In 2021, Hannah left the US for Costa Rica on the heels of a bad collapse that left her of fear, giving her panic attacks and drank excess. Hinders had even been lost in the aftermath of her heartache. “I was not healthy or physically healthy,” she tells Yahoo.
Fast Vooruit almost four years, and still hinders daily and surfs daily in Santa Teresa. Her mental and physical health is the “best they've ever been,” she says. “I can't even describe the change I have had in my life.”
Moving to Costa Rica is not the answer for everyone. But doctors with whom I spoke agreed that there really is Something special on the country. When I the Johns Hopkins University Oncology Professor, Dr. Otis BraWley, at the beginning of 2025 interviewed about the rise in the number of colorectal cancer in young adults, he told me that “prevention is the reason I was obsessed with Costa Rica.”
His statement initially seemed to come from the left field. But then BraWley rattled a number of surprising statistics: the life expectancy in the small island country is two to three years longer than that of the US, where the gross domestic product is 300 times larger. Costa Rica spends a tenth which the US does on health care (which is universal there), but the death rate of cancer is 40% lower.
“And it's all based on healthy living,” said BraWley in our previous interview.
He is not the only health expert who studies the secrets for the success of Costa Rica. Could it be a blueprint for a healthier us? This is what we have learned.
Costa Rica's Better Health, according to the figures
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the average life expectancy in Costa Rica was 78.6 years in 2021. That same year, Americans could expect an average of 76.4 years to live. That may not sound like a big difference, but in demographic terms of health, experts say. The death rates of cancer are also lower in Costa Rica – with 75.3 out of 100,000 people who die from the disease there every year, according to the WHO. This year in the US that figure is almost double: 145.4 per 100,000 per year, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Costa Rica's list of deaths of death looked like that of the US in 2021 (the last year for which the WHO data has), with the exception of COVID-19, the number one murderer of Costa Ricans and the third deadliest threat to Americans that year. But the difference is in the rates: for each of the top 10 of the most important causes of death, the US had considerably more dead than Costa Rica.
“Costa Rica is not the only country that has done this, so it is proof that that [reducing mortality rates] Is feasible, “says BraWley.” But the reason I use Costa Rica as an example is that it is a very nice place and the numbers are just that perfect. '
Both BraWley and Edward Ruiz-Narvaez, a associate professor at the University of Michigan, who grew up in Costa Rica, attribute these perfect figures to four important factors:
Little Costa Ricans -smoke
The use of tobacco is an important cause of cancer and deaths due to the disease, but Costa Rica may have remained the damage of smoking to a certain extent. The smoking percentages have fallen quickly in both countries since the heyday of tobacco in the sixties. But the use of cigarettes in Costa Rica has never achieved the same heights as in the US.
BraWley suspects that this is partly because “Costa Rica was too small a market to be concerned with” for large tobacco companies in the 1950s and 1960s. Companies like Philip Morris looked at the small population of Costa Rica and thought it would not be profitable to advertise his cigarettes there. Instead, tobacco companies concentrated their efforts on larger, richer countries such as the US and the UK – until those countries realized the incredible damage related to smoking and adopted regulations to prevent aggressive marketing. Tobacco companies then revolved around advertising in smaller countries with a lower income, and even used Costa Rica as a test area for marketing strategies for Latin America, in the nineties. But De Kleine Natie was very successful in adopting his own regulations against tobacco in the 2000s, and the rates have since fallen by around 10 percentage points. Although the smoking percentages in the US as a whole fall, they are still very high in some states: 21% of West -Virginians were cigarette smokers from 2022. And it remains the main cause of death, illness and disability due to disorders, heart disorders, lung disorders and diabetes.
1. Fruit, vegetables and the 'traditional' diet
BraWley suspects that Costa Rica has not seen the same upward trend in colorectal cancer rates as the US because the traditional diet there is healthier than the typical eating habits of the Americans. “The vegetables and vegetables and a good diet [Costa Ricans] Eat is a factor ”in their lower percentages of cancers, including colorectal cancer, he says. That is partly because these entire foods are less associated with obesity and in turn cancer. In our American diet is one of the things that contributes to the Obesitas epidemic the increasing number of foods, says.”
