top of page

Follow the Blue Zone Principles and You May Live to be Over 100!

Jan Flynn

But if you do, it'll be dumb luck



Wait — am I in a Blue Zone or do I just look that way? Image by Lisa Yount from Pixabay
Wait — am I in a Blue Zone or do I just look that way? Image by Lisa Yount from Pixabay


What do Okinawa, Sardinia, Costa Rica, and Hawaii have in common?


Why, they’re Blue Zones, of course — or at least, parts of them are. So are Icaria in Greece and Loma Linda in California. And as everybody knows by now — because there’s been so much research, press, cookbooks and lifestyle programs built on the concept —Blue Zones are places where people live healthier, happier, longer lives.

A lot longer: Blue Zones appear to have significantly more than their fair share of folks who are still going strong at age 100 or better. Sardinia, the first Blue Zone to be identified by Italian researchers in the 1990s, had 534 people age 100 or older as of 2021 — one Sardinian town, Perdasdefogu, had 13 times the average number of centenarians.

The wisdom goes that this enhanced length and quality of life comes down to a combination of lifestyle factors that we can emulate in our not-so-blue communities: a mostly plant-based diet, lots of physical activity, strong social connections, a sense of purpose, and low stress.

It would be easy to get the impression that if you just follow the Blue Zone principles, and maybe buy enough cookbooks, practice enough meditation, or take enough workshops, you too can sail merrily into your eleventh or twelfth decade.


Not to burst your blue bubble, but . . .


In a recent New York Times opinion piece (“Sorry, No Secret to Life is Going to Make You Live to 110”, January 20, 2025), Dr. Saul Newman, who is a research fellow at the Oxford Institue of Population Ageing, points out that the data on very long-lived people is deeply flawed.

In fact, he thinks the whole Blue Zone thing is bunk.

Dr. Newman isn’t just being a curmudgeon. He investigated statistics and records on 80 percent of people in the world who are (allegedly) age 110 or older. What he found is a whole lot of highly suspect data — and he sees the field of extreme-age research to be full of questionable conclusions drawn from shoddy research.

For instance, even in the U.S. birth certificates weren’t used at all until the early 20th Century. The standardized version wasn’t universally adopted until the 1930s — well after my parents were born.

In his opinion piece, Dr. Newman includes a striking graph depicting the dramatic decline of people in the U.S. claiming to be 110 or older in the years after birth certificates became standard.

And there are plenty of places in areas of the world where birth certificates were either never recorded or were destroyed by war or natural disasters. As Dr. Newman notes:

The oldest man ever recorded, Jiroemon Kimura from Japan, has three birthdays: One is fudged, one is a typo, and one is supposedly true. He was validated as the oldest man in 2012 by Guinness World Records.

Then there’s the outright deceit


One of the big drivers of dodgy age claims that Dr. Newman turned up is, disappointingly but perhaps not surprisingly, gaming the system. For instance, a pension fraud audit in Greece turned up thousands of fake centenarians.

Turns out there’s money to be made in claiming a superannuated relative or even knowledge of very, very old people. Dr. Newman writes:

Tokyo’s oldest man was really entombed in his apartment for 30 years while his family took his pension. Japanese people incinerated by American World War II bombings have “survived” for decades in a filing cabinet as administrative zombies, their cultural practices appropriated by Westerners to sell books on their supposed survival secrets like ikigai, the Japanese concept of finding purpose in life, and the purported health benefits of purple sweet potatoes.

Meanwhile, according to Dr. Newman’s findings, folks in Okinawa aren’t especially healthy, wealthy, or socially connected, even compared to the rest of Japan. They tend to be atheists, have very high rates of divorce, have double the national poverty rate, eat lots of meat, and collectively have the highest male body mass index in the country. And there’s nothing exceptional about their mortality rate.

As for Loma Linda, it not only has an average life expectancy, but a hefty percentage — 23% to 75% — of American neighborhoods have longer ones.


But what about Blue Zone lifestyles?


While Dr. Newman throws shade on the whole Blue Zone orthodoxy and some of its most well-known researchers, he doesn’t suggest that there’s anything amiss with the habits and approaches to life it promotes.

After all, what’s to object to? There are plenty of reasons to eat fresh, healthy food (mostly plants, as Michael Pollan would say), get regular exercise, nurture connections with other people, manage stress, and have a sense of purpose in life.

Those are all things that will make you feel better and happier, and help ensure that your time here on Earth is worthwhile and well spent. But even if you do all of them all the time, that doesn’t guarantee or even make it likely that you’ll live to see triple-digit candles on your birthday cake.

Humankind has been trying to unlock the secret to longevity, even immortality, for millennia. Thanks to public health measures, we live longer on average than 100 years ago. Still, statistically speaking most of us pop off before we hit our 90s.

That, in my never-humble opinion, shouldn’t matter. The truth is that we don’t have control over how long we live. But we do have some say in how well we live.

We’d be better off focusing on that.

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” — Susan Ertz, 1887–1985, writer

0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


© 2024 by Jan M Flynn. Powered and secured by Wix
bottom of page