Blue Zones

The places where humans live the longest are explained by traditional lifestyles, widespread incest or systematic fraud, there is no fourth option.

Thanks to Catherine MacDonald for helping us research and fact-check this episode!

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Links!

• The global pattern of centenarians highlights deep problems in demography
• Late-life mortality is underestimated because of data errors
• Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud
• Do People in ‘Blue Zones’ Actually Live Longer?
• They really are that old: a validation study of centenarian prevalence in Okinawa
• The Real Facts Supporting Jeanne Calment as the Oldest Ever Human 
• A Population Where Men Live As Long As Women: Villagrande Strisaili, Sardinia
• Typologies of Extreme Longevity Myths 
• Sardinian dietary analysis for longevity: a review of the literature
• Identification of a geographic area characterized by extreme longevity in the Sardinia island
• Specific features of the oldest old from the Longevity Blue Zones in Ikaria and Sardinia
• Making the Blue Zones: Neoliberalism and nudges in public health promotion
• Human longevity: Genetics or Lifestyle?
• Familial transmission of human longevity

Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!

Transcript

[Maintenance Phase theme]

Michael: Okay. For the first time in a long time, it is straightforwardly your job to tag us. 

Aubrey: Oh, man. 

Michael: I think we haven't done a Mikisode in a while. 

Aubrey: I've just really forgotten how nervous it makes me- [laughs] 

Michael: What? 

Aubrey: -that you are going to judge my terrible tagline. 

Michael: That's really the dynamic, just a long stony silence after whatever you say?

Aubrey: Yeah, yeah. That's the vibe. 

Michael: Is that it, Aubrey? 

Aubrey: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that's getting you out of the blue zones and into the true zones. 

Michael: [blows a raspberry] That's bait. That's bait. 

Aubrey: [laughs] 

Michael: You wanted to see how disapproving I would be. What even was that? The true zone? 

Aubrey: Nailed it. 

Michael: I was about to be like, I can't believe you think I would judge you harshly, but I am judging you harshly. 

Aubrey: Yeah. [crosstalk]

Michael: That is what's going on.  

Aubrey: You are judging me harshly. [Michael laughs] Absolutely. I'm Aubrey Gordon. 

Michael: I'm Michael Hobbs. 

Aubrey: If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase. You can also subscribe through Apple Podcasts Premium. It's the same content. 

Michael: Yeah, the same content. 

Aubrey: Michael. 

Michael: Aubrey.

Aubrey: Today. 

Michael: Today. 

Aubrey: You are taking us into the true zones. [laughs]  

Michael: Oh, God. You're going to make it a thing all episode. 

Aubrey: I'm going to call it back. It's my finest work yet. 

Michael: [laughs] What do you know about blue zones actually? Do you have a definition? Are you aware of the Netflix documentary and stuff? 

Aubrey: My understanding of blue zones is that the idea is that there are some parts of the world where people live longer than other parts of the world. 

Michael: Yes. 

Aubrey: I've been trying to stay fresh on it and avoiding coverage of it, which has been hard because there has been a high-profile debunking of blue zones, as I understand it. Yes?

Michael: I really went on a journey with this, Aubrey. 

Aubrey: Oh, my God. 

Michael: I want to take you on a journey with me. 

Aubrey: I can't wait. 

Michael: This is one of those episodes where people got really into the concept, but then people also got really into the debunking and neither one of them are really justified by the data. 

Aubrey: What?

Michael: We're going to tell a very complicated story eventually, but first we just have to talk about the history of the concept of blue zones. Throughout culture, throughout history, people have made claims that they're really old. People would say, “I'm 140 years old.” And they're oftentimes coupled with this idea that there's these remote, misty places where like everybody lives to 150. These sort of fountain of youth myths, these have persisted throughout time. And it was really easy to do this before the late 1800s because there was essentially no system of checking them. 

Aubrey: I just have always assumed that the sort of antiaging world is like the original wellness grift. 

Michael: It really is, yeah. Basically, the field of gerontology, which I've been reading a lot of the last couple weeks, essentially grows out of efforts to validate these places. The first time they're able to actually confirm one of these communities is in 1999. There are people who are looking around Sardinia. A lot of genetic research is done there because it has very low rates of immigration and the population has just been kind of-- It's an island, it's relatively far from Italy. So, it's always been of interest to researchers. And so, in the late 1990s, there is a researcher named Johnny Pez who starts looking around Sardinia and looking for age records. You're going to make a joke about the name, aren't you? All right, just get it over with. 

Aubrey: Does he shoot his research right out of his neck?

Michael: All right. [laughs] 

Aubrey: I really love that you knew it was coming.

Michael: I hear your little breaths as I'm talking like, “Here it comes. [Aubrey laughs] She wants to do a thing about the name.”

Aubrey: Of course. Listen, you knew that the first time you read that name, you were like, [Michael laughs] “Oh, my dad joke cohost is going to bust in like the fucking Kool-Aid man.” [Michael laughs] Oh, yeah, Pez. 

Michael: So, Johnny Pez starts looking around, getting records around Sardinia, and he identifies not Sardinia as a whole, but these very isolated areas in the highlands of Sardinia, very traditional shepherding communities. He starts to notice that there's like a huge number of people over 100 there. And the weirdest thing is that men seem to live as long as women. One of the most consistent findings in old age research is that women live 3 to 10 years longer than men. And in this particular area, men are living just as long as women.

So, he gets the records, he writes this up. And in 1999, he presents this to a conference of other gerontologists. I've read various descriptions of this presentation and it sounds like he was essentially laughed out of the room. Everyone at this conference was just like, the men are obviously exaggerating, right? If men are like, “Ha-ha, I'm 150,” it is guys being dudes. 

Aubrey: Just a bunch of Brian Johnsons. 

Michael: Just a bunch of fucking Brian Johnsons out here. And so, at this conference, he meets another researcher named Michel Poulain. And everyone is like, “Well, somebody's got to go confirm these ages. They're obviously lying. It's just like every other fucking myth of these longevitous communities. Like, someone needs to go and debunk this,” whatever. 

So, Michel Poulain spends the next four years traveling to this area, this remote, weird part of Sardinia, to disconfirm the fact that all of these dudes are so old there. This is where we get the term, blue zones. When Poulain was doing this, he visited 40 different small municipalities. And every time he could confirm someone over 100, he would put a blue dot on his map. Looking at the entire map of Sardinia, he has areas where there's tons of blue dots. So, we had the one preliminary paper in 1999 which was like, super brief. Like, “Hey, we think there's a lot of old people here.”

We then, in 2004, get this very dry paper that is like, “Here is what we have done to confirm these people's ages.” Like, clergy records, there's municipal records, there's school records. They're going out of their way to try to disconfirm that these people are over 100. They basically published this paper being like, “We can't disconfirm this. All evidence indicates that there's just a lot of dudes that are very old in this community.”

And so, I'm going to send you a couple paragraphs from the abstract of this paper. 

Aubrey: An alternative and interesting hypothesis is that the high rate of inbreeding determined by frequent marriages between consanguineous individuals and low immigration rates have progressively decreased the variability of the genetic pool and facilitated the emergence of genetic characteristics that protect individuals from diseases that are major causes of mortality, particularly in older individuals. Given the exceptionally high prevalence of male centenarians in the blue zone, it is reasonable to assume that either the environmental characteristics or the genetic factors or both, exert their favorable effect more strongly in men than in women. 

