Do you want to know how to live 100 years without growing old? This week, I am talking with Jason Prall, who has been traveling to specific places called the Blue Zones — the longest lived and healthiest populations on earth — to learn more about what the centenarian secrets are. He’s been on a quest to answer why they are healthy at 100 as opposed to many elderly people in the western world who are ridden with disease and fatigue.
In this podcast, you’ll learn:
- How people in the blue zones live to be centenarians
- Why low stress-levels are going hand in hand with longevity
- Why having a purpose plays a role in longevity
- Why many in the modern world are not living in harmony with nature
- Why leaf blowers can make your life shorter
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How To Live 100 Years Without Growing Old – Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey there, this is Ari Whitten and welcome back to the Energy Blueprint podcast. This is the place to get all of the latest and greatest science around increasing your energy levels and overcoming fatigue.
Today, I have with me, Jason Prall. He’s actually gonna come over to my house and we’re gonna sit in my backyard and film this interview. It’s a little bit unusual in that sense, normally I’m talking to people through my computer.
It was nice to actually sit with him in person. He’s got some really amazing work that he’s doing right now. He’s got something, a documentary in the works that’s gonna come out very soon called “The Human Longevity Project.” He actually just got back to San Diego, where he and I both live, and he just got back from traveling all over the world to these blue zone areas, which, if you’re not familiar with this idea, blue zones are basically the worlds healthiest and longest lived peoples in the world.
They’ve created five of these, which are known to be the specific population groups that have this amazing longevity and have a very high proportion of people who live to 100, centenarians. He’s basically going around and finding older people and saying, “Hey, what are your secrets?” It’s actually amazing to me that this documentary has never been made before because it’s such a great concept. I would have thought that something like this had been made maybe 10 years ago, 20 years ago but he’s making it now.
It’s phenomenal work and I’ve had the chance to discuss, in depth, with him on a number of occasions a lot of the details around this and just chat science and chat longevity. He’s doing some really fascinating work and they’ve got some really fascinating findings. I really enjoyed doing this interview and I think that you’re gonna love the information here.
Also, one other note here is as far as the relationship between this and energy, you can think of the things which extend longevity as things which preserve energy production into old age. The more efficient that you are the better you do things to preserve yourselves and your mitochondria’s ability to produce energy to produce energy as you get older and older and older, the longer you’ll tend to live but you’ll also tend to have more energy as you get older rather than less.
There’s a lot of overlap between the strategies to enhance longevity and the strategies that will enhance energy production.
I just want you to be mindful of that, be paying attention to that and listening for that as you watch or listen to this interview.
With that said, there’s a ton of great stuff in this interview. I really enjoyed doing it. I think you’re gonna love it. Enjoy the interview and I’ll talk to you soon.
Jason, thanks so much for joining me here.
Jason Prall: Yeah, of course. Good to be here.
Ari Whitten: And coming to my house here. We’re hanging out in my backyard, which is cool. It’s unusual for me, normally I’m sitting at my computer talking to people in distant cities.
Jason Prall: 10-minute drive is not too bad.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Cool, man. I know that you’re working on something called ” The Human Longevity Project.”
Jason Prall: Yes.
What longevity is and how Jason became interested in the topic
Ari Whitten: Can you tell everyone a little bit about that and what it’s all about and what you’re doing with that and how you got interested in longevity.
Jason Prall: Yeah, I mean. Longevity is a very vague topic, right? I mean what are we even talking about. Really, my gravitation towards longevity was just getting into the health side of things. Really not focusing on disease, but focusing on health. I spent some time in the integrative space looking at functional medicine type stuff and really trying to help people resolve their dysfunctions that they’re experiencing.
That was a really good place and I really enjoyed that work to some degree, but for me, I resonated more with the health side of things. I realized, kind of, that was partially missing from a lot of discussions was this focus on health as opposed to understanding disease.
I kinda started to explore that a little bit more and I thought, “What better way to study health than looking at some of the healthiest populations that we have in the world that has been identified and studied, somewhat anyway.” I wanted to show what that looked like because a lot of times we think about what it’s like when we get to 90 and 95, right? I’ve talked to my parents and grandparents like, “I don’t wanna be that old.” I thought it’s really interesting that we have this idea that we don’t want to get to that age and I think it’s because what we see is between essentially 60 and on people feel like shit.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: And they don’t really function well in society. They’re partially excluded from society, from families, and they’re on multiple medications and I think that’s what we don’t want. We don’t want to get to 90, we just don’t want to feel like crap for 20 or 30 years, right?
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: Going to some of these places, Sardinia and Okinawa, Ikaria and Nicoya in particular, it’s amazing when you see 90-year-olds or 95-year-olds or 100-year-olds and their ability to function. All a sudden it’s a little inspiring, it’s like that is what I wanna be like. I know with your work, with all the energy stuff it’s like you want to have that energy at 80 and 90, right? You want to be able to function especially from a cognitive standpoint.
That’s kind of what prompted this whole project. We’re fairly deep into it and I can tell you what I thought I knew, it’s a little different. There were some surprises along the way and some things that were reinforced but when you’re there and you’re in these places and you’re talking to these people and you’re seeing how they live and the whole thing is a little bit different than I think a lot of the longevity discussions are about.
How people in the Blue Zones live differently from how longevity experts advise us to
Ari Whitten: In what sense? What kinds of things were different? What preconceived notions do you think most people have that just didn’t match up well with the actual experience that you found in these places.
Jason Prall: Yeah. I think the diet is always a big one, right? Everybody’s talking about the diet. What’s the optimal diet? How do we eat for longevity?
Well, there is no way to eat for longevity. The only way to really eat from longevity is to eat natural foods, to do so in a non-excessive way. Ideally, you would cycle through these foods based on what might be the season of that area. The diet is totally different than you might expect.
Just to give you an example: to eat meat or not eat meat, to go paleo or not paleo. These types of things. The only commonality, a common meat that every blue zone eats is pork and pork are probably the most demonized meat that we have. Even with pork, they’re not eating it you know every week, right? They’re generally slaughtering a pig every December or so.
It’s these types of things that when you’re there in you’re seeing it you start to understand why they’re doing this, you understand that they don’t have the same relationship to food that we have. That was a big one.
Exercise is another good example, right? As two guys who love to exercise, you know, it’s a fun thing, it’s an active thing we feel good when doing it but these people were not exercising in the way we would think, right? They move all day.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: One of my favorite quotes from one of the guys was, and this is really profound and simple but it really spoke volumes to me, he said, “Growing up, years ago in my life the body was active and the mind was still.” He said, “The problem now is the mind is so active and the body is still.”