Before moving to Costa Rica, there had been a busy, high -pressure work at the Pentagon, so she didn't cook much at home. “In principle, I was eating out in normal American restaurants; edited foods,” she says. “It was not a clean, whole food diet,” she says. When she arrived in Costa Rica, her surfing friends asked: “Why do you eat or put it in your food,” he remembers. Her diet did not change from one day to the next, but her way of thinking started to do. She realized: “To improve my surfing, I had to improve my diet.” Hindringen and her surfing friends now eat fish that they catch locally and tropical fruit that they choose every day, she says.
However, eating like a Costa Rican has advantages that are much further than surfing. “We have discovered that diet plays an important role in lifespan,” Ruiz-Narvaez tells Yahoo. Ruiz-Narvaez and his team collect data about the habits and lifestyle of nearly 3,000 Costa Ricans of 60 years and older now for 20 years. In 2024 they published a paper that shows that people who most often ate a 'traditional' diet built on the staples of high-protein, high fiber beans and white rice-a 18% lower dying rate compared to those who eat rice and beans rarely. The nutritional density of beans makes them unique inexpensive, says Ruiz-Narvaez. But they are not just beans and rice, he notes. The traditional Costa Rican diet is also rich in the fruit and vegetables that grow abundantly there.
But the highly processed foods that are omnipresent in the American diet – delicacy meat, chips, fast food, to name a few examples – are increasingly common in Costa Rica. And that also applies to colorectal cancer: the rates rose by 35% between 2000 and 2020.
2. Fewer cars, more walking
When Hinders visited Costa Rica for the first time, she was charmed by the One Gravel Main Street of Santa Teresa, covered with store pels. “Everyone is walking and cycling,” she recalls her first visit. “It was just so different from where I grew up in North Virginia, where it is very suburbs.” Almost four years after he moved there, there is still no car (although she has had motorcycles on different points). She walks to the supermarket, sometimes three times a day. It is far removed from the weekly car ride to Costco to store groceries that she regards as the typical American ritual.
Historically, Costa Ricans have walked many of the places where they need to process jobs that require physical activity. It is not the case that the country has been healthier because there are more gyms compounds than in the US; The exercise that Costa Ricans get is incidental, woven into the fabric of their daily lives. When Ruiz-Narvaez started to study the lifespan under Costa Ricans in 2005: “People were active, worked on farms and had more family support,” he says. “People aged 60 and older have a very different behavior and lifestyles compared to the current Costa Rican,” he adds. For many people, Desk jobs with a higher wage and less daily physical tension. But there is a disadvantage. “Countries with an average income and high income often have higher death rates from cancer than countries with a lower income,” says BraWley. “That is because with increasing income the approval of bad habits comes: less exercise, more use of cars” and an increasing dependence on handy, processed foods.
Although Costa Ricans, especially older people, still see the protective effects of life in a country that was not hidden with cars, that changes. Ruiz-Narvaez says that urbanization has come with a growing number of cars and desk courts. “There is less chance of walking to a job or to school” than when he grew up in Costa Rica, he says.
3. Common meals and church meetings
Another lifetime factor that studied Ruiz-Narvaez were social connections.
In the US, the former surgeon -general loneliness declared an epidemic associated with a greater risk of death and illness. Ruiz-Narvaez discovered that Costa Ricans with many social connections through friends, church and civil groups have an almost 30% lower death rate than comparable people with lower levels of social ties. “In Costa Rica it is customary to observe houses with three generations [living in them] -Parents, grandparents and children and that is part of the social connection, you have family members in the area, ”says Ruiz-Narvaez. In addition to high percentages of church visits, these family groups tend to eat meals together.” People look at food, “as a factor in the lifetime of Costa Ricanen,” but I see food as a social ritual, “says Ruiz-Narvaez.
Although urbanization can cut in these rituals for many in the growing cities of Costa Rica, hinders says that they are an important part of her in her adopted country every day. She and her friends come together to barbecue their catches of the day almost daily. Since he moved to Costa Rica, hindrings says that “she is” a completely different person, because of where I live and the lifestyle, but also because of the people and the community. ” It is not only her surf friends who offer a sense of community. “I had never lived anywhere where I got to know everyone in the supermarket or the coffee shop; you are friends with everyone and you can't drive on the road without waving to 10 people,” she says.
Lessons to learn from Costa Rica
It is worth noting that Ruiz-Narvaez also credit the good health of Costa Rica to his universal health care model, a public option that everyone can benefit from, as well as higher private insurers. But much of the good health of the country can be credited to a culture and lifestyle, including whole foods such as fruit, vegetables and beans, physical movement that is ingrained in daily activities and a feeling of community.
