The secret of ‘Blue Zones’ where people reach 100? Fake data, says academic

For a quarter-century, researchers and the general public have sought to understand why people in so-called “Blue Zones” live to 100 at far greater rates than anywhere else.

Saul Newman, a researcher at the University College London (UCL), believes he has the answer: actually, they don’t.

Despite being popularised in news articles, cookbooks and even a recent Netflix documentary series, the Blue Zones are really just a by-product of bad data, argues Newman, who has spent years debunking research about 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, clerical 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 the claims around Blue Zones, Newman, a senior fellow at UCL’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies, analysed reams of demographic data, including United Nations mortality statistics for 236 jurisdictions gathered between 1970 and 2021.

The figures, he found, were simply not believable.

Some of the places reported to have the most centenarians included Kenya, Malawi, and the self-governing territory of Western Sahara, jurisdictions with overall life expectancies of just 64, 65, and 71, respectively.

Similar patterns cropped up in Western countries, with the London borough of Tower Hamlets, one of the most deprived areas in the UK, reported to have more people aged over 105 than anywhere else in the country.

“I tracked down 80 percent of the people in the world who are aged over 110 and found where they had been born, where they died, and analysed the population level patterns,” Newman told Al Jazeera.

“It was absolutely striking because the more old age poverty means you get more 110-year-olds.”

A couple relax on a beach in Miyakojima, Okinawa, Japan [Carl Court/Getty Images]

Newman believes that clerical errors – whether intentional or inadvertent – have been compounded over the decades, severely undermining the reliability of statistics related to old age.

Some governments have acknowledged serious flaws in their record-keeping related to births and deaths.

In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82 percent of its citizens reported to be over 100 had already died.

In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72 percent of its centenarians claiming pensions – some 9,000 people – were already dead.

Puerto Rico’s government said in 2010 that it would replace all existing birth certificates due to concerns about widespread fraud and identity theft.

More prosaic reasons can explain the apparent longevity of residents of jurisdictions such as Monaco, according to Newman, where low inheritance taxes are a draw for older Europeans, skewing the demographic data.

Still, the idea of Blue Zones has been hard to shift, even in the face of reliable data.

Japan’s Okinawa prefecture has often been lauded in the media for its diet and cultural practices.

Okinawans, however, have some of the worst health indicators in Japan, according to the Japanese government’s annual National Health and Nutrition Survey, which has been carried out since 1946.

While the traditional Okinawan diet is widely seen as healthy, a 2020 study found that the island prefecture today has a higher prevalence of obesity and higher rates of mortality among those aged 40–65 than mainland Japan.

Newman believes that the apparent longevity of Okinawans is the result of many deaths going unregistered.

“It’s almost like we are so determined that there is a secret to longevity that we’ll listen to anything – a secret to longevity that isn’t going to the gym, that isn’t giving up drinking,” Newman said.

“We want there to be some magic blueberries, and we want it so much that we can live in this sort of realm where cognitive dissonance is possible.”

People swimming off the island of Ikaria, Greece, on August 21, 2020 [Dimitris Tosidis/EPA-EFE]

Newman said that his research has not necessarily won him friends in academia, though he has been gratified with the support he has received from colleagues at UCL and Oxford, where he is a fellow at the Institute for Population Ageing.

He said that much of his work has received little notice from fellow academics and that a study he recently submitted for publication was subjected to nine peer reviews, instead of the usual two or three.
Newman did receive some notable recognition – and a legion of fans online – earlier this month, though, when he was awarded the first-ever 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, then think”.

The prizes are handed out each year by genuine Nobel Laureates in a ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I’m very happy that it’s getting more attention, because I think, I think deep down, everyone also knows this smoothie is not going to save them,” Newman said.

“I think it’s the safety blanket that you cling onto, and so to have that overturned in a way that’s hopefully funny, I think that gets a lot of attention and people enjoy it.”

Despite drawing attention to the problem of pension fraud, Newman said he doesn’t fault people resorting to such measures.

“To be clear, I like that people are doing this because they’re being left behind by their governments in these places. They are not being given a sufficient pension. They’re not being given a sufficient retirement net,” he said.

“The fact that they are just saying, ‘Well, I’ll just keep collecting Barry’s pension from down the road.’ I think this is an indicator of the difficult pressures these people are under.”