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: It was really just movement. They were constantly moving, right? Walking 40 kilometers a day to go do something, deliver something or pick something up. Moving around in their gardens, or with their shepherds. There’s a lot of shepherds. They were moving a lot. They weren’t exercising, they weren’t doing interval training, they weren’t lifting heavy things.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: That was really cool to see. Generally, it was the lifestyle overall. We all understood that they relax and stay calm and these things, but when you see how they really behave it just sort of infiltrates you. You can’t not fall in love with this sort of very serene sort of lifestyle. It’s not about taking breaks and relaxing and siestas and these type of things, it’s just about enjoying the simplicity.
That was a huge one for us to see was the enjoyment of the simple things in life. If you look at our society they do the opposite. All we want is the new greatest cool technological advancement that we want to play with or use to hack something, right?
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: They have a different overall mentality and it’s not to say that we can totally go back to that mentality here but we can definitely absorb some of those teachings and apply them in various ways in our modern world.
What some of the secrets of longevity in humans are
Ari Whitten: Absolutely. What were some of the most important takeaways as far as factors that you were able to see or maybe that they spoke about as contributing to their longevity?
Jason Prall: Yeah, I can say that each place sort of had different components that really contributed to their good health. Let me say this first, too, because you know we’re talking about longevity but I think an important distinction that we need to make, too, and really what this film is going to be about is not getting to 110 and feeling like shit for the last 40 years of your life, right?
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: Through medications and bio hacking and gene sequencing and you know editing all kinds of genes. No, this is about health span, right?
Ari Whitten: Right.
Jason Prall: What contributed to their great health span varied.
Ari Whitten: For people maybe haven’t heard that word-
Jason Prall: Sure.
Ari Whitten: Can you just define that? Maybe clarify what it means to live a long health span versus a long life span.
Jason Prall: Right. That’s a good point. It is a huge distinction, right? That the life span would, of course, be the total number of years that you live before you die. That’s wonderful. A lot of people talking about getting to 120 or 150 or 200, right? There are all these numbers thrown out there. Really, the health span is I think what we all want.
We want to live healthy without the support of medications and assisted things that would help us live a normal life. Good cognitive function, right? Good memory, good ability to move without pain and all kinds of issues.
It’s really about just sort of living in a youthful state as long as possible. I think a lot of people would probably wouldn’t mind having a health span of a 100, getting to 100 in a very healthy way. Dying having sex, that’s a pretty good way to go out, right?
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: As opposed to living to 120 and just eeking by and not being able to move for the last 20 or 30 years of your life, right?
Ari Whitten: Right.
Jason Prall: There’s just a difference there.
Each place kind of had its own special components that contributed to that. Ultimately when I asked all these centenarians and healthy 90-year-olds some advice that they could give me on how to live a long healthy good life I think it’s 100% of them that said you need to find peace with everybody around you. You have good relationships. Just don’t have any issues with those around you.
Ari Whitten: It’s not about bio hacking.
Jason Prall: Right, yeah. Right.
Ari Whitten: And consuming-
Jason Prall: What supplement they’ve been taking? Yeah. No, a little different.
That’s pretty profound, right? I mean, people from different cultures, obviously living individual lives that, you know, they don’t get on conference calls and say, “Hey what do you guys think.” This is just a personal experience that they all kind of said the same things.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: When you hear it from the horse’s mouth you’d be pretty stupid to ignore that and go look at research instead, right?
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: This is the wisdom that people are gaining. To be honest, it’s one of the things that we’re losing here in the west. We’re losing the wisdom from the elderly population because we kind of stuff them in homes, we don’t want to take care of them, we don’t want to deal with them.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: They don’t really serve a great purpose in society, they’re slow drivers, all these things and yet they have so much wisdom to share. It’s really been pretty amazing to hear some of their wisdom that we can take to heart and apply because we don’t really have a ton of that opportunity here.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Did you get a sense, an experience of that when you are in these places of that community and that social aspect of their lives? Did you get some experience of that? What was that like?
Jason Prall: Easily the most differentiating component in my mind … Every place I’ve been in western culture, the United States, you have your friends and you have good groups that you can associate with whether it be a yoga community or a meditation community or a CrossFit gym or something. There are all these groups and that’s great but it wasn’t about living an isolated life and then going to get your community and finding your tribe, right? It really was about constantly surrounded by the people that are all working together and caring about one another.
One guy said that oftentimes when he would go to work he would walk to work and he’d see a friend in a nearby village or in his village they would just sit and chat for like hours and they wouldn’t go to work. This is what it was for them.
The community really was everything. They have celebrations to bring people together, they work together as a community, they would help build things and create a better community as a community. They understood the value of it, too. This wasn’t just by chance. They understood the value, they fostered it. It really was part of their culture and so they live in small groups but they all kind of work together.
When you’re there and you’re in it you feel it, you’re a part of it. Often times we would get invited into random people’s houses that they would give us all kinds of food and just treat us like family.
Honestly, there’s a lot of great people here in the US and in the west but I don’t know how many I can go up to their house, knock on their door and then have them invite me in to have a meal and treat me like I’m just part of the family.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: This was the experience everywhere we went.
How centenarians live 100 years with help of nature
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Very cool. What other kinds of takeaways did you get in studying these different populations? Beyond social aspects were there any very clear observations of lifestyle habits? I know you’ve kinda mentioned a few in passing here but what were some of the other key ones?
Jason Prall: We know one of the things … The overall theme is as they live in alignment with nature. They follow nature’s rules. Part of that, I think, involves the simplicity of things.
If you look at our lives here in the US we’ve literally over complicated everything. How many people drive to a coffee shop five minutes away when they could just walk. Thing is that the drive will save them time, which can be allocated towards making money you are doing something else that will … What comes to mind, and I don’t mean this negatively, but Tim Ferris, right? He’s of these guys that like he’s trying to maximize efficiency of everything he does.
If you carry that logic forward, you’re maximizing efficiency of something so you can do something else and that something else you’re doing in trying to maximize the efficiency of that so you can do something else. You keep doing that and you’ve maximized the efficiency of everything, you’ve done a lot of stuff, but you’ve never really given yourself the time that you need.
What’s the purpose of all that? Just to gain efficiencies? That’s one thing is that there is no rush to do things. There’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing to do. The whole point of their lives is to live a good life so they, literally, are doing this the whole time.
They really simplify things. A lot of them have gardens. Obviously not having supermarkets in the way that we have them. They have a little kind of farmers market type things and places you can go to get food but most of them had food sources that were right there in their backyard.
