“Blue Zones”: Are People Living Longer or Just Committing More Fraud?

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It’s finally time for the greatest event on the annual scientific calendar: the Ig Nobels. You may be aware of the Nobel Prize, which is prestigious, yes, but pointedly boring. The IG Nobels, though, are both prestigious AND a lot of fun.

The Ig Nobels are the brainchild of Marc Abrahams, who also edits the Annals of Improbable Research. Starting in the 1990s, Marc awarded Ig Nobels to research that makes people laugh, and then makes them think. My first Ig Nobel ceremony was in 2007, where one prize went to a researcher who discovered that Viagra can cure jetlag in hamsters. I’m just going to leave that sentence there and if you want to know more, head over to patreon.com/rebecca or find the link in the description box to the transcript where I list all my sources!

After that ceremony, I met up with other local critical thinkers and readers of my blog Skepchick, and we launched Boston Skeptics in the Pub, and Marc was our first speaker. So yeah, I have a soft spot in my heart for the Ig Nobels and I look forward to them every year.

They stopped live events when COVID started up, but this year they’re back and the honorees are as great as ever. Remember back in 2021 when I made a video about how some mammals can breathe through their buttholes and research suggests that might be a way to give humans oxygen? Well, the team that conducted that study just won the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize for Physiology!

The Botany Prize this year went to a study I mentioned in a past Patreon-only newsletter, in which two guys tested the mimicking ability of the plant boquila trifoliolata by showing that it can even mimic an artificial plant (though as I mentioned in that newsletter, it’s not the BEST study so more research will need to be done).

But there were a few studies in this year’s ceremony that I wasn’t familiar with, so I’m very glad that my friend Drew Curtis of Fark.com tipped me off to the winner of the Demography Prize, which involved a study on so-called “Blue Zones.”

First let me tell you what the heck that means: “blue zone” is a term first coined in a paper published in 2004, in which researchers circled areas of Sardinia where there was an above average number of people living longer than the average lifespan around them.

That study found that extremely old people tended to be located in a particularly rural, mountainous area of Sardinia, and the lead researcher, Michel Poulain, started concurrently working with the American writer Dan Buettner to identify more of these clumps of centenarians in other parts of the world. Over time, they identified blue zones in Okinawa, Japan; the Nicoyo Peninsula of Costa Rica; and Icaria, Greece.

Interesting, right? If people in these areas are more likely to live to triple digits despite the median lifespan nearby being in the 70s at best, it would behoove scientists to study what they’re doing right so that we might all maximize our lifespan, much like Bryan Johnson is trying to do. That’s the guy who says he’s never going to die but he absolutely 100% is. Click here to learn more about that grifter.

It DOES seem like the research into aging and dying and how to stop it is an easy target for grifters, because none of us really want to age or die despite those being the only two options available to us. But it’s important to remember that there are good scientists doing good, interesting research on this topic. I really need you to remember that right now, because thus far I’m not sure that I’ve actually mentioned any good scientists doing good research on this topic.

That said, allow me to continue: Buettner has really run with the blue zone idea, arguing that the people in these areas share certain traits that we can use to inform our own lives. They don’t share genetic markers, and they tend to be in more rural isolated areas, so it’s not just a case of “genetic lottery” or having a lot of money on hand. Instead, he says he’s come up with the “Power 9,” which are nine “evidence-based common denominators among the world’s centenarians that are believed to slow this aging process:”

First, move around naturally but don’t actually work out.

Next, have a sense of purpose in life.

Third, relieve stress.

Fourth, stop eating before you’re full.

Fifth, eat mostly plants.

Sixth, drink booze moderately.

Seventh, belong to a religion. Any religion.

Eighth, have a family and keep them close.

And ninth, be part of a social circle that also has healthy habits.

And that’s it! That’s what all these people who lived into their 100s had in common. According to Dan Buettner.

Now, if you didn’t see a single red flag in any of those items, allow me to lend you a few more.

Dan Buettner is not a scientist. He’s a salesman, according to this profile from his alma mater University of St. Thomas, where he graduated with Spanish and international business majors. That’s probably why he thought to form a marketing company and trademark the phrase “blue zones” just before Poulain’s study was published. Then he added a new blue zone: Loma Linda, California, where he said people were particularly long-lived because there are a lot of Seventh Day Adventists there. (If you didn’t know, not only do the Adventists go to church on Saturday instead of Sunday but they also tend to be vegetarians who don’t drink or smoke.)

Oh and Loma Linda is also where Buettner founded his company. Then he started doing interviews, made a TED talk, and importantly he started working to form financially tasty partnerships with various universities, governments, and healthcare companies. 

In 2020, Buettner hammered out a deal for Blue Zones (™) to be acquired by one of those companies: Adventist Health. The collection of hospitals owned by the Seventh Day Adventists.

So, Buettner definitely made bank off Blue Zones, both financially and professionally, and the Adventists now have an entire “scientific” organization that “proves” being an Adventist is so beneficial that you will literally live longer if you join, but do these conflicts of interest mean that the entire idea of blue zones is bunk? No, of course not! But this new Ig Nobel-prize winning study might.

