Ah, the Blue Zones. Those places where people live longer and healthier lives than anybody else. Where a nightly glass of wine helps extend lifespan.
At a time when moderate drinking is under attack, the Blue Zone narrative feels like solid proof that wine has an important role to play in a healthy life.
Alas, it seems the Blue Zones are just a myth.
The Blue Zones
The Blue Zones are five regions of the world where people are said to live for 100 years or more, thanks to days spent walking up and down steep hills and eating healthy food.
The five zones are Okinawa Prefecture, Japan; Nuoro Province, Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; and Icaria, Greece. In four of these places, people include a glass or two of wine a day with their meals.
“You can consume alcohol and live to a happy 100, even up to one drink daily for women, two for men,” writes Aislinn Kotifani at the bluezones.com, the official website of Blue Zones®. “We know from blue zones centenarians that this is true: People in four original blue zones areas drink alcohol moderately and regularly.”
The Sardinians are supposed to be particularly healthy, thanks to their local Cannonau, a red wine said to be particularly rich in antioxidants.
Unfortunately, according to Saul Justin Newman, a senior research fellow at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies, there are no “Blue Zones”. There are only places riddled with bad record keeping, where grasping family members never fill out death certificates, so they can keep claiming the dead person’s pension.
Newman has just won a major prize for his research into the matter — an Ig Nobel, awarded for research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think”.
The coming of the Blue Zones
Around the turn of the century, cyclist and expeditioner Dan Buettner convinced National Geographic to help him explore those places in the world where people lived to a very old age. His work culminated in a 2005 National Geographic cover story, “Secrets of Long Life”, which attracted enormous attention.
After that, Buettner worked with collaborators to identify other longevity regions and wrote up his findings in the bestselling book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest. There have since been spin-off books, updated books, recipe books, and a Netflix mini-series, along with speeches, prizes and collaborations with researchers.
But, says Newman, it’s just not true that there are Blue Zones full of unusually old people.
“In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up,” he wrote in The Conversation. “I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 100 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate.”
To put this in context: “In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.”
Newman, a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University when he started looking into it, discovered that what the Blue Zones really had in common was dodgy record keeping.
Take Okinawa. “There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.”
Newman says that the so-called Japanese centenarians are mostly found in places where American bombers destroyed records in World War II. The problem in Greece and Italy, on the other hand, is that there are thousands of people fraudulently collecting pensions on behalf of dead relatives.
Newman adds that at least 72% of the Greek centenarians he tracked were dead or missing, or were pension fraud cases. Sardinia is another place where the data is “questionable”.
As for the living, they turned out to be anything but healthy. According to that Conversation article, the “Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.”
Overall, says Newman, longevity data is just “rotten from the inside out”.
The fallout
After Newman finished his research, he couldn’t get it peer reviewed or published, which he told the New York Times was probably because it showed that a lot of existing research was nonsense.
But he was finally recognised at a recent ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Newman accepted his Ig Nobel in front of a cheering audience of scientists. Other prize winners included Japanese scientists who identified some mammals that can breathe through their anus, and a multinational team who studied whether the hair on the heads of people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction as people in the southern hemisphere (no).
But while the Blue Zones might be bunk, the evidence is still clear that wine in moderation is an important component of the Mediterranean diet.
With or without fraudulent pension records.
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