They all drink, other than maybe Loma Linda, but Loma Linda, which is not really a blue zone, to be honest, it’s actually not a blue zone technically, but they all drink. Whether it be tsipouro, or ouzo in Ikaria, whether it be red wine in Sardinia, they all have alcohol and they don’t drink to get drunk or to party. Most of them drink as a digestive aid for their food. They are thinking a little bit differently about alcohol.
But even when they do have alcohol for celebrations and gatherings it is almost always locally produced. Wines are literally made in the household or with somebody nearby. Same thing with tsipouro and some of these other things. It’s a different relationship with that.
They sleep well. I asked a lot of these people because, in these small areas like Nicoya, Costa Rica, they didn’t have electricity 50 years ago.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: It just didn’t exist. I said, “What’d you do after the sun goes down with no electricity.” And he said, “Well, we have to sleep.” Think about all the people with sleep issues right now. You know first hand with all the people you’ve worked with and everything that you’ve looked at, poor sleep or lack of sleep fosters the dysfunctions and the illnesses.
Ari Whitten: Oh, for sure. Yeah. They say that lack or poor sleep is the mother of all health issues.
Jason Prall: Right.
Ari Whitten: Obviously, it’s an overgeneralization. It’s not always the case, but I think it’s-
Jason Prall: It’s a pretty bold and accurate statement.
Ari Whitten: I think it’s accurate for the most part.
Jason Prall: Right. They didn’t really have sleep issues.
I asked a lot of them do they have digestive issues. No, they didn’t. They don’t have some of these things that we have. They didn’t have the stress of trying to worry about that stuff, right?
(If you want to know more about how you can improve your sleep, listen to my podcast with Dr. Michael Breus, The Sleep Doctor HERE!)
How centenarians all have lower stress levels
Of course, low stress, in general, is a commonality between all of them, but part of that comes down to the cultural aspects of what they’re doing, the purpose that they have in their life, right? The purpose was a huge one. We talked to one guy who’s 85 in Okinawa and he’s in like the city, he’s not even in sort of the more rural beneficial longevity areas, he’s literally in the city of Naha I think it was, and he’s 85 and he’s running a construction company and a couple other companies. I asked him, I was like, “When are you going to retire?” He kinda looked at me like, “What are you talking about. This is what I do. I’m going to do this until I die.”
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: You start to realize that, okay, there’s perhaps a little bit different of approach on how people behave and what they spend their time doing. Most people in the US spend their time making money to either support themselves and keep things … Just provide a baseline income or to earn tons of money and build things or whatever they want to do but it’s mostly to acquire things.
They don’t really take that approach in a lot of these places. Their whole way of operating as different and they’re finding things that are either purposeful for survival point of view or purposeful for what they really enjoy doing.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: We kind of chatted about this but finding your own purpose in your own life, it’s like, I mean, how important is that and how much better do you feel going about your day working 14 hours.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: It’s a lot easier to work 14 hours when you love what you’re doing, right?
Ari Whitten: Yeah, absolutely. I think this concept of purpose is an important point to drive home and we were chatting about it before. I think it’s a big one.
Jason Prall: Yeah, it’s huge.
Ari Whitten: You can’t create health in … Let me put it this way, you can spend thousands of dollars taking supplements, you can go find the best-
Jason Prall: Best coaches, right.
Ari Whitten: Optimal diet. You can hire all the best and most amazing, most knowledgeable people in the world, but if you don’t have a purpose in life you’re not gonna get there to being optimally healthy.
Jason Prall: I think a lot of that comes down to the subconscious emotional traumas. These very subtle things of, “I’m not really living the life that I want to or that I’m supposed to be living.” I think whether or not we truly recognize that consciously, it’s there. That this isn’t really what I’m here for, I’m kind of just going throughout my day.
That little emotional stress that is there constantly will slowly, slowly eat at you physically, mentally, and emotionally. I think that’s a big one.
Having a purpose in life is one of the centenarian secrets
I think finding a purpose that you have … I think it can be anything.
Having kids, that can be your purpose in life is raising children the right way. We talk to one gal, she was 94 in Loma Linda and I was just telling you this but it’s a great story. She’s 94, she lives in a small community, she doesn’t have a ton of friends that she grew up with, her kids are gone doing their own thing, and her husband’s kind of slowly going downhill. I said, “What keeps you going? You’re 94.” She said, “Well, I’ve got to learn this song for the violin class on Wednesday.”
For me, that was so powerful. We sort of glorify this idea of purpose, that it has to be this big grandiose thing that we have to be, sort of, Steve Jobs-esque purpose in life. Really, at the end of the day, it can be so simple, so small, that it’s just something to keep you going. Something you’re looking forward to doing. For her it was … She was really good … She was actually a pretty good Euchre player. She was good with the ukulele. She was doing ukulele classes every Tuesday or something but the violin … She picked up the violin, I think, at the age of 90, or 92. How many 90 plus-year-olds do you know picking up new skills, new talents, new arts, new whatever?
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: Pretty amazing, right?
When we think about something like music that’s a great example of something that you’re training the brain to learn a new skill. That is one of the best cognitive enhancers you can ever imagine. Way more powerful than a supplement you’re ever going to take.
When we look at some of these things … She’s enjoying it, it’s a challenge, it gives her something to shoot for her and a sense of purpose, it brings her together with people that she can learn with and have fun with as well.
You can knock out you know five or six big things that can contribute to health with one little thing but if you’re afraid of taking on new things and failing and not being successful in something when you pick it up you’re missing out on a lot of things.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: It’s a lot more powerful than taking a pill.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. There’s actually research showing that having a purpose in life affects your epigenetic expression.
Jason Prall: Absolutely.
Ari Whitten: Expression of your genes. I know they measured mood and life span and all these things have been connected to this purpose in life. I think on a more plain kind of non-technical, non-scientific level, there’s this kind of concept that I’ve thought about which is when you don’t have a purpose when there’s nothing … Ikigai, the concept in Okinawa, is reason for being, I think, is the more proper translation of it is what’s your reason for being? It can change like you were getting at it. It doesn’t have to be this big vision of your life, you have this one purpose.
Jason Prall: You’re going this way, right?
Ari Whitten: It can be this week my ikigai is that I gotta learn the violin-
Jason Prall: Absolutely.
Ari Whitten: Or that I go to my granddaughter’s performance or whatever and be there to love and support my granddaughter.
What I was going to say is I think when you don’t have that, when you don’t have any more reason for being, I think that it may send a signal to your genes that are almost like you’re done.