Michael: So basically, the first explanation for this is like, oh, it's just centuries of inbreeding [Michael laughs] I have kind of by coincidence given these people some sort of immunity to various other diseases that kill old people. 

Aubrey: I do like that the final sentence is like, “Hey, there's a lot of old men here. So, here's what we're going to float. It's either genetics or environment.”

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aubrey: [Michael laughs] Great, sure. I mean, I guess. 

Michael: So, that is 2004 when this paper is published. We then get the popularization of this. This is where we meet the protagonist for most of this episode, Dan Buettner. This is the guy who is eventually the subject of the Netflix documentary. 

Aubrey: And also, the author of-- There's like a blue zones cookbook.

Michael: Yeah. Oh, God. 

Aubrey: And there’s like a little blue zones mini empire. 

Michael: We will get to it. He's published-- I think it's like eight books about blue zones. 

Aubrey: Wow. 

Michael: He really has made this his entire career. His bio is weirdly murky. I read a bunch of old interviews with him. I listened to a bunch of current podcast interviews with him. And he sort of edits the way that he got into this field. He's in his 40s when he finds out about this. So, he has like an entire previous life. He is raised in the Twin Cities. According to one interview, but I haven't seen him mention it anywhere else, after college, he starts working at IBM and then he's really into long-distance cycling. So, he sets three Guinness Book of World Records for long-distance cycling for distance and speed and stuff. He, at one point, bikes from Alaska down to the tip of Argentina. He then bikes across the entire Soviet Union. He bikes around Africa. 

He starts writing books about this. So, his book about the Soviet Union one is called Sovietrek. He writes a book and does a PBS documentary called Africatrek. He basically becomes one of these guys that is like, frankly, very good at turning these experiences into publicity and into products that he sells. So, you know, like, the Oregon Trail was like a big deal in the 1990s.  

Aubrey: Was. Look, Michael. [Michael laughs] Yes. I personally died of dysentery, like- 

Michael: So many times. 

Aubrey: - at least 30 times. 

Michael: He makes something called the Africa Trail CD Rom after his Africa bike trip. Once he gets back from these various trips, he starts this online platform, which I can't even really figure out what it does, but it's called Quest Network. He says he's trying to solve the world's mysteries. So, it appears to be this thing where people will go explore like Mayan Ruins and they will have a satellite uplink to classrooms where kids can kind of watch live what they're doing. I don't know how the fuck they were doing this in the late 1990s, to be honest, like, dial-up speeds, but there's some sort of like live satellite uplink component to this. And then, kids in the classrooms can kind of vote on like should we explore east or should we explore West? It's like this weird online learning platform. It appears to be quite successful, this model. 

And in 1999, one of the mysteries that he's trying to solve is, where are the oldest people? Like, what is it about certain places that make people live longer? I still don't really get this. He says, in 1999, he is invited by the Japanese government and funded by the Japanese government to go visit Okinawa, which is another one of these places that has kind of always been seen as like a longevity hotspot. So, he goes there and does this kind of like online quest, live learning thing. He interviews a bunch of old people. Nothing really comes of that though. So, this remains an interest of his. 

And in 2004, he sees the article by Michel Poulain saying, “Hey, I investigated these villages in Sardinia and everyone is very old there. This appears to be true.” So, in 2005, he writes the article that kind of launches this entire concept of blue zones. There's an article for National Geographic called The Secrets of Long Life. The central tension at the heart of this, and I think ultimately the downfall of blue zones is around this question of, are we engaged in an academic endeavor? What explains why these people are old, or are we engaged in an advice-giving endeavor? 

Aubrey: Michael, I believe science has settled the question. It is inbreeding. [Michael laughs] The scientific research we were just reading said inbreeding. 

Michael: At this point with the Sardinia stuff, there's no information about lifestyle things. There's been no surveys of the diets of Sardinians. This is basically just the field doing very boring yeoman's work of just trying to confirm, “Hey, there's a lot of old people here” 

Aubrey: Right. They're trying to verify like, “We think we're seeing this thing. Are we really seeing this thing?”

Michael: I am going to send you the first couple paragraphs of Dan Buettner's National Geographic article and you can tell me which direction he decided to take. 

Aubrey: What if I said you could add up to 10 years to your life? 

Michael: Adding 10 years. 

Aubrey: A long healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits. If you adopt the right lifestyle, experts say, chances are you may live up to a decade longer. So, what's the formula for success? In recent years, researchers have fanned out across the globe to find the secrets to long life.

Michael: Secrets. 

Aubrey: In Sardinia, Italy, one team of demographers found a hotspot of longevity in mountain villages where men reach age 100 at an amazing rate. 

Michael: Amazing. 

Aubrey: On the islands of Okinawa, Japan, another team examined a group that is among the longest lived on Earth. And in Loma Linda, California, researchers studied a group of Seventh Day Adventists who rank among America's longevity all stars. Residents of these three places produce a high rate of centenarians, suffer a fraction of the diseases that commonly kill people in other parts of the developed world and enjoy more healthy years of life. In sum, they offer three sets of best practices to emulate. The rest is up to you. [Michael laughs] So, he infomercial-ed it. He went full “There's got to be a better way.”

Michael: Yeah, he fully is just like, these are the tips that you can use in your life. 

Aubrey: The whole thing is just like, is this you? And it's black and white footage of someone opening a closet and a bunch of junk falling onto them. [Michael laughs] It's wild how huckster-y the tone of this is. 

Michael: And he describes elsewhere that he went with the demographers. He went with Pez and Poulain to Sardinia to talk to people. He does this in other areas too. The actual researchers have questionnaires that they give people about their diet and lifestyle habits, or Poulain is like, “Where are your school records? How do I find your birth certificate?” He's interested in like how to disconfirm or confirm that these people actually are as old as they say they are. Dan Buettner is basically just like, “Do you eat meat? Do you ride your bike?”

Aubrey: Oh, Lord. 

Michael: And not to cancel my own grandma on the show or whatever. 

Aubrey: [laughs] I can't wait to hear where this goes. 

Michael: But my grandmother is not a reliable narrator of how she reached 100. It's like asking naturally extremely thin people how to be thin. 

Aubrey: This idea that people have like information to offer on how their bodies got to be the way that their bodies are is true in very, very limited cases. 

Michael: And also, we've talked a million times on the show about how so many of these wellness myths begin with, I think, modern society's very ambivalent attitude toward modernity and especially urbanization. It's like we left the land where we had these simple lifestyles, and now we live in this desiccated version of human life. We're all packed in together, etc. And so, there's something very telling about in the Sardinia section of this article, he has long descriptions of, like, the shepherds walking the fields, waking up with the sunrise. They have fast food in these areas in Sardinia, they have supermarkets. But he sort of edits that out as if every single person is just walking the earth. 

