It may be easier than you would think to live an active and healthy lifestyle well into your 90s.

So says Dan Buettner, author of "Blue Zone: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest," a book that looks at the living habits of people living in Blue Zones, so called because they are the geographic areas where the highest percentages of people live long and vital lives.

Buettner, who traveled to the four zones, says longevity isn't achieved through medication or surgery, and it doesn't take a lot of hard work. Instead, it relies on what we do every day in terms of eating, life perspective and the company we keep.

Author of "The Blue Zones" provides tips for living a long, healthy life

When my mother was 92, she decided it was time to talk about things like her stocks and checking accounts.

"I'm starting to get old," she said by way of explanation.

Dan Buettner hadn't yet written "The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest" (National Geographic 2008). But if he had, and if his Web site, www.bluezones.com, with its vitality compass had been up, my mom could have taken the 35-question test to see what her biological age -- the body's age given a person's current habits -- was compared to her chronological age.

My guess, since she was still driving at that age, still cooked her own meals and still got upset when the wrong political party won an election, that her biological age would have been significantly lower than 92.

I took the vitality compass test (it's free and takes about two minutes) and found out that I was seven years younger than my actual age (and here I've been telling people I'm 10 years young than I am) and had a life expectancy of 95.6 -- which is just short of how long my mother, who made it to 96, lived.

Unfortunately, my healthy life expectancy, the years I should live free of major diseases was about 86.

"That's really good," Buettner said when we chatted on the phone shortly after that.

"The average life span is about 78 years for women."

Buettner, who set three records biking across continents, is a modern-day explorer.

"In past centuries, men would go to the North Pole or down the Amazon, where others hadn't been before and their exploration brought back knowledge of new places," Buettner says.

"All that type of exploring has been done. I wanted to bring back knowledge of how people can live longer by studying those that do."

Buettner and a team of experts including two Ph.D.s and demographers compiled information on those who really did live longer than most of us.

"Some groups, like the Georgians, really didn't know how old they were or didn't tell the truth about their age," Buettner says.

The truly long-lived can be found in the Blue Zones. According to Buettner, there are four Blue Zones in the world -- Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Loma Linda, Calif.; and the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica.

Now I'd be up for moving to Sardinia or the Nicoya Peninsula, but since I can't, Buettner tells me I can improve my longevity in other ways.

But first he wanted to clear up some misconceptions. Just because both my mother and father lived well past the normal life span, doesn't give me a huge boost in that department.

"Inheritability of lifestyle is very little," he says noting that studies using Danish twins confirmed this.

"Ten percent of longevity is from genes, though some say 20 percent. It's not about your longevity inheritance; it's about your lifestyle inheritance."

That means if our parents practiced a healthy lifestyle and we learned from them, that increases our chance of living to a healthy old age.

"One of the big lessons of the Blue Zone is to choose the people we hang out with," Buettner says.

"We can choose to hang out with people who love to get out and do things, who are engaged in life and have a spiritual component to life, and not people who smoke and eat fattening food."

In other words, don't hang out with those who think fried chicken and cigarettes are acceptable food groups.

Buettner, though he wants us all to watch our weight and not tip the scales, doesn't like diets and notes the diet and supplement industry rakes in about $45 billion dollars annually.

"I think diets are an enormous disservice to people," he says.

"Diets work for people for almost six months but after that, people will be off of it and gaining weight and by the end of a certain period, only 2 percent will have remained at the weight they achieved from their diet."

So what to do?

"Eat off small plates," Buettner says. "I know you're probably rolling your eye, but studies show that people eat more when they eat off of big plates.

Also, fill your plate and then put the rest of the food away. People who eat a big breakfast consume fewer calories through the day. And take the TV out of the kitchen so you don't mindlessly eat. The best thing to do is to eat together as a family, because conversation takes away from eating time."