Jason Prall: Let’s move on.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, like you’ve completed-
Jason Prall: Time to wind this life down.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. You’ve completed your role here as this organism and there’s no more reason for you to continue to be alive and for us, the cells of your body, to continue to produce energy and allow you to keep on breathing and doing whatever you’re doing.
Jason Prall: Right.
Ari Whitten: At this point, you’re just taking up useful resources for the rest of the population.
I’m saying this in a harsh way so for anybody that doesn’t have a sense of purpose please forgive me. This is just an idea that I had floating around in my head that maybe our bodies just don’t care to go on living when we don’t have a sense of purpose.
Jason Prall: I think you’re right and I think it aligns with this idea of there’s lots of research showing that when cancer doctors diagnose somebody with cancer and say, “You’ve got six months to live,” well they got six months to live.
The mind is amazing and we don’t even know what it is. I’m not talking about the brain, I’m talking about the mind right and what is a thought? What is an emotion? We don’t really have strong definitions for what these things are. I can tell you that there is a lot of research and there a lot of understanding around this, particularly in various spiritual communities and teachings and this type of thing, but that stuff is powerful and it’s literally sending the messages to our body to either heal to stay sick or to wind down.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: The thing about purpose for me is it takes courage, right? At the end of the day, everybody has a purpose. They may not feel like they found it but really I think what’s happening that we’re seeing is that people are ignoring what they’re being told. In other words, we’re getting messages all the time. We have certain thoughts, we have certain dreams, we have certain ideas of what we want to do but we don’t do them for whatever reason. We’re afraid that we were not going to make enough money, we’re afraid that somebody’s gonna think we’re stupid, we’re afraid we’re going to fail, we’re afraid we’re going to succeed.
All these things that we have these little instincts about, like I kind of really want to do that. I don’t know why I just want to do that but the culture is telling us not to do it or we’re telling ourselves not to do it and we don’t do it. We keep doing the things that we’re doing because we’re either good at it or it’s easy or I’m safe.
Those are the things that I think prevent us from following our purpose. Following your purpose is easy. It’s literally easiest thing you can do because it’s literally just letting go, but we hold on to these things. I think it is that sort of conflict, you know, this wrestling in the mind that is creating such turmoil in the body that it’s going to manifest in something. There’s so much research backing all that up.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: And we don’t fully know how it works but I can tell you from the research and then seeing it live … And then the feeling, right? When you kind of follow your passion for the first time it’s like, “God this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: It felt so good. I can work forever. I don’t need to sleep. It’s funny, you find all these people that literally don’t sleep and it’s like that can’t be good for your health, but when you have such a passion for something perhaps we can actually override even things like sleep to some degree.
A good example this actually is in Ikaria. They have these things called panigiris. These panigiris are all night parties. The village gets together, they make all this food, they do all these things and prep for this, and then like five or six o’clock they sit down for dinner, the whole village and the people from other villages.
These are 5-year-olds up to 95-year-olds. Everybody’s involved with this stuff and everybody looks forward to it. They sit down, they eat, they drink a little wine, they drink a little tsipouro and they’re not getting drunk, the band is playing all night long, really there’s no break, the continue to play tune after tune after tune without any stop. Everybody’s dancing in a circle, like 200 people in a big, big circle. People come and go in and out of the circle and they’re just doing this all night till 6, 7, 8 a.m.
When we think about something like that, we’re like “Okay, well that’s really bad. It’s not following any sort of circadian rhythm aspect. They’re not sleeping. This is terrible.”
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: But they’re celebrating, they’re having fun, they’re with other people. That’s powerful.
Ari Whitten: Right.
Jason Prall: You maybe don’t have to do everything by the book. If you’re doing most things right and you’re enjoying yourself you can probably override a lot of these technical things that we think we know.
Ari Whitten: Maybe just that play and enjoyment and social aspect and community and all of those things, the net benefit of that outweigh the harm of one night of sleep deprivation.
Jason Prall: Exactly. 100%. I think, from my experience, it’s like that’s probably a reality.
How many people in the modern world are not living in accordance with nature
Ari Whitten: Very cool. You mentioned one thing earlier that I wanted to go back to because I think it’s an important point and I would love to get you to elaborate on it. It’s this idea of living in accordance with the laws of nature versus not in accordance with it.
Jason Prall: Yeah.
Ari Whitten: Can you just elaborate a bit more on how they were in accordance with nature versus maybe how where many modern people are not in accordance with that.
Jason Prall: Yeah, I mean, the easiest one is food. Where are we getting our food? Are you eating kiwi from New Zealand, right? If so, how did that get to your door? It’s gotta be flown across the world, which means it has to be picked unripe, it’s gotta finally get to you, it’s grown unconventionally because that’s generally what has to happen for most of those things to travel that far. It’s probably gotta be sprayed and protected. It’s just one example.
If you’re living in you know the UK or Seattle or on Minnesota is eating fruit in the winter the best thing? Probably not, but even more importantly I think is the fact that in the US we have basically any food we want all year around.
You can eat any fruit any vegetable any meat any pasta anything whenever you want.
I think the downside to that is that humans are generally habitual creatures. If I asked you your five favorite food you could probably list them like that and you probably eat them fairly frequently. If I threw out some random food that is not really your cup of tea or that you don’t really explore much, perhaps the Goya, which is sort of bitter melon, which is a big food in Okinawa. How often do you eat bitter melon? Probably never. I never do.
Because we’re habitual we don’t rotate our foods, I think that is important. Everything in life is cyclical, everything has a cycle. Nothing is consistent and constant.
Ari Whitten: I think it’s worth mentioning here because it may not be totally obvious since most people do their shopping in a grocery store and they’re so disconnected from the nature that maybe they don’t even grasp what you’re talking about which is the fact that a lot of these foods don’t grow in certain parts of the year.
Jason Prall: Right.
Ari Whitten: If you’re living off the land you do not have access to certain foods during portions of the year and then you do have access to those foods during portions of the year.
Jason Prall: Absolutely, and I’ll give you a really good example that’s going to piss a lot of people off, coffee. Coffee beans, it’s a fruit. Coffee beans are seasonal. They are cyclical. You don’t produce coffee 7, 12 months out of the year, they have a season. There is a coffee harvest, believe it or not. We found ways around this but that’s a great example of if you were living not in the modern way, you probably had to find ways to you use these things in a cyclical manner. Pineapple, even in the tropics, there are tropical seasons, there are wet and dry seasons.
One of the good examples of this is with meat. The big debate that you see a lot is vegetarian/vegan versus this Paleo idea of heavy meat consumption. The benefits of meat, the harmful aspects of meat. It’s sort of this one or the other type of mentality.