He actually-- I listened to a couple podcast interviews with him, and he says in one of the interviews, when they're asking about like, “What do you consider to be your purpose in life?” He says, “My purpose is finding the traditional peoples of the world and sharing their wisdom.” That's like a kind of a nice thing to say and to think. That's lovely, finding these indigenous communities and sharing stories of their societies. But I think that's what Dan thinks that he's doing. But what he's really doing is he's looking for things that he thinks are replicable in this very ideological way. He's not looking at like, “Oh, yeah. What is the welfare structure that they have in Italy?” Or, “What are the statins these people are taking?” He's specifically seeking out these kind of close to the land types of practices. 

Aubrey: Right. And also, it is a selective kind of nostalgia, right? 

Michael: Yeah. 

Aubrey: There is sort of this idea that we were healthier without really bothering to look at what does the actual data say? How long were people living? And the answer is a lot shorter-- 

Michael: That's the thing. He's describing them as, “These are traditional shepherding communities and that's why they live so long,” but there are thousands of traditional shepherding subsistence farming communities in the world, and they don't have long lifespans typically. So, he goes through the Sardinian example. He then goes to Okinawa, which is kind of the same sort of thing, a lot of this fetishization of traditionalism.

He then takes us to Loma Linda, California. This whole section is about the Seventh Day Adventist community. These people have been part of a study, basically like track their lifestyle and habits over time. So, I'm going to send you a little description of that study. 

Aubrey: From 1976 to 1988, the National Institutes of Health funded a study of 34,000 California Adventists to see whether their health-oriented lifestyle affected their life expectancy and risk of heart disease and cancer. The study found that the Adventist habit of consuming beans, soy milk, tomatoes and other fruits lowered their risk of developing certain cancers. It also suggested that eating whole wheat bread, drinking five glasses of water a day, and most surprisingly, consuming four servings of nuts a week had reduced their risk of heart disease. In the end, the study reached a stunning conclusion, says Gary Fraser of Loma Linda University. The average Adventist lived four to ten years longer than the average Californian. That makes the Adventist one of the nation's most convincing cultures of longevity. 

Michael: Something is very funny about the fact that the first ever article, the popularization of this concept of blue zones includes three examples, and one of them is not a blue zone. The Seventh Day Adventists, it's like a subgroup within Loma Linda, California. Loma Linda does not have a particularly long lifespan. It's only a very small subgroup, but you can find groups like this all over the place in America. The difference between the richest Americans and the poorest Americans is 14 years of lifespan. So, if you went to-- like, Mississippi has one of the lowest life expectancies in America. If you went to any country club in Mississippi, you would find a ton of people who live 10 years longer than the Mississippi average. This just isn't a Blue Zone. [laughs] 

Aubrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a group of people who belong to the same church in the same town. 

Michael: Dan later says, he's like, “Oh, the only reason this is in there is because my editors wanted somewhere in the United States.” [Aubrey laughs] But then, what's wild is he just like, keeps it. So, in other interviews he's like, “Oh, I put it in there because of my editors.” And then like, “Oh, it just stuck.” I'm like, “Why did it stick, Dan? You're the one doing the Blue Zones thing. You can just unstick it if you don't want to.” 

Aubrey: Yeah, what the fuck? What the fuck?

Michael: So, after this article comes out in 2005, it blows up and Dan essentially makes this the rest of his career. He actually works directly with Johnny Pez and Michel Poulain to travel around the world and confirm these areas. So eventually, they're contacted by a researcher in Costa Rica. There's a small peninsula in Costa Rica called Nicoya where, again, there's just a lot of people who live to 100. They also identify an island in Greece called Icaria. In 2008, Dan publishes his book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who Lived the Longest. I read this book. It's an interesting mix of very kind of normal lifestyle advice and weird crank bullshit. So, each of the little sections has text boxes that he breaks out with little tips, like little things that you could be doing. And this is one of them from the Sardinia section. 

Aubrey: Goat's milk. When compared to cow's milk, goat's milk delivers a powerful nutritional punch. One glass contains 13% more calcium, 25% more vitamin B6, 47% more vitamin A, 134% more potassium, and three times more niacin. Mike, you just need goat milk. 

Michael: I looked this up. The societies with the highest consumption of goat's milk, mostly in South Asia like Pakistan and India, and they don't have longer lifespans. 

Aubrey: It's like weird Weight Watchers brain kind of stuff that's like, just swap out your white rice for brown rice and you're on the way or whatever. And it's like, God, none of those work. 

Michael: He has a whole thing about turmeric has antioxidants. And then in the Okinawa section, he's like, “Soy is like a superfood, and people who eat soy live longer,” and stuff. And it's very like 2005 in that way. 

Aubrey: Right. It's very TED Talk-y, very life hack-y, very like, “Just this one weird trick.”

Michael: I do want to give the book some credit. I think as far as sort of fad diet or fad lifestyle advice, I've definitely seen worse. Most of the advice is fine. So, he's like, “People in the blue zones move regularly.” He's a vegetarian, and so he's like, “Try to avoid meat. Try to avoid processed foods.” In both Sardinia and Okinawa, they have a rule that's basically, eat until you're 80% full. They phrase it differently in both cultures, but it's essentially, don't eat until you're stuffed. He provides a bunch of recipes, and they're all kind of like fine. He's not saying eat 500 calories a day. 

Aubrey: It sounds like a lot of the stuff in here is not going to hurt you. It just sort of has horse blinders on. 

Michael: The other thing I wanted to mention, a major component of the blue zones advice is like, trying to find a purpose in your life and trying to build wholesome, intimate relationships. And like, I love this. 

Aubrey: Yeah. 

Michael: These are some of the tips. He says, “Volunteer for a new organization. Call, text, or email one friend or family member you haven't connected with recently. Host a healthy potluck. Plan a vacation or some time off work. Schedule a weekly get-together with friends. Write a thank you note to your coworker or friend. Take time to rediscover a hobby you once loved.” 

Aubrey: Yeah, these all seem lovely. 

Michael: We're always grading on a fucking curve on this show, but it's like just the fact that he actually talks about like maybe trying to do things for other people.

Aubrey: Yes. 

Michael: This is maybe the first book we've ever talked about that actually has this in there. [Michael laughs] 

Aubrey: Totally. It's this and Angela Lansbury. 

Michael: He also has a little bit of kind of structural stuff-

Aubrey: What?

Michael: -and this comes out in his interviews. He says, “This isn't really about individual willpower. It's about the environments that we've created.” I mean this is at odds with all of his other fucking like little life hack-y advice. But he does kind of acknowledge the basic realities that American life makes this very difficult. So, this is from the book. 

Aubrey: In the Western world, accomplishment, status, and material wealth are highly revered and require most of our time. Americans employed full time work on average 43 hours a week and take the shortest paid vacations in the industrialized world. Then, when they do take time off, according to one source, 20% of them stay in touch with the office. We generally hold working and being productive in high regard. Being busy often wins us esteem. Few cultural institutions exist to encourage us to slow down, unwind and destress.

Michael: Is this amazing? Is this scorching societal critique? No, but by the standards of a fucking diet book, I'll take it. 

Aubrey: God, I'm really stuck on average of 43 hours a week. Were we ever so young? 

Michael: There's also some kind of bad advice. He does have the structural critique, but then he also fetishizes these societies that don't really have the same structures in place. So, here's his description of Sardinia from the book.