Yeah, did you forget where we started? That happens to me a lot, sorry. You know I love a rabbit hole.

Earlier I told you about nine traits centenarians in the blue zones had in common, according to Buettner. But one demographer, Dr Saul Newman at Oxford University, is arguing that he failed to identify some other interesting commonalities. In a paper that is still in preprint and thus hasn’t been peer-reviewed, Newman found that in the US, centenarians all seemed to share the trait of “not having a birth certificate.”

Further, “In Italy, England, and France, which have more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by 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. In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age.

“Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero

percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short 30 lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.”

Weird! Why would people be more likely to live past 100 in areas with a lower than average number of 90-year olds? Why would people be more likely to live past 100 in places with great poverty, when every other study shows that wealth is a top predictor of wellness? Why would Loma Linda, America’s one great Blue Zone where people are promised the gift of living 10 years longer than average, actually have an “unremarkable average lifespan” according to the CDC?

You’re not a dumb dumb so you already know where this is going: it’s fraud. The answer is fraud. And unintentional errors! But also fraud.

Now, it’s so important that I need to say it again: this is a preprint. It has not yet been formally peer reviewed so no matter how convincing you find Newman’s data, it’s not smart or good science to assume this is bulletproof. 

But it’s not Newman’s first foray into this area: in 2017 and 2018 he published papers exposing statistical mistakes in other longevity research that effectively deleted their findings. And interestingly, Newman isn’t just being a buzzkill for people who want to live longer, as the 2017 paper rebuts a previous study claiming to find a 125-year limit for humans, finding instead that “the limit to human lifespan is historically flexible and increasing.”

I wanted to check that because I was curious if he has a bias. If he does, it’s a bias against what he sees as shady longevity research, not against the idea that humans can live well into the triple digits.

In a recent interview with Phys.org, Newman brings up some relevant information:

“In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.

“According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.

“Regions where people most often reach 100–110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.”

While I can’t say that this preprint fundamentally disproves the idea of blue zones, but I do think it supports Newman’s idea that the data in this field is just “rotten from the inside out.” He points out in his paper that most of this research is “confirmed” based on documents, but if you imagine 100 centenarians in a room holding their birth documents and you have one hand their documents to their sibling and leave, you’d have no idea which of the 100 is the fake centenarian because their documents would still show internal consistency and even an interview with an oral history of their life would still match up.

Newman ultimately calls for more research to develop biological testing that can accurately pinpoint a person’s age, like through an examination of epigenetic data. But until then, he wonders why the field of demography accepts such a high rate of ridiculous errors. “…when most Greek centenarians were found to not exist in the aftermath of the global financial crisis,” he writes, “their non-existence was published in newspapers[51], but was not mentioned or cited in the demographic literature….If equivalent rates of fake data were discovered in any other field – for example, if 82% of people in the UK Biobank or 17% of galaxies detected by the Hubble telescope were revealed to be imaginary – a major scandal would ensue. In demography, however, such revelations seem to barely merit citation.

“It seems worth asking, therefore, why the recurrent discovery of high rates of non-random age

errors have been ignored by the scientific community, given the fundamental importance of

accurate age data to fields like medicine, gerontology, the social sciences, and epidemiology.”

That’s such a great point. What do the people publishing in this field have to gain by ignoring these enormous inconsistencies in the data? Ah well, I guess that’s just something for a future study to explore. In the meantime, I’m going to knock off work now and relax by watching something on Netflix. Something science-y, that should be fun!

Okay, I’ll actually conclude by being fair to BlueZones.com (™) as they have responded to Newman, just beneath the link to find Blue Zones Kitchen Meals in a supermarket near you I’m sorry I swear I’m trying to be fair.

They correctly highlight that his paper is a preprint that has not been accepted by any journals thus far, despite the fact that mainstream media sometimes reports it as being a published (and thus peer-reviewed) study. They argue that their methods of age verification are accurate, and they point out that “Blue Zones” are just places where people live longer than average, and NOT necessarily places with a higher than average number of centenarians.

They also have some researchers weigh in on specific points, and they take issue with some of his choices of statistical analysis, and for failing to consider other options–for instance, he points out that the population of Okinawa are very unhealthy but maybe that’s just the youngest generation who have been more “Westernized,” while the older generation continues to avoid alcohol and moderate their eating and do other healthy habits.

As always, links to everything are in the transcript found at patreon.com/rebecca so feel free to read it all and decide for yourself. I do think that there are certain habits with a lot of scientific evidence to show they will improve and extend our lifespans, like eating in moderation, and moving your body, and fostering a healthy and loving social circle. But I’m very skeptical of some of the other “Blue Zone (™)” claims: as I’ve discussed in the past, there’s very little evidence to suggest that even “moderate” alcohol use is beneficial, and a lot of evidence to suggest that alcohol in any amount is bad for you. And I will need a lot more evidence to believe that being part of a religion is universally beneficial, especially when you control for a healthy social circle and/or a supportive family.

So I’m glad that Newman is pushing back on all this, but I’d love to see some peer reviewed research that will better tease apart an incredibly complicated idea that seems to have gone to market long before the data is in.