Albert Lea, Minnesota: The Town That Chose to Live Longer

Albert Lea, Minnesota sits at the junction of Interstates Ninety and Thirty-Five, which makes it the kind of town drivers pass through rather than stop in. In two thousand nine, a researcher named Dan Buettner convinced the city to try something different. He wanted to make it a laboratory for longevity.

Buettner had spent years studying communities around the world where people lived measurably longer lives: villages in Sardinia, an island in Greece, a community of Seventh-day Adventists in California. He called these places blue zones, and he had distilled their shared habits into a set of principles. In two thousand nine, Albert Lea agreed to put those principles into practice for an entire city.

The experiment ran for most of a year. The city widened sidewalks and added walking paths to make walking a default rather than a choice. Restaurants modified menus. Employers adjusted workplace policies. Community organizations restructured around social connection rather than passive participation. The goal was to change the environment so that healthy behavior became the easier behavior.

When the year ended, participants had added an average of about three years to their projected life expectancy. Participants lost an average of nearly three pounds each.

Albert Lea had been a typical midwestern city before the experiment, which was part of the point. Buettner had specifically wanted a statistically average American community, not an already-healthy outlier. In two thousand sixteen, it became the first Blue Zones certified community in the United States.

The city was named for Lieutenant Albert Miller Lea, an army topographer who surveyed the region in eighteen thirty-five. He mapped the lake that now bears his name before the first settler arrived. What the town became nearly two hundred years later, the researcher would have found equally strange and instructive.