The blue zones are falling apart — and that is good science

Five places on earth where people live extraordinarily long lives: Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Ikaria in Greece, Nicoya in Costa Rica, and Loma Linda in California. Study what they eat and how they live, copy it, and you too might reach a hundred.

It is one of the most successful ideas in modern health writing — books, documentaries, a certification programme, entire towns redesigned around the principles.

Then a demographer went and looked at the birth certificates.

What Saul Newman found

Saul Justin Newman, a researcher at University College London’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies, examined the records underlying extreme old age claims across the United States, Italy, England, France and Japan.

His findings are difficult to explain away.

Supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of records. In the United States, the state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69–82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. Not a fall in people reaching 110 — a fall in records of people reaching 110, at the moment documentation arrived.

Almost none of them have proof of birth. Only 18% of “exhaustively validated” supercentenarians worldwide have a birth certificate. In the United States, close to zero percent do.

The birthdays cluster impossibly. Supercentenarian birthdates concentrate on the first of the month and on days divisible by five — the signature of numbers being estimated or invented rather than recorded.

The predictors run backwards. In Italy, England and France, which have more uniform registration, remarkable longevity is predicted by poverty, low incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, and — the detail that ought to stop anyone — fewer 90-year-olds.

A region with unusually many 110-year-olds and unusually few 90-year-olds is not a place where people age well. It is a place where the paperwork is unreliable.

And the blue zones themselves fit the pattern. Sardinia, Okinawa and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rates and short life expectancy relative to their own national averages.

Newman received the first-ever Ig Nobel Prize in Demography for this work, in September 2024. His acceptance line: the secret to extreme longevity is to move somewhere birth certificates are rare, teach your children pension fraud, and start lying.

Why the paperwork would be wrong

Two mechanisms, neither requiring anyone to be villainous.

Clerical error. A birth year transcribed incorrectly in 1910 and never corrected propagates through every document that follows. Records become perfectly consistent and perfectly wrong.

Pension fraud. Where record-keeping is weak, a family has a direct financial incentive not to register a death, since payments continue while the person remains officially alive. In 1997, thirty thousand Italian citizens were found to be claiming pensions while dead.

As Newman put it about one blue zone population: they are only alive on pension day.

The rebuttal, and why it matters

This is a live dispute, and reporting it fairly means giving the other side its due.

Prominent blue zone researchers published a rebuttal calling Newman’s work ethically and academically irresponsible. Their substantive objections: he referred to broader regions of Japan and Sardinia when the blue zones are smaller defined areas, and they had meticulously validated the ages of supercentenarians in those zones, cross-checking historical records and registries dating back to the 1800s.

Newman’s response is the crux of the whole argument. If the birth certificate is wrong at the start, it gets copied into everything downstream — and you end up with perfectly consistent, perfectly wrong records. Validation against other documents cannot detect an error that entered at the source.

Note also that Newman’s central paper has circulated as a preprint and was under peer review. That is a genuine caveat and should be stated. It does not neutralise the findings, but it means this is an argument in progress rather than a settled reversal.

What survives

Here is where honest coverage has to resist the temptation to swing to the opposite extreme.

The blue zones may not be places where people reach 110 at unusual rates. That does not make the underlying dietary observations wrong.

The eating patterns described — largely plant-based, high in legumes, moderate in calories, low in ultra-processed food — are supported independently by an enormous body of nutritional research that has nothing to do with Okinawa or Sardinia. Legumes, fibre, vegetables and limited processed food have evidence behind them from cohorts and trials in populations where the birth certificates are not in doubt.

The same applies to the social observations. Strong community ties, purpose in later life, ordinary daily movement — these are supported by research in populations with reliable records. Loneliness as a mortality risk factor does not rest on Ikarian demography.

So the advice survives. The evidence for it has changed. It was never sensible to eat lentils because a Sardinian shepherd claimed to be 109. It is sensible to eat lentils because of what pulses do to blood lipids, satiety and fibre intake, measured in trials.

Why this belongs on a site about longevity

Because it is the clearest available illustration of how this field goes wrong, and the mistake is not obscure.

A striking pattern is observed. An explanation is proposed. The explanation is appealing, marketable, and morally satisfying — eat like these people and live like these people. An industry forms. Two decades pass. Then someone checks the foundational data and finds the pattern itself may be an artefact.

Nobody involved needed to be dishonest for this to happen. The researchers who built the blue zone framework were working with the best data available. The data was bad in a way that was not obvious until someone looked specifically at documentation coverage rather than at diet.

This is what functioning science looks like from the inside. Not a smooth accumulation of truths, but claims being tested, sometimes failing, and occasionally being demolished by someone asking an unglamorous question about record-keeping.

The useful reflex to take from it: when a longevity claim rests on how long a particular group of people lived, ask how anyone knows. Often the answer is that somebody wrote it down, decades ago, and nobody checked.

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This article is for general information and is not medical advice.

Sources

1. Newman SJ. Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud. bioRxiv, 2024. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
2. UCL Institute of Education. UCL demographer’s work debunking ‘blue zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans wins Ig Nobel prize, 2024. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-work-debunking-blue-zone-regions-exceptional-lifespans-wins-ig-nobel-prize
3. Fortune. Are blue zones a myth? Extreme aging, pension fraud and century-old lies, 2024. https://dc.fortune.com/europe/2024/12/14/are-blue-zones-myth-extreme-aging-pension-fraud-century-old-lies
4. Blue Zones. Are supercentenarian claims based on age exaggeration? (rebuttal), 2024. https://www.bluezones.com/news/are-supercentenarian-claims-based-on-age-exaggeration/
5. IFLScience. Ig Nobel prizewinner debunks supposed blue zones, 2024. https://www.iflscience.com/ig-nobel-prizewinner-debunks-supposed-blue-zones-where-people-live-exceptionally-long-lives-76078