The Blue Zones debunked

 You may have seen a Netflix documentary called Blue Zones. It’s about those supposedly amazing places—from Okinawa, Japan, to Ikaria, Greece—where a disproportionate number of people live into a very old age. Dr. Saul Newman, a research fellow at the University College London Center for Longitudinal Studies, debunked the blue-zone research with studies of his own. He found undetected errors in every blue zone. As he notes in an interview, “...there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents.”

What he found in his studies was a lack of documentation certifying people’s deaths as well as many cases of age fraud—people claiming to be older than they are. For example, families who didn’t register their relatives’ deaths collected their social security money. In Greece, he found that at least 72 percent of the people who were supposedly over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from “underground”—that is, they were dead and buried. In the United States, he found that at least 17 percent of people purported to be over the age of 100 were, in fact, either clerical errors, missing or dead.

The documentary shows old people in Okinawa happily tending to their gardens. In fact, Okinawans aren’t gardeners. The government of Japan has been measuring life in Okinawa and other prefectures since 1975. Their records indicate that, in the matter of growing gardens, Okinawa is third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. Government records also show that Okinawans are third to last in their consumption of root and leafy green vegetables. In fact, according to government data, Okinawa lands at the bottom of the health pile.

Loma Linda, California, is the single U.S. blue zone. It’s known for its high concentration of Seventh-day Adventists, who eat a mostly plant-based diet. Newman says the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan and found that “it is completely and utterly unremarkable.”

As Newman reminds us, the core of science is reproducibility. Not only have the blue zone results not been reproduced, but the underlying blue zone data has never been published.

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