003, but grew up in the Moodus section of East Haddam and trained at Middlesex Hospital.
He reached out to Buettner a couple months back through the website, which encourages people to recommend their town or county for consideration.
Blue zones are areas in which citizens, schools, employers, restaurants, grocery stores and community leaders have united to optimize quality of life for its inhabitants, according to its website.
“When you look at the map of where Blue Zone communities are located around the country, there are a lot in the Midwest, in the South, the West Coast — California, Oregon — Hawaii, Utah. There’s really nothing in the whole Northeast corridor of the United States,” Kalinowski said. “It’s really kind of striking.”
The selection process is a rigorous one. “Those cities must demonstrate willingness and leadership to be innovators,” Buettner said.
In all, 78 communities applied for consideration for the pilot project, which was launched in Albert Lea, Minnesota, in 2008, a city with a population of 18,000.
“City governments, employers, school superintendents, restaurants, grocery stores, faith-based organizations, civic groups and nonprofits [in Albert Lea] said, ‘Why wouldn’t we do this?’” Buettner said.
It was so successful, he said, the initiative has since been replicated in nine states and 42 communities.
Nine lifestyle characteristics, called the “power nine,” can help add up to 12 additional, healthy years to an individual’s life, according to Blue Zones.
They are: moving naturally, living with purpose and volunteering, incorporating downtime, stop eating when one feels 80 percent full, eat more fruits and vegetables, engaging socially, enjoying a glass of wine each evening, putting loved ones first and associating with the “right tribe.”
Two-thirds of the nation is overweight, people consume half their calories from unhealthful foods and 80 percent of a person’s health is attributed to lifestyle choices, while the 20 percent they can’t control is genetic, according to Blue Zones.
It found that communities like those in Hawaii eat what some may consider counter-intuitive to what they’ve been taught: a high-carb diet that is low in protein and fats, a handful of nuts a day, and legumes as the cornerstone of their meals.
As part of the Minnesota experiment, Buettner said, “we brought in experts and tried to get the community to do more of the nine commonalities, permanently or semi-permanently changing environments, lifestyles and the design of places we spend our days: homes, restaurants, grocery stores we shop at, where we work, where we study faith,” he said.
After 13 months, he said, city workers’ health care claims tumbled by 40 percent, tobacco use in the whole county was down by 17 percent, and 80 percent of people increased their walking, biking and use of public transport.
“Things like diets, gym memberships don’t work simply because only a small percentage of people can extract the will necessary to do these actions every day throughout their life,” Buettner said.
That’s when communities can step up to “nudge residents into making healthy choices easier, making it harder to smoke, get junk food … and not be so reliant on the car — getting people moving,” he said.
“It’s all about choice. Nothing is mandated. Our health care model is broken. What we’ve been doing in the past doesn’t work,” Buettner said.
“The unifying goal is to make the healthy choice the easy choice,” Kalinowski said.
There is a key to improving the quality of the years each individual has, he said. “The three most important things are being less sedentary, moving natural through your day; eating a more plant-based diet and focusing on strong interpersonal connections with the people around you.”
Those who live in blue zones, Kalinowski said, don’t worry about being thin or working out.
“They found none of the people wake up and say, ‘I’m going to go to the gym.’ ‘I’m going to go on a diet.’ ‘I’m going to actively be healthy,’ they just wake up and function within the structure of their community,” Kalinowski said.
As for the presentation Wednesday night, “If we think this is a good idea as a community and we want to pursue this, then we’ve got a little work to do demonstrating our commitment to the Blue Zones Project, and, in the same sense, the Blues Zone Project has to demonstrate its value to our community.
“It’s a little bit of a courtship.”
For information, see bluezonesproject.com.