Aubrey: A final and subtle yet powerful Sardinian attribute is their positive attitude toward elders. In America, being young is celebrated and growing old is often dreaded. I have heard that most seniors polled said they'd rather die than be put in an assisted living facility. But in America, we are increasingly having to care for our seniors outside the family. People over 65 in the US will need long-term care for an average of three years and more than a third of them will not rely on help from family. There are no long-term care facilities in the Sardinian blue zone. There, respect increases with age. Younger generations feel a debt to the parents and grandparents who raised them. All but 1 of the 50 or so centenarians I interviewed had a daughter or granddaughter who actively cared for them. 

Michael: “There are no long-term care facilities in Sardinia,” is not something to emulate. [laughs] 

Aubrey: There is only the unpaid labor of young women family members. 

Michael: Yeah. I get what he's getting at here. Like the thing about respecting elders, completely fucking true, like absolutely. But also, we do need systems to take care of older people. 

Aubrey: Totally. It's also like, hey man, that poll about not wanting to go to assisted living facilities I think probably has a lot more to do with the specific state of assisted living facilities than the fact of them.

Michael: He also has a bit of the same problem with his thing of like, surround yourself with good people and try to form meaningful friendships, he also keeps coming back to this idea that you should cut people out of your life if they don't have the same health habits as you. He has this whole section called “The Right Tribe.” 

Aubrey: Oh, no. Is this all the shit that's like, “Your fat friends are making you fat. Your depressed friends are making you depressed”? 

Michael: Very explicitly. So, here's this. 

Aubrey: Know the people who reinforce the right habits, people who understand or live by blue zone secrets. Go through your address book or your contact list of friends. Think about which ones support healthy habits and challenge you mentally and which ones you can truly rely on in case of need.

Michael: I don't know, man. Be a vegetarian, don't be. Bike around, don't bike around, whatever. But it feels really toxic and bad to be like, [laughs] “You should cut people out of your life if they don't have the same health habits as you.”

Aubrey: This pops up, I would say, every few years or so in usually a New York Times health op-ed that someone's like, “You know what you should consider, is dumping all your fat friends and all your depressed friends.” And I'm like, “Well, alone again, naturally.” 

Michael: Oh, God. [laughs] So, I want to get into critiques of the blue zones just as a concept because this is now like a whole academic field. Before we get to that, I do want to talk a little bit about my jokerfication when it comes to Dan Buettner.

Aubrey: Oh, no. 

Michael: In his 2005 book, he's pretty clear about the fact that this came out of this researcher, Johnny Pez, going to Sardinia, finding the records and then bringing Michel Poulain on board to confirm the records and then publishing it in an academic journal. And they were the ones putting blue dots on paper and calling them “blue zones” for the clustering of the dots. But then over time, Dan has sort of edited them out. And if you go on bluezones.com, which is run by Dan, this is how he describes the history of Blue Zones. 

Aubrey: The term “blue zones” was first coined by Blue Zones founder, Dan Buettner. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Aubrey: A National Geographic explorer and fellow and journalist during an exploratory project he led in 2004. After an expedition to Okinawa, Japan, in 2000 to investigate the longevity there, he set out to explore other regions of the world with reportedly high longevity. 

Michael: He did not coin the term. It's right there in black and white, man, you didn't coin the term “blue zones.”

Aubrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Michael: He says here he keeps doing this thing where he's like a team that I led to Sardinia. Dude, you didn't even hear about this until after the fucking paper was published. These are researchers going there and spending months tediously trying to confirm the ages of these old people. You were not involved. You read a fucking paper and then you wrote about it for National Geographic. That's fine. That's what I do. That's what a lot of us do. But don't fucking say you were the one that led the team. 

Aubrey: Michael, you're just salty. Because we did that episode and I invented the food pyramid. [Michael laughs] They're just so mad. 

Michael: And also, even the Okinawa stuff, he writes himself into it. He's like, “Oh, in 1999, I went to Okinawa,” but there was a best-selling book in the 1990s about people in Okinawa living a long time. This is a different team of researchers named Craig and Brad Wilcox who were working on confirming the ages of people in Okinawa. There was a researcher from Tokyo in 1975 who went down there to be like, “Oh, I think these ages seem high let me go confirm it.” So, they spent years confirming the ages of people in Okinawa. They eventually write a book called The Okinawa Program, which was popular at the time, but it's now kind of lost to history. And then, Dan just writes himself into this as like, “I went to Okinawa for the first time to discover this.” You just saw a best-selling book [laughs] about Okinawa, and you went there. You're just a journalist, man. It's fine. 

Aubrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Michael: There's also an interesting thing. Now that sort of there's been the debunking which we're about to get to, there's been more investigation of this sort of partnership between him and these two researchers throughout the 2000s. Apparently, they broke up at some point relatively recently, sometime between 2020 and 2023. Johnny Pez just left, he won't say why, but he's like, “I'm not working with Dan anymore.” And in 2009, as he's kind of expanding the Blue Zones empire, writing these best-selling books, Buettner patents the term “blue zone.” So basically, this is to prevent other people from like, marketing it. 

Aubrey: Yeah, like those pesky researchers who came up again. 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. [Aubrey laughs] That is how this feels. So, Michel Poulain says that he had no idea that Dan patented the term “blue zones.”

Aubrey: Ooh. 

Michael: It's kind of funny. There's now two Blue Zones websites. So, one run by Buettner is bluezones.com. And Michelle Poulain, who's like the actual researcher who did all the fucking yeoman's work to confirm the ages of all these locations, he runs longevitybluezones.com. 

Aubrey: Oh, it's not truezones.com? 

Michael: [laughs] True zones. [Aubrey laughs] It's all coming back. Even beyond leaving Dan Buettner out of it, when you look into what we now know about the actual blue zones, it's a much more complicated picture. One of the things that I find really interesting about Sardinia that's actually true for the Greek blue zone as well, is that the Sardinian blue zones have higher rates of smoking than the Italian average. 

Aubrey: Huh. 

Michael: If we're being systematic about this kind of lifestyle advice, shouldn't we be telling people to smoke? But obviously, that would be insane because we know that smoking is bad for you, so that must be kind of a fluke. But then, it's sort of like, “Well, wait a minute, if we know that it's bad for you, we're discarding it because other research indicates that it's bad for you. Shouldn't we just be looking at research of what's good for you and what's bad for you?” If we're cherry-picking stuff that is confirmed by other research, well, we should just be doing the other research. What is the point of Sardinia then? 

Aubrey: This is like the tricky thing about all this stuff, is that we're reaching for one weird trick, life hack kind of things that are like, “What's the one step that you can take?” “Oh, I need to eat more nuts? Great. Oh, I need to practice more incest? Awesome.” 

Michael: Yeah. Chardonnay and cousin fucking. 

Aubrey: The answers are, once again, probably like a lot more complicated, a lot thornier than that, and probably not a uniformly rosy picture. 

Michael: Well, that to me is like-- The difference between the academic endeavor to figure out what's going on and the sort of like lifestyle advice endeavor, because one of the best predictors actually of old age is not having children and having fewer children. [Aubrey laughs] That would be weird advice to give. Like, if you want to live a long time, don't have kids. 

Aubrey: Yeah, for real. 

