I don’t want to live forever, or even exceptionally long. Nevertheless, I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of “blue zones,” or parts of the world where more residents than average live to become centenarians and supercentenarians (living past 110). I’m far from alone. The media (including Matador Network, often) has extensively covered the concept, and a small ecosystem has sprung up around learning from the lifestyles of people in these regions. Yet ongoing research shows that the whole blue zone concept is possibly one big lie, or at the very least a case of extrapolating from bad data.
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People Travel to Blue Zones For Insight Into Longer, Healthier Lives. But Blue Zones May Be a Lie.
The concept was popularized by Dan Buettner’s 2009 book “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.” In 2023, the blue zone idea got a new extension on its life in the spotlight with the Netflix documentary series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones.
Recently, listening to an episode of the Freakonomics podcast, I heard for the first time about a competing theory. In an interview with Tom Whitwell, who writes a popular list of 52 things he learned each year, Freakonomics host Stephen Dubner calls out that Whitwell including the following in his 2023 iteration: “The number of supercentenarians in an area tends to fall dramatically about 100 years after accurate birth records are introduced.”
“If you were somebody who read Sunday supplements of newspapers or if you watched National Geographic, they spent a lot of time talking about blue zones, which were areas where people lived remarkably long, like 110 years old,” Whitwell explains on the podcast. “They’d talk about eating beans, drinking red wine, not too much food, little amounts of meat, natural exercise — not going to the gym, but gardening, having friends, having a sense of purpose.”
Whitwell went down a rabbit hole on blue zones and found an Oxford academic named Saul Newman. Newman appears to be on a quest to put an end to the blue zone conversation — and his deeper, academic look past the longevity headlines and flashy promises leads to a more sobering understanding.
The research is compiled in part in the paper “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud.”
The title alone is a lot to unpack. Digging a little deeper into the numbers and data shows how people capitalize on missing documentation for attention and money. In the United States, for example, the paper notes that supercentenarian status sees a 69 to 82 percent decrease when state-by-state birth certificates were instituted.
Higher old-age poverty rates in England and France were associated with claims of longer lives. In fact, the key indicators of a population seeing exceptionally long lives in Italy, England, and France were things that you would think would lead to earlier deaths: “poverty, low per capita incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, fewer 90+ year olds, and residence in remote, overseas, and colonial territories.” Three blue zone regions in particular (Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Ikaria, Greece) have low incomes, low literacy, high crime rates, and shorter life expectancy than their respective national averages.
Accurate records seem to be the biggest issue. Of all of the supercentenarians, only 18 percent have a birth certificate, the paper notes, and zero of those in the US have one. What’s more, the birthdates of supercentenarians are more common on days divisible by five. Either there’s a whole lot more riding on what date a person is born than people think, or people who guesstimate their age have a lack of imagination and a preference for dates that end in five or zero. Or, you know, outright fraud taking advantage of chaotic record-keeping situations for attention and monetary payments.
“The way I imagine this is, you’re living in a small rural town in remote Greece or Italy,” Whitwell says on the podcast. “Somebody comes to you with an idea, they say, ‘I’ve got a mate who works in the council, and if we pay him a bit of money, he can change your age so that you as a 50 year-old are now 60 so you get your pension.’”
The numbers of fudged ages for financial gain point in the fraud direction. In Greece, for example, 200,000 people lost pension payments after the 2012 financial crisis. Turns out many of those claims were for people already dead. In Japan in 2010, some 230,000 Japanese centenarians were missing, invented, misreported, dead, or otherwise unaccounted for.
Okinawa, Japan’s blue zone, was significantly damaged during World War II. Whitwell mentions about 90 percent of paper records were destroyed, and new documents were given by the US military after the war — meaning they were coming form people who use a different calendar and don’t speak the same language. Then there’s the lifestyle question. Okinawa has the highest obesity rate in Japan, Whitwell notes, and it has one of the lowest gardening rates (daily natural movements for things like gardening is one of the things said to increase the lifespan in blue zones). Okinawa also has Japan’s fourth-highest rate of suicide for people over 65 (happiness and community being another blue zone indicator) and eat an average of 40 kilograms of meat annually (five kilos per year is the target in blue zones).
The idea that there are certain places in the world with lifestyles that lead to longer lives is extremely enticing. Traveling to these locations and learning from these lifestyles, the thinking goes, could lead to longer lives elsewhere. The reality is a lot messier. In fact, the real key to longevity is much more depressing.
“So, rich people live longer,” Whitwell tells Dubner. “Rich countries, the average life expectancy is 80-plus. Poor countries, it’s 60-plus. It’s not mysterious, or subtle.”
Money might not directly buy happiness, but it does seem to buy a longer life. 