Everywhere in the world is different and very few places are vegetarian/vegan and very few spaces are heavy meat consumption. They do exist on both sides but it’s not the majority of the world.
In these blue zones, these places where people are living really healthy lives into their late 90s and into their 100s, they eat mostly a plant based diet, with usually a seasonal aspect to the meat that they consume. They might slaughter a pig in December and have it for a few months and they can salt it heavily to preserve it, but generally, it’s a pretty big consumption based on celebrations.
A lot of older culture will celebrate the solstice, this sort of the sun’s coming back, life is reborn, all these types of things, so there’s a lot of seasonal aspects to food that are followed and obeyed because that is how you survive.
We were talking a little while ago about salads, right?
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: None of these places eats salads. They might have a little lettuce on their plate but they don’t eat like a bowl of salad that we have here in the west, especially here on the west coast, right, in California.
It makes sense because while leafy greens and salads are very very healthy, they don’t really sustain you. If you’re living in a place that requires sustenance to do the work that needs to be done you’re not going to load up on salads, right? You’re going to eat things like sweet potatoes or white potatoes or squash, these type of things. Fruits that are growing on trees all around you, you’re just literally going and pick them and eating them.
It’s important to understand that the dietary dogmas that exist here in the US in particular, they’re probably doing us more harm than good. In order to follow the laws of nature, we need to be eating food that nature is providing for us. For people who want to eat meat that does include meat.
I understand the argument against meat, I’m actually okay with it, to not eat meat. I think probably avoiding meat is better for our spiritual aspect of ourselves. For the physical body, I’m pretty confident that meat is probably a pretty good thing. I’m open to all aspects of ways of eating but I think the fundamental real thing that we need to do is start by eating real food in its natural form: organic, from the earth, ideally in a cyclical way.
Because there’s a lot of profound aspects to foods that are provided in nature. I think we haven’t even begun to understand the complexity of food when it comes to the phytonutrients, to the polyphenols, to the bacteria that are growing on the outside of the food, even on a peach. There are bacteria on the peach itself. Doesn’t need to be growing in the ground. Those are some components. The other components are not having fertilizers and not killing the soil that food is grown in.
That’s just one law of nature but the circadian rhythm is a huge one, massive, massive problem we have here in the west. Getting back in alignment with those laws of nature. Infections-
Ari Whitten: Actually real quick just in case some listeners … All my members of my program know what circadian rhythm is.
Jason Prall: Yeah, I skip over it.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If anybody doesn’t know that term, circadian rhythm, just give a quick definition.
Jason Prall: Yeah, absolutely. Circadian, right, meaning, sort of, cycle. Goes round and round. It is this idea that the light cycle was what guides us. That we have the sunrise and we have a sunset. When the sun is coming up in the morning, due to the atmosphere, certain wavelengths of light get in and certain sort of get refracted back out in space.
The UV doesn’t make its way. That’s why you’ll never get a sunburn early morning. It just can’t happen no matter where you are. There is a circadian rhythm to our days I think light, particularly going through the eyes, but it’s also on the skin, will guide the physiology of the body.
Your people probably know this but it’s worth stating and going over again because it’s so so important, there is not a biochemical reaction in the body that is not operating on the circadian rhythm.
Every single cell of every single organ in the body is operating on the light cycle. We have our own internal rhythm. I think it’s estimated about 24 1/2 hours or something like that, the sun is kind of the thing … Not only sun, the darkness too. The sun and the darkness work together that they are keeping on a daily rhythm.
This is important. I can give you one physiological example of this. I was looking at a research paper that was looking at thyroid function with regard to circadian rhythm.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: There are over a thousand genes in the thyroid alone, that has to do with the thyroid alone, they get up regulated or down regulated based on the light cycle.
Ari Whitten: Yep.
Jason Prall: That’s just one organ. We talk about the liver, the heart, the brain, all these things, the sexual organs, all these things operate on this light cycle and it’s also why the thyroid gets down regulated in the winter because the light cycle is a lot different than it is in the summer.
Slow down the thyroid, slow down the energy metabolism, all of a sudden hypothyroidism is a normal thing, we don’t need to worry about it if we’re operating in the way that we’re supposed to.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: When we’re not and the thyroid slowing down for other reasons perhaps too much oxidative stress, perhaps our light cycles are messed up, yeah okay. You’ve got too much stress then that’s going to happen.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: You start to realize that all the problems that we’re seeing in our sort of modern way of living are essentially due to this deviation from the laws of nature and part of this has to do with the self. Lack of love and appreciation and gratitude for the self. We always talk about love is this sort of outward projection or compassion being an outward projection, but sometimes we forget that we need to love ourselves. We have to have compassion for ourselves.
Another thing that is a law of nature is this idea of love and this sort of component of love it has to do with just the general aspect of the universe.
I think it’s so complex, to some degree, with regard to the laws of nature but we kind of know that. We don’t really need to spend too much time on figuring out what they are. I think we kind of have an intuitive sense for what they are, we just have to understand how important that is.
A great example of this is wearing shoes, right? So many flat soled shoes and we have a foot design for a reason. Any chiropractor or osteopath or any of these type of physical workers will tell you that we have a lot of physical issues because we don’t walk on our bare feet. It’s just a lot of these type of things.
The other component that we’ve mentioned a few times is the social aspect of things. We are social creatures and this idea of loneliness versus being alone. It’s good to be alone, it’s bad to be lonely.
We need the dark and the light and being alone and being in groups and socializing. It’s really the simple stuff like that and not over complicating things, living in a simple way, slowing down, sleeping, eating from natural sources, not over consuming things, not polluting our environment. This isn’t rocket surgery. This is simple stuff but it’s not convenient. It’s not convenient to grow your own garden in our modern world because I can go to the store and get anything I want to and I can’t grow a pineapple all year around here, unfortunately.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
How gratitude helps you live longer
Jason Prall: We have to get rid of some of this convenience. I think part of it, though, is sort of more philosophical argument where if you have something at your fingertips all year round, all day, it starts to lose its importance. It’s like whatever.
But can you imagine how excited you are for the solstice and the sun to come back and now you can … This food starts growing again, that’s an important thing.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, or excited for pork if you only eat pork two or three times a year.
Jason Prall: Exactly.
Ari Whitten: It becomes a very special thing.
Jason Prall: Everything becomes a little more special.
Ari Whitten: And carries more meaning.
Jason Prall: Exactly.
Ari Whitten: And the gratitude element is huge.
