For a quarter-century, researchers and the general public have tried to understand why people in so-called “blue zones” live to 100 at much higher rates than anywhere else.
Saul Newman, a researcher at University College London (UCL), believes he has the answer: in fact, this is not the case.
Despite being popularized in news articles, cookbooks and even a recent Netflix documentary series, the Blue Zones are really just a byproduct of faulty data, argues Newman, who has spent years debunking research on extremely elderly populations.
Rather than lifestyle factors such as diet or social connections, he says, the apparent longevity of people in five regions (Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California) can be explained by pension fraud, administrative errors, and a lack of reliable birth and death records.
Dan Buettner, the American author and explorer credited with coining the term Blue Zone, did not respond to a request for comment.
For his research into claims around the Blue Zones, Newman, a senior researcher at the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies, analysed large amounts of demographic data, including United Nations mortality statistics for 236 jurisdictions collected between 1970 and 2021.
The numbers, he found, were simply not credible.
Among the places where the most centenarians were reported were Kenya, Malawi and the autonomous territory of Western Sahara – jurisdictions with an overall life expectancy of just 64, 65 and 71 years, respectively.
Similar patterns were seen in Western countries: in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, one of the most deprived areas in the UK, there were reported to be more people over the age of 105 than anywhere else in the country.
“I tracked down 80 percent of the world’s people over the age of 110 and found out where they were born, where they died and looked at patterns at the population level,” Newman told Al Jazeera.
“It was absolutely shocking because the higher the poverty among older people, the more people are 110 years old.”
Newman believes that administrative errors, whether intentional or unintentional, have accumulated over the decades, seriously undermining the reliability of statistics relating to old age.
Some governments have acknowledged serious flaws in their records of births and deaths.
In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82 percent of its citizens over the age of 100 had already died.
In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72 percent of its centenarians who were applying for pensions – some 9,000 people – were already dead.
The Puerto Rican government said in 2010 that it would replace all existing birth certificates due to concerns about widespread fraud and identity theft.
More prosaic reasons may explain the apparent longevity of residents of jurisdictions like Monaco, according to Newman, where low inheritance taxes are a draw for older Europeans, skewing demographics.
Still, the idea of Blue Zones has been difficult to change, even with reliable data.
The Japanese prefecture of Okinawa has often been praised in the media for its diet and cultural practices.
However, Okinawans have some of the worst health indicators in Japan, according to the Japanese government's annual National Health and Nutrition Survey, which has been conducted since 1946.
While the traditional Okinawan diet is widely considered healthy, a 2020 study found that the island prefecture today has a higher prevalence of obesity and higher mortality rates among people aged 40 to 65 than mainland Japan.
Newman believes that the apparent longevity of Okinawans is the result of many unrecorded deaths.
“It’s almost like we’re so determined to believe there’s a secret to longevity that we’ll listen to anything — a secret to longevity that isn’t going to the gym or quitting drinking,” Newman said.
“We want there to be magic blueberries and we want them so badly that we can live in some kind of realm where cognitive dissonance is possible.”
Newman said his research had not necessarily won him friends in academia, although he had been pleased with the support he had received from colleagues at UCL and Oxford, where he was a member of the Institute for Population Ageing.
He said much of his work has received little attention from academic colleagues and that a study he recently submitted for publication underwent nine peer reviews, rather than the usual two or three.
However, Newman received notable recognition (and a legion of online followers) earlier this month, when he was awarded the first Ig Nobel Prize in Demography for his work.
The Ig Nobel Prize was created in 1991 as a satirical award for “unusual research achievements that make people laugh and then think.”
The prizes are awarded each year by real Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I'm really happy that it's getting more attention, because I think deep down, everyone also knows that this shake isn't going to save them,” Newman said.
“I think it’s the security blanket that you hold on to, and having that turned around in a way that I hope is fun, I think it draws a lot of attention and people enjoy it.”
Despite drawing attention to the problem of pension fraud, Newman said he does not blame people for resorting to such measures.
“To be clear, I like people to do this because the governments in those places are leaving them behind. They are not giving them a sufficient pension. They are not giving them a sufficient retirement net,” he said.
“The fact that they're just saying, 'Well, I'll continue to collect Barry's pension from the next street,' I think is indicative of the difficult pressures that these people are under.”