Michael: But I do think as an academic endeavor, it's really interesting to know that. Stressors might reduce your lifespan, like having kids is a stressor. I think to discover these sorts of patterns is super interesting, but that's not really lifestyle advice. The other one that he mentions a lot in all of the literature around blue zones is red wine. “You know, in Sardinia they drink so much red wine. In Greece, they drink all this red wine.” But if you look at the actual numbers, people in the Sardinian blue zone drink less alcohol than Italians in general and drink less red wine than Sardinians. 

Aubrey: That's very funny. 

Michael: It seems like he's just going there and being like, “Oh, this guy drinks red wine. Red wine must be good for you.” Without any actual checking of, like, “Well, wait a minute. Is this a population thing or just this one guy?” It also turns out to be the same thing with this eat until you're 80% full thing. Like, that is a cultural rule like that's something people say. But there's no evidence that people in the Sardinian blue zone eat less than other people in Italy. It just isn't clear how much of this stuff is really generalizable.

There's also another thing in Sardinia specifically is-- You know, Italy is a country with very traditional gender roles, and Sardinia especially is even more stratified by gender than other parts of Italy. And so, one of the things that may actually explain why men specifically live so much longer in these remote parts of Sardinia is that there's so much glorification of old men, often to the detriment of older women. If you're an aging woman in these areas of Sardinia, they don't consider it an obligation to care for you. So, your kids are not going to take you in, whereas if you're an older man, they will take you in. Is this something we should replicate, like, patriarchy? [laughs]

I'm not trying to cancel Sardinia, but it's just like, if we're interested in an academic endeavor of, “Hey, what explains this?”, we would look at the good and the bad of these societies. But when you go through these societies and the thousands of different habits that make up people's lifestyles, and you pick out the ones that you like, what are we doing? You might as well just say, “These are the things that I like.” 

Aubrey: Even in the earlier quote that you pulled, it was like, “Yeah, younger daughters and women take care of older people and men.”

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Aubrey: Yeah. This is like a core organizing principle. And, like, boy, oh, boy, buddy, why don't you break that shit out by gender and look a little bit like, what are they outcomes for ladies? 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Aubrey: Because I'm guessing that someone is paying a price for that longevity in some way, shape or form. 

Michael: A quote that I was going to read you from the National Geographic article earlier, but I forgot, is he's talking about stress, like, “The less stressful lifestyles of Sardinia.” And he's interviewing this guy, Tonino, who's like, the pastoralist climbing around the mountains. He says, “I do the work,” admits Tonino, hooking Giovanna around the waist, “My ragazza does the worrying.”

Aubrey: Oh, God. Oh, God. [Michael laughs] Hey. 

Michael: So, get your ragazza to do the worrying. 

Aubrey: Oh, God. 

Michael: So, this was like my excuse to talk about how even before all the statistical debunking, everything we're about to get into, I just don't think the concept of blue zones is very fucking useful. I just think the whole thing is garbage. But now, we're going to talk about the specific ways that blue zones may or may not be garbage. 

Aubrey: So, this is the high-profile debunking, yes? 

Michael: Exactly. This is why we're here today. 

Aubrey: Right. This is the reason for the season. 

Michael: So, this essentially comes from just a random guy. This is a researcher at University College London named Saul Justin Newman, who it seems like basically just started reading about Blue Zones kind of in his spare time and was like, “Yo, fuck this,” which I deeply sympathize with. [laughs]   

Aubrey: I was going to say it sounds like you and me. 

Michael: He is a biologist, but he's like a plant biologist and all of his other publications are kind of technical things. 

Aubrey: Well, then he's not like you and me. [Laughs] 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, exact. In 2019, Saul Newman publishes a pre-print paper so like not peer reviewed, just like a thing that he puts on the Internet called “Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans.” He sort of republishes and updates this for 2024. It's now called Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud. He also has another paper from 2024 called the Global pattern of Centenarians highlights deep problems in demography.

So, the core argument here is very like Maintenance Phase adjacent. It's basically that we can't say anything about blue zones or about the clustering of the old people because all of the data is garbage So, he starts with a, a general critique of the sort of entire field of gerontology. He talks about how age is a really important factor and yet there's no actual objective way to measure how old somebody is. It's especially difficult for centenarians because if somebody's 100 years old in 2024, that means they were born in 1924, which means we're relying on records from a very different time. Government capacities were very different. And because the field of gerontology essentially emerges in the 1970s. We're then going back to people born in the 1870s. 

Aubrey: Right. For context, the late 1800s is when the US government issued its first nutrition guidelines. And one of those guidelines was be sure to eat vegetable ash. 

Michael: Oh, yeah. 

Aubrey: Burn up those vegetables and then chow down on the onion ash. 

Michael: It was like, what's the correct dosage of heroin for your child? 

Aubrey: Right, yes. 

Michael: When they have a little sniffles, when they have the sniffles. 

Aubrey: Yes. 

Michael: He says the field of gerontology and demography don't really take this seriously because they kind of assume that, “Eh, there's probably not that much error. And when there's error, it's probably random.” Some people say they're a little older, some people say they're a little younger, it's kind of a wash. But he says “No, errors are actually extremely common. And there are reasons why people exaggerate their age.” And there's many reasons you wouldn't file a death certificate. Because if your mom is getting a pension, you can just be like, “I am my mom.” And then, you get free money. 

Aubrey: Right, right, right. 

Michael: Most of his papers are dedicated to criticizing these specific databases where people are trying to gather every single person who's over 100. There are various efforts to do this. There's a UN database. He essentially says these databases are just useless. So, I'm going to send you kind of thesis statement. 

Aubrey: According to uncorrected UN metrics, the blue zone regions with the highest late life survival are heavily enriched for states with absent or unreliable birth certificates, states with no centralized government, communist dictatorships, and countries actively engaged in war or genocide. New Caledonia is the best country in the world for life expectancy at age 100, despite being ranked 51st in the world for life expectancy at birth. 

Michael: One way to look at blue zones is like, “Oh, it's where people walk amongst the sheep and where they eat fresh roasted pumpkin every day.” Or another way to look at it is it's places where they just don't keep very good records. He notes in France, almost every region in France where people live past 110 are like post-colonial regions, regions where there's been natural disasters, regions where records have been destroyed. And then, you look at Paris, which has like all the rich people live in Paris, it has the best medical care and Paris has way fewer people over 110. The mechanisms we know extend people's life expectancies, you don't find old people in places with those mechanisms. 

He also notes that when you look into the databases for people who do have their date of birth recorded, there's a suspiciously high number of them on the first of the month and in some countries, they're missing round numbers. Like, you don't find people born on like the 10th and the 15th. And that's typical of human beings trying to come up with numbers that sound random. 

Aubrey: Oh, no, Mike. 

Michael: Like, when you ask people to pick a random number between 1 and 10, most people pick 7. 

Aubrey: Why do I feel called out by this? 

Michael: No, same, same. 

Aubrey: I absolutely would have picked 7. 

Michael: You find, since the introduction of cesarean sections, that there's a little bit more births on weekdays than weekends. 

Aubrey: Oh yeah, that's like a women in the workforce thing. 

Michael: But even that, he says that's only like a 2% flex. Like, we don't-- It's not that big of a change weekday to weekend, the number of births. And yet, for these round numbers, you find a fourfold difference for supercentenarians. 

Aubrey: Jeez Louise.