Jason Prall: Huge. You start to become grateful for all the little things. You know how hard it is … A good example is you see a lot of these spoiled kids, right? Really wealthy parents who love their kids and they give them everything. You start to see what spoiled people do. They have no gratitude for anything and you go to the other side of the coin and you look at somebody who has lived in poverty or struggled most of their life and they’re happiest with the simplest things.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: Very simple things.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. I think one of the worst things that can happen to us as humans is to normalize to abundance and just a life filled with good things and then to normalize to it.
Jason Prall: Yeah.
Ari Whitten: And not appreciate any of it.
Jason Prall: 100%.
Ari Whitten: I think even … This has been known for people for a long time, the stoics in Ancient Greece had practices to guard against them from getting to that place psychologically so they would remove themselves from their life of comfort and luxury and abundance and go sleep on the floor and go out in nature and not have insulated rooms and all the comforts of the modern world.
They’d intentionally separate themselves from that, for a period of time, to reset themselves psychologically so that they can come back to their situation with more gratitude.
Jason Prall: Absolutely. It goes back to Buddhism as well. Sleeping on low, non-extravagant beds and sort of this restriction of a lot of the glamorous things. The Buddha himself sort of left this life of luxury to go out on his own and experience the real world.
I think, unfortunately, because we have been sort of blessed with all this comfort and luxury and safety of our modern world and we have to now intentionally take steps to restrict things, to perhaps give things away and support other people. It’s part of one of the downfalls of sort of a capitalistic mindset of me versus you, we live in a world of scarcity, I need to hoard and save, I need to progress.
It’s always this competitive type of thing and, not to get in sort of economic debates, but there is a consequence to that that carries over to the rest of our lives that I think when you go to some of these places that I’m talking about it doesn’t exist. They don’t have competition, they don’t fight over resources, they work together to foster resources that are sufficient to satisfy their needs. It doesn’t get any more basic than that.
I can tell you, they’re not missing out they don’t care about the latest technology. They just don’t really have a need for it. It’s a really fascinating thing that in our world we talk about the dangers of electromagnetic fields and having your computer and being too tied to your computer or your phone.
Well, go without a phone and see how you do. All of a sudden we’ve created this need in our world so it’s a really weird thing.
Ari Whitten: You’ve replaced the EMF’s with psychological pain of not having your phone next to you.
Jason Prall: Absolutely. It literally is … If you want to operate in this world, you kind of need that stuff to get by.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: We’ve created this need for things that are doing us more damage, potentially, unless we take a conscious look at what we’re doing. When you live simply you don’t have a need for these things. They’ve created, whether it be intentionally or unintentionally, they’ve created a life that is a lot less reliant on a lot of the stuff that we feel is absolutely crucial.
A coffee maker is a little less crucial in that environment because they have a natural way of doing things.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I know that we spoke on the phone a lot yesterday and there are so many topics that I want to go into with you and there’s so much wisdom that I think you have to share and I would love to do a part two, part three with you-
Jason Prall: Yeah, absolutely.
Jason’s three takeaways for you
Ari Whitten: On some other topics but you know to wrap up this longevity conversation can you share maybe like the top three takeaways for people to kind of come away with from this discussion of the differences between blue zone ways of life and our ways of life.
1. Follow the centenarians dietary habits
Jason Prall: Yeah, absolutely. I think to kind of keep it actionable I will say when you’re looking at your diet number one go as organic and local as you can. I know that’s a message that’s been repeated but it is so so critical. It literally can be that simple.
Don’t fear fruits for crying out loud. Every one of these places eats fruits. Fruits have an amazing benefit. Fruits are far more than sugar. It’s laughable to think we’ve reduced fruits down to sugar.
I can tell you that I’ve been eating loads of sugars and starches for the past month as we’ve been traveling, I didn’t gain an ounce. It’s not about weight loss, it’s not about feeding gut bacteria, the wrong things, fruits are huge.
Consume organic whole natural foods. That’s how you want to approach your diet. Load up on plants, on sustenance. White rice is not the devil, I can tell you that. Don’t overeat it, but you don’t need to fear it. Sweet potatoes, 70% of the Okinawan diet.
Ari Whitten: And Okinawan sweet potatoes are the bomb.
Jason Prall: They’re amazing, right? I know.
Just eat natural, local, organic foods as often as you can and don’t worry about all these smoothies with all this crap in it. That can have its place but just keep it simple. So clean up the diet with that kinda stuff.
2. Foster good relationships
Number two I would say find a way to foster good relationships and work to eliminate the bad ones in your life. Whether that be getting rid of them or resolving them, find a way to resolve the social, emotional issues that we often carry around in our modern way of living. Just work to foster those type of things.
3. Simplify your life
The third, I will say that do whatever you can to simplify your life in every way possible. Cut out all the unnecessary crap that is brought on to you by culture.
Culture is, as Terrence McKenna famously said, it’s one of my favorite quotes, “Culture is not your friend. Culture does not care about you. Do not cater to culture.”
Find out what resonates with you, what you really want to do, what’s important to you, and spend your time, money and energy fostering and developing that stuff because that’s what’s gonna feed your soul.
There is a saying in Okinawa that is … I forgot what it is but essentially translates to good for the soul.
Simplify, simplify, simplify whatever you can. It is the most profound way to lower the stress load of your environment.
I’m always a little cautious talk about stress because it’s sort of this big, huge, massive complex thing and what even is it? How do you perceive it? What’s involved? A lot of the stress is brought on by unnecessary things that we have in our lives that we don’t want.
We don’t want to do this work, we don’t want to have that relationship or have this talk or do these things. We go to a party that we don’t want to go to and it’s causing a stress.
Just focus on simplifying things, finding out what you really want and spend your time on that.
(Another good way is to meditate. In the podcast, How To Use Meditation To Overcome Fatigue, Emily Fletcher, shares how meditation can reduce stress and allow you to live a happier life. Listen to the podcast HERE!)
The Longevity Project – Jason’s message to the world
Ari Whitten: Beautiful. Where can people go to find a little bit more about your work and “The Human Longevity Project” and anything you want to direct people to, you think it’s important for them to hear about.
Jason Prall: Yeah. This is my focus right now, is working on this film. If this sounds interesting to you I can tell you we just scratched the surface. We talk about literally everything from child bearing and child birthing to how we treat the elderly. It’s literally when we talk about longevity, birthing practices are critical for longevity. We have to explore that whole realm.
Obviously the food, the diet, the exercise, the social aspects. It ranges the whole thing. We’re going to have seven episodes to go over all this stuff. We talk to all kinds of people in the blue zones, all the older people, we talk to local experts to get the science and the understanding.
If you’re worried this is going to be a fluff piece I can tell you that there is plenty of science and geekiness in here to back it up, but hopefully it’s well rounded in that regard.
