The three cities of the Lehigh Valley are embarking on an effort to improve the health and lives of their residents by making healthy choices an easier option.
That plan was unveiled Thursday morning in the packed event hall of the Americus Hotel in downtown Allentown: Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton all will participate in a five-year Blue Zones project thanks to Lehigh Valley Health Network and developer City Center Investment Corp. to improve the well-being of residents through community initiatives.
The project began in 2023 with a feasibility assessment. Over the next five years, the Blue Zones project committee will work with local governments, nonprofits and businesses to try to improve places where residents spend most of their time, such as streets, parks, schools, workplaces, grocery stores and housing, so that living a healthy, active and more fulfilling life is easier.
Dr. Brian Nester, president and CEO of LVHN, said at the event that population efforts such as Blue Zones are key to better overall health outcomes in the community and inside health care settings. Nester said he was something he realized after the Affordable Care Act was passed. He said there is no future for health care under a fee-for-service model and that more needs to be done to address health within communities before people are in the emergency room.
“What we have to do is make the healthy choice the easy choice,” Nester said.
What are Blue Zones?
Blue Zones are cultures across the world that are purported to have the healthiest, longest-living populations. These places, such as Sardinia, Italy and Icaria, Greece, were identified by Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow and founder of the Blue Zones organizations, and are the subject of a recent Emmy award-winning docuseries on Netflix .
The existence of actual Blue Zones, these isolated pockets of healthy people living to 100 and beyond, is disputed with one recent study, suggesting many cases of centenarians and supercentenarians across the globe, including those identified by the organization and docuseries, are due to clerical errors or pension fraud.
However, Blue Zones projects , of which 90 have occurred across the U.S., have resulted in marked improvements in many of the communities they have occurred in. The central idea of Blue Zones projects is that it’s easier to create healthier cultures, ones where people have more activity in their daily lives, eat healthier diets high in plants and low in processed foods and have richer social connections when the place they live makes doing those things easy and part of everyday life.
“You can have the best clinical care in the Valley from your doctor at Lehigh Valley Health Network. But if you’re discharging patients back into an environment that has crappy food as the abundant options and transportation is unsafe, or unattractive, or people are isolated, and not engaged, they don’t have a way to practice their purpose, their way of giving back, leaving their fingerprints on this community, you’re never going to get the outcomes you want,” said Dan Buettner Jr., executive vice president and chief development officer of Blue Zones.
Blue Zones projects have been instituted in cities such as Fort Worth, Texas, and entire geographic areas such as Hawaii and southwest Florida . The projects include actions such as pedestrian infrastructure improvements, economic investment in downtown areas, additions of bike lanes and deals with grocery local grocery stores to prioritize healthy foods. Statistical evidence appears to show decreases in obesity, smoking and stress, and increased consumption of healthy foods and overall well-being during the years Blue Zones projects were active.
What will Blue Zones do in the Lehigh Valley?
Monica Arrowsmith, account executive for Blue Zones Project Lehigh Valley, laid out a blueprint of what the first eight months of the project will look like.
The first three months of the project primarily will be focused on organizing committees, hiring staffing, coming up with marketing campaigns and completing training. After that, more outwardly visible steps will start, a Gallup Well-Being survey will be launched, onsite assessments to determine specific initiatives will occur and marketing will start.
From months six to eight a Blue Zone blueprint will be drafted and hopefully approved and a policy summit will be held followed by a kick-off event.
“We do that collectively, this is not top-down. This is a community saying ‘Yes, let’s move forward,’” Arrowsmith said.
Kristen Wenrich, director of the Bethlehem Health Bureau, said the beautiful thing about the Blue Zone project is that it will build upon work that is already being done in the Lehigh Valley to improve public health.
“Although we’ve made great strides, we recognize that there’s gaps in some of the programs and initiatives that we’re implementing in our community. So Blue Zones coming into our communities with expertise and resources, we’re really looking forward to being able to learn.”
Easton Mayor Salvatore Panto Jr. said his father is 97 years old and still healthy because he was active most of his life.
“My father, he worked till he was 83,” Panto said. “He was a butcher all his life, a meat cutter and he carried around mature carcasses and I think that helped him live a long life. What I think helps us in Blue Zones is it creates a lifestyle that becomes normal and natural and you just do it automatically. We don’t do that now.”
He added that as Easton has become a foodie destination he would like to see some restaurants incorporate Blue Zone-approved food into their menus.
Nester said he hopes Blue Zones Project Lehigh Valley does for LVHN what interferon therapy did for cancer patients
“It was a temporizing therapy that allowed them to get to the next drug, and then another decade to get to the next drug,” Nester said. “We have people that have lived a couple of decade cycles because of interferon. That gave them the opportunity to literally be cured today of their long-standing cancers. Blue Zones — I see it as our interferon. It is the opportunity that will allow us to get to the next level of an American health care system that will allow us to truly deliver the highest possible care at the lowest cost cost to every single American.”
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