Michael: He then gets to the Blue Zones specifically. So, this is a very long excerpt but we're going to talk about it in detail, so I want you to read the whole thing. 

Aubrey: Substantial error rates were recently uncovered in every blue zone. In 1997, 30,000 Italian citizens were discovered to be claiming the pension whilst dead. In 2008, 42% of Costa Rican 99 plus year olds were revealed to have misstated their age in the 2000 census. After limited error correction, the Nicoya blue zone shrunk by around 90% and old age life expectancy plummeted from world leading to “near the bottom of the pack.” In 2010, over 230,000 Japanese centenarians were discovered to be missing, imaginary clerical errors or dead, an error rate of 82% in data then considered among the best in the world. Greece followed in 2012 when at least 72% of Greek centenarians reported in the census were discovered to be dead or, depending on your perspective, committing pension fraud.

Michael: He then goes into Okinawa specifically because it was the first blue zone identified. So, here's this. 

Aubrey: In Okinawa, the anomalous pattern of centenarians is compounded by other error-generative processes. Japanese birth and marriage records are not generated by a central bureaucracy, but instead are hand recorded by family members as Koseki documents. On top of this self-report data, the large-scale bombing and invasion of Okinawa involved the destruction of entire cities and towns, obliterating around 90% of Koseki records. Post-war Okinawans subsequently requested replacement documents described from memory through a US-led military government that largely spoke no Japanese and which used a different calendar. The number of replacement documents issued, a proxy measure of American bombing and shelling intensity, predicts 79% of the variation in centenarian status across Okinawa. 

Michael: So, it's a pretty strong case. 

Aubrey: Sure. 

Michael: We can’t really say where people over a hundred are. When we find large numbers of centenarians, it's mostly in these regions where it just isn't very plausible that they're clustered there. And then, another factor that predicts blue zones is you don't have the fucking records. 

Before we get into more of the detail and the debate about this, I want to take a slight detour into the story of-- Have you heard of Jeanne Calment, the oldest woman who ever lived, Aubrey? 

Aubrey: No, I have not. 

Michael: Okay, this is a woman who was born in France in 1875. She has a daughter in 1898 when she's 22. In 1991, she is officially confirmed as the oldest person in the world. And then six years later, in 1997, she dies at the age of 122 years. Around 20 years after she dies in 2018, there is a Russian doctor in Moscow who starts looking around at photos of her and is like, “She does not look 110 in these photos. She looks way younger, like suspiciously younger.” He also finds that earlier in her life, Jeanne has like a bump on the tip of her nose. And then when she's older, she doesn't have the bump anymore. The sort of the initial questions attract the attention of another Russian guy named Nikolai Zak, who is a mathematician who starts doing the numbers. And he's saying that it's really fucking sketchy that the oldest person is 122 and the second oldest person is 119. It's like a really, really unlikely result that this woman was 122.

They also start looking around. There's various transcripts of interviews with her, and they find other discrepancies. So, she's born in 1875, and when she's growing up, there's a massive cholera epidemic in the small town in France where she lives that she doesn't mention in any of her stories about growing up. She also says that she was friends with Vincent Van Gogh. [Aubrey laughs] People are just like, “That's a weird move.” They also note that her French ID card has her eye color changes halfway through her life. And they also note her signature gets kind of loopier and changes over her life too.

Aubrey: Your signature changing is like a known thing.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Aubrey: People's signatures change over time, but it is like there’s sort of like death by a thousand cuts happening here.

Michael: So, this mathematician, Nikolai Zak, comes up with a theory that explains all of this. According to him, Jeanne Calment died in 1934, and her daughter took over her life so that she wouldn't have to pay inheritance taxes.

Aubrey: Oh, hey.

Michael: This aligns with kind of everything we know about old age claims. There's always been these mythical figures who say, like, “Well, I'm like 131 million years old,” and they never turn out to be true, so it's like another one--

Aubrey: Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. 

Michael: However, the theory that Jeanne Calment faked her death is basically a conspiracy theory. 

Aubrey: Huh. 

Michael: So, this little detour is based on a very good New Yorker article called “Was Jeanne Calment the Oldest Person Who Ever Lived – or a Fraud?” by Lauren Collins in 2020. Also, a very good academic article called “The Real Supporting Jeanne Calment as the Oldest Ever Human” by Jean-Marie Robine. So, because she lived in the same city her whole life, a relatively small city in France, and she married her own cousin, so her last name never changed--

Aubrey: Good. Excellent. I didn't expect us to be here, but he we are, nonetheless. 

Michael: [laughs] Yes. There's tons of records confirming her. There's birth records, there's church records, there's marriage records, there's real estate purchases. The whole thing of the mom dies, but then the daughter takes over her identity, we're not talking about her showing up in the records as her mom. We're talking about someone who lives as Jeanne Calment for the rest of her life and maintains this idea that her daughter died. Every single person who knew her says, “Yeah, she did not swap bodies. The mother and daughter didn't even look similar.”

Aubrey: This is a Talented Mr. Ripley situation. 

Michael: Like, full on. 

Aubrey: Yeah. 

Michael: There's also this funny thing. If she did all this to avoid the inheritance tax. In 1934, the French inheritance tax was not particularly large. It would have been around 6% of her assets. There's also like the efforts to confirm Jeanne's old age were really extensive. Like, they pulled school records and were like, “Hey, what's the name of your first-grade teacher?” And she would know. 

People who do this kind of for a living, like actual gerontologists who are experts in age verification, spent literally years poking at Jeanne Calment’s story and did not find any inconsistencies. Like, there are a couple things, like the Vincent Van Gogh thing is really fucking weird. And it seems like that's just kind of like an exaggeration. And as you mentioned, the fact that her signature changed over her life is just not that weird. And the discrepancy on her ID card is that it used to say her eyes were gray, and then eventually it said her eyes were black. 

Aubrey: This is like true crime brain coming after your great-great grandma. 

Michael: Dude, the true crime brain shit is so bad. It's also with the photos too. He's like, “Oh, her nose is different.” But we're talking about photos from the fucking 1920s and 1930s. You can't really tell very much about somebody. And this whole thing about of, like, “Ooh, “She looks different in this photo,” people look so different in different photos from lighting effects, the lenses. 

Aubrey: You know what this is? It's not true crime brain. It's moon landing brain. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Aubrey: It's never happened before. Ergo, it simply couldn't happen. Ergo, this has to be a conspiracy. 

Michael: To me, the reason we're going down this detour, you essentially have this pattern where people who are close to the situation and who've looked into it are like, “Yeah, look, we've also thought of the extremely obvious points that you're making, like, ‘Oh, she could be lying.’ And we've looked into it.”’ And then there's this person who lives in Moscow whose thousands of miles away, has no direct evidence of anything, no direct experience with the case or professional experience doing these kinds of investigations, who's just like, “The math says she's not 122.” This pattern is basically what's going on with Saul Newman's debunking of the blue zones. 

Aubrey: Oh, no. 

Michael: His whole thing is like, “Demographers don't care about bad data,” and stuff, but if you actually read the literature from gerontologists, they've always known that most people who say they're over 100 and very, very most people who say they're over 105 are fucking lying. The field is acutely aware of this and has gone to great lengths to disconfirm previous blue zones and previous people who said they were extremely old.