There is a lot of great info that we’re going to be talking about so if it’s piqued your interest in any way you can go to humanlongevityfilm.com and just sign up for updates.
Ari Whitten: If it hasn’t piqued your interest then what’s wrong with you? Do you not care about living to an old age and being healthy and functional for a really long time?
Jason Prall: I can tell you this too, there’s some hilarious … These people that we’ve interviewed are absolutely hilarious. They have such a good sense of humor.
Ari Whitten: Nice.
Jason Prall: If you don’t like old people, I mean, come on. They’re just the best.
It’s so amazing to see these people and what they’re actually saying. I didn’t do it justice, I can tell you that, just in this interview.
You can go to humanlongevityfilm.com. Right now we don’t have a lot. You can just sign up for updates. This will be out, probably, early next year. We’ll be releasing some things as they come. I would love for …This is going to be free for people, so you can watch this film online for free.
What we really want is to get this message out there. We want people to hear and see what’s really happening and how to really improve their lives.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: It’s not about getting to 150. I know that’s sexy and it’s a really hot topic right now but we need to get you up to 60-
Ari Whitten: Yeah, 60, 70. Healthy and functional.
Jason Prall: Exactly. That’s what we need to fix, I know that’s what you work on. From an energy standpoint, holy shit, these people are like 90 with boat loads of energy.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: It’s cool to see.
I would direct most people there. I’ve got my website, jasonprall.com, that you can go to with the … I’ve really slacked on updating it and doing much there because I’m so focused on this film, but yeah. I really hope that we can just get as many people to hear this and see this as possible.
Ari Whitten: Beautiful. I’m gonna be sharing it with my audience.
Jason Prall: Appreciate it.
Ari Whitten: I’m super excited. I want to help you get this message out because it’s an awesome message and I think people need to hear it.
Jason Prall: I appreciate that.
Ari Whitten: It’s very much aligned with what I teach and this is like just another way to get the message out to as many people as possible, plus you’re doing it in such … It’s such a great way, such a beautiful way by actually going to these places getting the stories getting the actual … Capturing the video of what these places and these people are like.
Jason Prall: It’s cool.
Ari Whitten: That’s amazing.
Jason Prall: I can tell you that you know we’ve got some amazing drone footage from these places that’ll just totally blow your mind.
Ari Whitten: Nice.
Jason Prall: Just seeing how this stuff looks in the real world. It starts to get rid of the theory about longevity. There are so many people talking about longevity and they’ve never been to these places.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
How modern world longevity strategies are over-complicated
Jason Prall: They’re not studying health, they’re not studying the people. When you go there and you see these things happening all the mystery starts to go away.
Ari Whitten: On that note I know we’re wrapping up, there’s one thing you just made me think of which is do you know who Vince Giuliano is?
Jason Prall: I don’t.
Ari Whitten: Anti-aging M.D.
Jason Prall: Okay.
Ari Whitten: Runs a website called antiagingfirewalls.
Jason Prall: Oh, I have-
Ari Whitten: Prolific blogger on longevity and anti-aging.
Jason Prall: I’ve seen his website. He’s got, actually, some really good stuff.
Ari Whitten: He does, yeah. He’s one of my favorite scientists and really, really brilliant guy. I need to have him on the podcast. He gave a talk, it’s actually on YouTube, it’s a wonderful talk on anti-aging. At the beginning of the talk, he intros with … You’ve seen those charts of like biochemical mechanisms? Like this pathway and that pathway.
Jason Prall: He’s standing there.
Ari Whitten: This arrow is pointing there and this one pointing there. He shows all these examples of different graphs like this and, to paint the visual for those of you who haven’t seen this, just imagine sort of a central pathway or concept here, and then another one over here with an arrow pointing that way, and then another one here, and another one here, another one over here, another one over here, and then arrows pointing in every direction and circular arrows and arrows pointing from one to another. Just a web of like thousands of different arrows pointing in every-
Jason Prall: Feedback loops.
Ari Whitten: Direction. He showed all these different graphs and then he showed ones from different textbooks and he’s like, “These don’t even match up with each other.”
Then he makes the point that you know actual aging scientists, the guys who are studying this stuff, they generally know about just this … If this is kind of the central bubble and this is one little area, they generally know like one little bit over here. But even these guys who are doing full-time anti-aging stuff, they don’t know about all these other pieces of research.
Jason Prall: Absolutely.
Ari Whitten: They’re looking at this little sliver of the pie and they’re absolutely experts and they’re brilliant in that little sliver of the pie and they know a hell of a lot more about that sliver than I do and than you do, but they’re not looking at the big picture. What you’re doing is a totally different thing, a totally different paradigm of how we need to approach understanding health and longevity.
Jason Prall: Right. We talked about this. When you start looking inside the body from a biochemical, physiological perspective, you get intrigued and you learn some things and then you have some question and you get those questions answered, then ten more things pop up from that.
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: As your sort of diagram explanation has illustrated, it’s too complex. You literally don’t have … You could spend your entire life studying these things and you will not get the full picture, you can’t.
Ari Whitten: You won’t arrive at the actual strategies that are being used by populations.
Jason Prall: Absolutely. There are too many things going on inside the body that if you try to pinpoint one thing, or ten things, or a hundred things, or a million things it’s not enough. It kind of goes back to the philosophy that I’ve had to adapt to the way physiology is, is to view the body as a perfect black box, as perfect as it can be to do the functions that we want it to do.
You just changed the input to that black box, you trust that the body is doing what it’s supposed to do in its infinite complexity. When I say infinite that’s not … I mean infinite. It’s probably an infinitely complex thing. If you step outside of that real quick the simple aspects to what’s being put into the box: good relationships, good food, aligning with the natural rhythms of life, good thoughts, good energy, love, compassion. All of a sudden you get down to maybe two dozen things that you have to do in the right way.
It’s important to look at this stuff it’s cool you know we’re learning a lot I’m sure it will be of value in some way, but for the individual looking to better their lives to live in a healthier way you can’t focus on that because tweaking a biochemical reaction will never give you the purpose that you need.
If you don’t have purpose and you go try to tweak your biology what good are you really doing? Now you’re living 130 years with no purpose. Now you’re living 150 years in this disarray.
If you’re doing things to the environment you’re not living in harmony with the environment, with the natural laws of things and you’re adding destructive components to the world. Now you’re just doing it for longer? This is not what we want.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
How leaf blowers are reducing your odds of living to 100
Jason Prall: We need to fix our environment, fix our social environment, fix our way of life and live better. That not only will make us happier, individually, it will improve the collective consciousness, it will improve the environment. That is the answer. It is not in the technology or in the biochemistry. That’s just the stuff that’s happening. We got to fix everything around us. I mean, it’s all a problem.
