In a world where life expectancy has dramatically increased but where, according to Euromonitor, there is a growing concern about the possibility of living a long and healthy life, “blue zones” have captivated longevity researchers.
The term was coined to refer to regions of the world where people are said to live longer and healthier lives than elsewhere. Italy’s Sardinia island was the first to be referred as such in 2004.
Fraud, error and wishful thinking
However, Saul Justin Newman, a researcher at University College London’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies, told AFP that most data regarding the “blue zones” and extreme old age “is junk to a really shocking degree”.
Newman’s research, which is currently being peer-reviewed, looked at data about centenarians and supercentenarians — people who live to 100 and 110 — in the United States, Italy, England, France and Japan. Contrary to what one might expect, he found that supercentenarians tended to come from areas with poor health, high levels of poverty — and bad record-keeping. [1]
The best path to extreme longevity seems to be to “move where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying”, Newman said in September as he accepted an Ig Nobel prize, a humorous version of the Nobel that recognizes scientific discoveries that “make people laugh, then think”.
Just one of many examples is Sogen Kato, who was thought to be Japan’s oldest living person until his mummified remains were discovered in 2010. It turned out he had been dead since 1978. His family was arrested for collecting three decades of pensions payments.
The Japanese government then launched a review which found that 82 percent of Japan’s centenarians — 230,000 people — were missing or dead. “The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death,” Newman said.
In Costa Rica, a 2008 research showed that 42 percent of centenarians had “lied about their age” in an earlier census, Newman said. For Greece, he found 2012 data suggesting that 72 percent of the country’s centenarians were dead or imaginary. “They’re only alive on pension day,” Newman said.
Even when they are honest, people are much more likely to be wrong about their age than we think, the researcher says. And confirming a person’s age involves triple-checking very old documents that could have been wrong from the start.
Food supplements and cooking recipes
The desire to live longer and as healthy as possible has driven a booming lifestyle industry selling food supplements, books, tech and tips to those wanting to learn the secrets of the world’s oldest people.
For the researcher from University College London, the industry that has popped up around blue zones might largely explain the myth that has formed around these areas.
Blue zones are regions around the world where people are said to live disproportionately longer and healthier lives. The term was first used in 2004 by researchers referring to the Italian island of Sardinia. The following year, National Geographic reporter Dan Buettner wrote a story that added the Japanese islands of Okinawa and the Californian city of Loma Linda. Buettner admitted to the New York Times in October that he only included Loma Linda because his editor told him: “you need to find America’s blue zone”.
The reporter teamed up with some demographers to create the Blue Zones lifestyle brand, and they added Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula and the Greek island of Ikaria to the list.
However, unreliable public archives, such as those of Okinawa in Japan, largely destroyed by the bombings of the Second World War and then poorly managed by the American occupation authorities, have cast doubt on old age data in these regions.
Contested methodology
Several prominent blue zone researchers wrote a rebuttal earlier this year, calling Newman’s work “ethically and academically irresponsible”. They accused Newman of referring to broader regions of Japan and Sardinia when the blue zones were smaller areas.
The demographers also emphasized they had “meticulously validated” the ages of supercentenarians in blue zones, double-checking historical records and registries dating back to the 1800s.
Newman said this argument illustrated his point. “If you start with a birth certificate that’s wrong, that gets copied to everything, and you get perfectly consistent, perfectly wrong records,” he said.
A “clock” to measure age
The only “way out of this quagmire” is to physically measure people’s ages, Newman said.
Steve Horvarth’s epigenetic clock could be used as a starting point.
An ageing researcher at the University of California, Steve Horvath has created a new technique called a methylation clock “for the express purpose of validating claims of exceptional longevity”. The clock can “reliably detect instances of severe fraud”, such as when a child assumes their parent’s identity, but cannot yet tell the difference between a 115- and 120-year-old, Horvath told AFP.
Newman’s analysis “appears to be both rigorous and convincing”, Horvath said, adding that several blue zones are overseen by rigorous scientists. “I suspect both opinions hold some truth,” he said.