There was a woman in Kazakhstan who said that she's 130. People go there and they're like, “Nah.” I don't really know why but people in Cuba lie about their age a lot. And so, people like gerontologists are always having to fly to Cuba and then look and be like, “No.” People who do this for a living and have made this their life's work are pretty good at disconfirming old age claims and are not reluctant to be like, “No, this is not a blue zone,” or, “No, this is not a person who's 120.” 

Aubrey: Right. This is the thing where we assume that unless someone is in an extremely professionalized role, that we recognize that they haven't given any thought to their profession. My God, the number of people who used to call my old work and be like, “Hey, you guys are having a hard time getting gay marriage passed. I have an idea. What if you took it to court?” And you're like, “Oh, yeah, fucking nobody thought of that.” 

Michael: Have you tried framing it like this? 

Aubrey: Totally. 

Michael: Tried describing it differently. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Aubrey: “Have you tried telling straight people to imagine [Michael laughs] if their relationships weren't recognized?” Yeah. Yes, we have. 

Michael: So, one thing that is so weird about this paper of Saul Newman's that goes super viral and there's all kinds of articles about like blue zones debunked is like, it doesn't talk about Blue Zones. The whole thing is essentially debunking these UN databases of everyone over 100. And it is true that those databases aren't that good, but also demographers know that they're not that good and they don't really use them. 

Aubrey: So, wait, but how did we get from this paper that is pretty clearly just poking holes in the idea of supercentenarians being at the levels that they're at to, “The blue zones have been debunked”?

Michael: Yeah. This is what drives me fucking crazy. 

Aubrey: Which is how all of this stuff got billed, right? 

Michael: We are now going to scroll up through your text messages, Aubrey, and we are going to reread the essentially only place in his entire document that Saul Newman talks about the blue zones. 

Aubrey: Substantial error rates were recently uncovered in every “blue zone.” In 1997, 30,000 Italian citizens were discovered to be claiming the pension whilst dead. 

Michael: This has nothing to do with blue zones. This is basically just people not filing death certificates for their older relatives and potentially collecting the pensions. But the blue zones have nothing to do with people filing death certificates. They have to do with researchers interviewing people who are over 100 and confirming their birth records. This 2004 study that we talked about where Michel Poulain gets invited to go to Sardinia, they individually confirmed the ages of 600 people. Like, it took years.

They did actually remove one person from the roll because there's a thing in Italy, where at times where there was high infant mortality when your baby died, oftentimes you'd have another kid and give them a similar name or the same name. So, there was this woman who seemed to die when she was 110, but they were using the birth certificate of her sister who died when she was like a year and a half old. Turned out she was actually 107. So again, they're not reluctant to remove people. 

Aubrey: Yeah. 

Michael: Okay, go for the next one. 

Aubrey: In 2008, 42% of Costa Rican 99 plus year olds were revealed to have misstated their age in the 2000 census. 

Michael: That one's just irrelevant. People are not identifying blue zones by looking at census data and then just doing nothing else. 

Aubrey: After limited error correction, the Nicoya blue zone shrunk by around 90% and old age life expectancy plummeted from world leading to “near the bottom of the pack.” 

Michael: So, this one bugs me because this is based on a study by the guy who discovered the Nicoya blue zone. So, there's a researcher there named Luis Rosero-Bixby who discovered the blue zone, took incredible effort to confirm that these age records are real, and then eventually wrote an article called “The Vanishing Advantage of Longevity in Nicoya,” where he talks about, “Yeah, we looked into all the age records, and it turns out the blue zone, where people live a long time, is actually smaller than we initially thought.” So, he's essentially debunking his own work, something that Saul Newman says nobody ever does. And then also, he says there's this cohort shift where like people born before 1930 tend to live a long time in this region, whereas people born after 1930, younger people, are showing more signs of poor health markers and shorter longevity. So again, that doesn't really debunk people that are 110 now. 

Aubrey: Right. That may actually just be a trend. 

Michael: That's just a trend. And this is actually true in essentially all of the blue zones, is that with globalization, a lot of people are emigrating and there's more immigration and patterns, lifestyle stuff is changing, most of these blue zones are kind of not showing the effect that they used to. He's citing the work of demographers to say that demographers don't do this. 

Aubrey: In 2010, over 230,000 Japanese centenarians were discovered to be missing, imaginary, clerical errors or dead, an error rate of 82% in data then considered among the best in the world. 

Michael: So, this one is bizarre. It's based on a BBC article about these 230,000 missing centenarians. That number is really weird because there's only 40,000 centenarians in all of Japan. So, for there to be 230,000 missing centenarians, they're looking at the entire database of every single person who was born in Japan since 1872. 

Aubrey: Oh. 

Michael: All it is, is we have birth records for these people and we don't have death records for 230,000 people. So, some of these are people who like went missing in World War II and just like no one ever filed a death certificate. Maybe because their relatives were dead too. This is fairly typical in this kind of data that you don't have a perfect match between every single birth and every single death being recorded. So, there were people on the rolls that were like 150 years old. But I read a whole academic article about this where they were like, no one really uses this particular database. Like, this isn't showing up in life expectancy stuff. And also, that error rate, if we're looking at all births since 1872, that's an extremely low error rate. 

Aubrey: Oh, yeah. 

Michael: It's a 0.5% error rate. So, this just has, again, nothing to do with blue zones. Blue zones are not being identified by like, “Oh, hey, there's this person who was born and 150 years later we don't have a death certificate.” That's not how they identified the Okinawa Blue zone. 

Aubrey: Yeah, it just seems like this person is reaching for a bunch of problematic age-related data to be like, “Aha. See?”

Michael: Okay, read the last one. There's one more left. 

Aubrey: Greece followed in 2012 when at least 72% of Greek centenarians reported in the census were discovered to be dead or depending on your perspective, committing pension fraud. 

Michael: So, this one is actually true. [Michael and Aubrey laughs] Greece was under all this pressure during the eurozone crisis to tighten down its budget and there were 9,000 people above 100 collecting a pension, which is hella fucking sketchy. That's like a rate of people over 100 higher than anywhere else in the world. They eventually recalculate and double check these things. It turns out there's about 2,000 people in the entire country over 100. So, people were fudging things around for their pensions. That is absolutely true. However, again, that has nothing to do with the Greek blue zone. 

The Greek blue zone is this little tiny island called Ikaria which has a population, a total population of 8,000 people. When they started looking into this, Johnny Pez and Michel Poulain travel to Ikaria to confirm this, there were only 164 people over the age of 90 on this entire island and they contacted them individually. That's what they're doing to confirm the blue zones, is they're literally going door to door. Newman’s entire argument is that this must be pension fraud, but he doesn't really have any data that it's pension fraud. I mean, there's a couple countries like Greece where, like, “Okay, yeah, people are definitely fucking doing this.” But this is another one of these kind of welfare queen myths that we have in America too, that it's so easy to cheat welfare or whatever, but, it's not that easy.

And pension fraud is something that is not looked well upon in most countries and is very easy to root out. Most government agencies have inspectorates that will go and look at people like, “Okay, you say you're 107. You've been collecting a pension for 40 years. Is this really true?” There are many procedures in most countries to look into this stuff. And again, Newman just doesn't address that at all. He's like, “Well, Greece has a lot of people doing it.” And yeah, but it was also really fucking obvious the minute they looked at it, that a lot of people were lying and they fixed it. 