We were talking about the leaf blower over here before. Obviously, with this interview, we can’t have all this stuff … That is a perfect example of not living in alignment with nature. I’m not demonizing this stuff you know we all kind of do this kind of stuff, I mean, we all drive, for crying out loud.
Ari Whitten: I am. I say every time I hear those things that they are the worst invention.
Jason Prall: It’s crazy.
Ari Whitten: And whoever invented that should be shot.
Jason Prall: Right.
Ari Whitten: Because it’s absolutely out of harmony with nature. It’s like I’m going to clean up this thing that’s dirty by polluting the air and, not only creating air pollution but also creating noise pollution at the same time. There’s research on both of those things that they’re extremely harmful to health.
Jason Prall: Absolutely.
Ari Whitten: It’s completely out of alignment with nature.
Jason Prall: You’re removing the natural components to fertilize the earth and then you’re getting to get some other fertilizer, probably, that’s chemical.
Again you can see the snowball effect.
Cars are another good example. When I was living in Santa Monica, a really wealthy area, I saw lots of lawns with the plastic turf like. The new field turf as grass and they think, “Oh this is wonderful that we don’t have to water it.” I’m like, “Yeah, but you know how much oil and plastic and crap that it’s gonna take to make that.”
Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm.
Jason Prall: Whereas you could just leave your lawn brown, it’s fine. I know is not socially acceptable. Again, culture not your friend.
These are all the things that we have to re look at in terms of longevity. It doesn’t seem like the that’s the things that we should be looking at, but it is. Those are the important things because if we can fix all that stuff, we can start living with purpose, living a more relaxed comfortable, social environment. Finding a way to live more simply, not use these resources like they’re infinite.
That’s how we live longer that’s how we improve everything.
I don’t think the answer is in the biochemistry, it’s not in the bio physics, it’s not in the technology that’s coming that’s going to … I know there are lots of people out there in the high tech space and silicon valley looking at longevity, it’s a hot, hot topic right now but gene splicing, gene editing, mitochondrial gene editing, all these things that we’re doing does that sound like it’s in alignment with nature?
No. What happens when we start editing and splicing genes? We start creating the world where now we’re even less grateful for the things that we do. Now we have fewer consequences for doing the wrong thing. In other words, I can screw up all this stuff and then I can, you know, just edit some things.
Ari Whitten: Right.
Jason Prall: That doesn’t sound like a very sustainable model to me.
Ari Whitten: And potential for the leaf blower effect. It just takes one problem create two more.
Jason Prall: Exactly. 100% agree. You just have to sit down and think about some of this stuff for a little bit and you start to realize that those cannot be the answer in and of themselves. I’m not saying we shouldn’t explore those technologies or explore those things, but the first thing we have to do and ask ourselves, is this in alignment with nature and if not is there a possible consequence that we might be suffering as a result.
I have yet to find an example of anything that violates the laws of nature, that is a good thing. For the long term.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: We might go and get away with it for a while, but I’ve yet to find anything and I can’t even imagine an argument that would suggest that violating the laws of nature is a good thing ever no matter what.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. I think that’s the big takeaway from this talk, is really reconsider what nature is all about.
Jason Prall: Yeah.
Ari Whitten: The messages from nature and how you should live in harmony with nature. And consider, after watching this, how you can go about reconnecting with nature and living in accordance with the laws of nature.
Jason Prall: Think about what if everybody did that. Everybody and their family and their own personal life. I think the real key is just to simplify it and not make things too complex. When you do that your entire emotional construct changes, your mental construct changes. You live in a little bit more of a content way and you’re just more grateful for the very simple things.
I think that’s really what this film is sort of doing. We’re trying to show that it doesn’t take all these things to live happy, healthy and a long life. It really is basic and we just have to change our priorities a little bit.
Ari Whitten: Beautiful. I think that’s a good note to end on.
Jason Prall: Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, thanks so much man. An absolute pleasure to have you on and, like I said, I know you have so much more to share and we can get into so many other areas in science and geek out on mitochondria, …
Jason Prall: Yeah.
Ari Whitten: … and chronic infections, and then some of the testing about different biomarkers, a lot of the stuff we talked about on the phone last night. There’s a lot of good stuff that I would love to share with my audience that you’re doing and I think we gotta have you on for part two, part three?
Jason Prall: I would love it. I mean, we geek out so much, it’s comical. Having you 10 minutes away’s been great-
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Jason Prall: Again, I just hope we can get all these messages out there because we’re all working together. We all have the same message. It’s just kinda delivered in a little different way.
Ari Whitten: Absolutely.
Jason Prall: I appreciate everything you’re doing and thanks for having me on.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, thanks so much, brother. The site that they can go to again for the … It’s-
Jason Prall: Humanlongevityfilm.com.
Ari Whitten: Okay, humanlongevityfilm.com.
Jason Prall: Yeah.
Ari Whitten: If you’re signed up for that, that’s a good idea. I’ll also be sending it out to everyone who’s on my email list, so-
Jason Prall: Perfect. That’s-
Ari Whitten: You’re gonna get it, hopefully, in both places.
Jason Prall: That’s great. And I can tell you that if you do sign up for updates, we are not going to hammer you with emails left and right. I’ve been on those email update lists and it’s too much sometimes. We’re very cognizant of that. We really just want to keep people posted as things develop and it’s a very casual thing right now so-
Ari Whitten: Awesome.
Jason Prall: I hope more people can check it out.
Ari Whitten: Awesome, man. Thank you again so much.
Jason Prall: Of course.
Ari Whitten: It’s been a pleasure.
Jason Prall: Thanks, Ari.
How To Live 100 Years Without Growing Old Show Notes
What longevity is and how Jason became interested in the topic (3:28)
How people in the blue zones live differently from how longevity experts advise us to live (6:06)
What some of the secrets of longevity in humans are (9:31)
How centenarians live 100 years with help of nature (15:16)
How centenarians all have lower stress levels (19:13)
How having a purpose in life is one of the centenarian secrets (21:52)
How many people in the modern world are not living in accordance with nature (29:50)
How gratitude helps you live longer (41:03)
Jason’s three takeaways for you (46:07)
The Longevity Project – Jason’s message to the world (49:40)
How modern world longevity strategies are over-complicated (53:23)
How leaf blowers are reducing your odds of living to 100 (58:51)
Links
To learn more about Jason’s project, check out the page for The Human Longevity Project HERE
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