Albert Lea Got Healthy
Could Albert Lea be a new Blue Zone?
By Richard Chin, St. Paul Pioneer Press
Published Wednesday, October 14, 2009
For the past 10 months, the southern Minnesota town has tried to adopt the lifestyle habits of such places as Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; and Icaria, Greece, dubbed ‘Blue Zones’ because residents live extraordinarily long and healthy lives.
Under something called the AARP/Blue Zones Vitality Project, sponsored with a $750,00 grant from United Health Foundation, Albert Lea was chosen for a pilot project to see whether a typical small American town could become a Blue Zone, too.
Since January, city officials and residents — with the guidance of experts like Dan Buettner, the Minnesota author and explorer who wrote a book about Blue Zones — have been forming walking groups, installing bike racks and sidewalks, and working in community gardens.
There have been programs to get children to school in “walking school buses” and to get local grocery stores to put up signs identifying “longevity” foods.
Residents have been wearing blue rubber band bracelets with the words “hara hachi bu,” an Okinawan directive to stop eating when one is only 80 percent full. There have been cooking classes and healthy potlucks. Churches have been encouraged to offer fruit instead of doughnuts after services, and two-thirds of locally owned restaurants have redesigned their menus.
At the Trails restaurant, for example, sales of salads have been up and sales of french fries and onion rings down, said manager Matt Vanvoltenberg.
“We go through quite a bit of fruit now,” he said.
Trails still offers “Paul Bunyan” meals, like the “Hefty Hauler,” a pound of ground beef and two side dishes.
“We’re also a truck stop,” Vanvoltenberg said. “Truckers like big portions.”
But he said sales of half-portion entrees have been increasing.
Local companies and schools also got involved, by adding healthier options in vending machines, limiting unhealthy snacks and conducting cafeteria makeovers.
The project is more than better diets and more exercise.
A common characteristic of Blue Zone residents is a healthy social and spiritual life. So the Albert Lea project includes church-attendance promotions, neighborhood park parties, volunteer projects and “Finding Purpose” workshops.
On Tuesday, organizers announced some results. More than one in five adults in the town of 18,000 people took part in the program in some way, they said.
When the program began, more than 2,300 residents filled out an online questionnaire that estimated their life span.
Those who filled out the form again this fall on average gained 3.1 years of life expectancy and lost 2.6 pounds each.
They also reported 8 percent to 14 percent improvements in measures including rates of depression, eating two or more servings of vegetables a day, having three or more servings of fish or seafood a month and engaging in a social group activity more than once a week.
The 600 people who participated in walking groups logged more than 75 million steps or 37,558 miles.
At a community celebration at Albert Lea High School on Tuesday night, cheerleaders greeted residents with chants of “Let’s get healthy!”
In the school gymnasium, Buettner congratulated the town for changing the entire community’s environment to naturally nudge residents into better habits.
The residents in the audience, many clad in blue shirts, almost all stood up when asked if they were eating more fruits and vegetables, if they had made more friends and if they were feeling healthier since the project began.
City Manager Victoria Simonsen said she personally lost 13 pounds and added 13 years of life expectancy since the project began. She said city employee health insurance claims in the first half of 2009 decreased nearly 50 percent compared with the previous year.
She said the city plans to seek grants to hire a coordinator and establish a permanent “vitality center” to keep the project going beyond the pilot project phase.
To help out in the effort, AARP and UnitedHealth Foundation each pledged $10,000 to the city Tuesday night.