Aubrey: A friend of mine was on SSDI for years, Social Security disability. And from time to time, because she was given less than $900 a month to live on for all of her expenses, There would be times when I would get her groceries or something. I mean just be like, that's not possible. And any time I sent her any amount of money, I would reliably get a call from the SSDI investigators in her state. 

Michael: No way. 

Aubrey: The smallest amount I got called for was $20. 

Michael: No way. I didn't actually know they did that. 

Aubrey: My God, man. The idea that many, many, many people are out here committing pension fraud in nations that presumably care about where their money is going is like nutso. 

Michael: There are places like Greece where there's actual evidence that this is taking place, but you have to present actual evidence. You can't just say, “Oh, all these people who say they're old are doing it for the pensions.” And in his paper, the only actual blue zone that he looks into is Okinawa. There's a paper in 2008 called “They really are that old: A validation study of centenarian prevalence in Okinawa.” [Aubrey laughs] And there's also a 2011 paper by Michel Poulain called Exceptional longevity in Okinawa: A plea for in-depth validation, where they talk about this challenge of, like, yeah, a lot of the records were destroyed in World War II, but they actually look at parts of Okinawa where there was more destruction and places where the records were relatively intact and they don't find more centenarians in places where the records were destroyed.

People have made extraordinary efforts. And this paper by Poulain about Okinawa is really interesting. He's like, “Yeah, it's really fucking hard to confirm this. And we need to have better methods as a field.” This isn't the only place where data is spotty and we shouldn't just accept people's testimony, “I don’t know. I'm 130.” You have to kind of triangulate your way to concluding, like there really just are a lot of old people here. And I'm not endorsing the work of Michel Poulain. This is also a guy who gives lifestyle advice, which I don't think is justified by the data.

But the core point that I'm making is that if you want to debunk the blue zones, you have to actually debunk the blue zones. You have to debunk the specific work that gerontologists have done to confirm these places. You can't just say, “Well, Greece has a real big problem with pension fraud. And therefore, this project where they spent years going door to door and confirming people's birth records in Greece is fake.” These are just two completely separate things. 

Aubrey: You and I have talked about this before on the show that your findings are your findings, and you shouldn't sugarcoat or change your findings based on sort of public response. And also, we live in a world where findings like these get immediately translated into individual directives- 

Michael: Yes, exactly. 

Aubrey: -on how to live and what to eat. This is all super fascinating to me and I still feel really uneasy with the idea that there's a fucking blue zones cookbook. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Aubrey: If we're taking the research on the researcher's terms, there is nothing that I have heard thus far to indicate that the unique thread that sort of holds all of these places together is something about the foods that they all eat.

Michael: Totally. I will also say, in defense of Newman, like I'm criticizing his conclusions here. However, he does have huge portions of his paper where he's like, “Yeah, they say that in Okinawa, it's the sweet potatoes that are making people live longer, but they actually have lower sweet potato consumption than the rest of Japan.” And Dan Buettner says, “Oh, they love gardening in Okinawa,” but there's public surveys where people say that they garden less than other areas of Japan. 

Aubrey: And that's self-report. [laughs]

Michael: This is why I wanted to spend so much time debunking the concept of blue zones on its own fucking terms before we got to this. Because yes, all this stuff about lifestyle is just like, there isn't really data to back it up. Untangling causation from just statistical flukes is really fucking hard and it's so facile to just be like, “They eat turmeric in Sardinia, and so you should eat turmeric, and you'll live to 100.” No. 

Aubrey: Right. It's worth finding out, and we haven't fucking found out yet, right? 

Michael: Well, well, the thing is, I don't want to go back to the inbreeding. 

Aubrey: Oh, no, Michael. This is my [unintelligible 01:03:17] [Michael laughs] by the way, you bringing up this much incest talk is really I am learning I have a threshold.

Michael: From what I’ve found from reading all this literature, is that the phenomenon of people living past 110 is kind of a distinct phenomenon from average life expectancy. And from all the data that I've found about it appears to be mostly genetic. People who live past 110 almost always have like two or three family members who live past 110, there appears to be something in some people that literally makes them age more slowly. The fact that all of these blue zones are like remote regions where you have genetically distinct populations, I think the original explanation in that 2004 paper is probably correct. Something clustered in the Sardinian highlands over time and happens to make people age a little bit more slowly. I don't actually think it's going to be a lifestyle thing. 

Aubrey: You think it's atmospheric or genetic or something else?

Michael: Yeah, I mean, there's-- One of the papers I read says longevity, defined as top 10% of survivors and beyond, is transmitted as a quantitative genetic trait. I don't find the concept of centenarians all that useful when-- I think we should just look at life expectancy and we can find all kinds of information about what seems to extend life expectancy. And I spent a decent amount of time looking into this, and it's almost all medical system stuff. It's like getting cancer screened.

Aubrey: 100 fucking percent. Shocking-

Michael: It's like vaccines. 

Aubrey: -that the thing that keeps people alive is healthcare. 

Michael: I think this is just like a really complex and super-interesting field. And it's just really hard to determine what affects life expectancy. Also, because things are changing so quickly, lifestyles have changed so dramatically over the last 100 years that somebody who's living to 100 now, it's just really hard to say what did it. And also, can we replicate the conditions of 1924 even if we wanted to? 

Aubrey: Yes. And also, we’ve got to stop doing the kind of news coverage that is like somebody lived past 100 and now we're going to ask them how they did it. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Aubrey: Yeah. It's very cute and sweet that the grandma from Texas told everybody she drinks a Dr. Pepper every day and that's how she lived to 110-

Michael: I know, that just isn't useful. 

Aubrey: -but that's not like health advice. It's not useful. And again, as you're noting, most of the things that are going to make a big difference are going to be large-scale correlations rather than like a clean causation relationship. And they're going to be systemic, not like individual practices. 

Michael: It's like such a weird conclusion at the end of the episode where we're like, “Yeah, blue zones are bullshit, but not for the reasons this guy says they're bullshit.” [laughs]  

Aubrey: Yeah. Yes, yes. 

Michael: Saul Newman is saying that people aren't really living to 100 in these areas. I'm saying they probably are living to 100 in these areas. I think these areas are true. However, I don't think any of the lifestyle aspects [laughs] on these things is useful. People in the highlands of Sardinia live a little bit differently than other people in Italy, but not that much. There isn't evidence that it's the fucking sweet potatoes or the gardening, but there isn't evidence that it's pension fraud either. 

Aubrey: You know what I'm realizing as we're talking about this, is that the blue zone stuff has traveled a really similar path to a bunch of the BMI stuff, which is population level observations that then sort of worms its way into an opportunity to make money for somebody and becomes an individual directive. 

Michael: Exactly. 

Aubrey: It's a wild one to be like, “Oh, we're in the middle of one of those right now. We're doing a BMI, everybody.” 

Michael: So, in conclusion, they're not the blue zones, they're the true zones. [Aubrey laughs] It’s accurate. 

Aubrey: I told you it was a good tag line. 

Michael: [laughs]

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