They were supposed to be real-life fountains of youth. In March 2000 the term “Blue Zone” was first used to describe Sardinia, an Italian island that appeared to be home to a statistically improbable number of people living past the age of 100. In the decades since, four more areas have been identified around the globe where locals apparently have an increased chance of becoming a centenarian: Okinawa in Japan; Nicoya in Costa Rica; Ikaria in Greece and Loma Linda in California. These so-called Blue Zones have inspired countless studies, cookbooks, travel stories and even their own Netflix documentary series (2023’s Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones). The trouble is, the outlandish claims about the life-giving properties of these regions just don’t stand up to close scrutiny.
Last month, Dr Saul Newman of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for his work debunking Blue Zones. Newman’s investigation into serious flaws in the data about the world’s oldest people saw him take home an award that has been handed out since 1991 for scientific research that “makes people laugh, and then think.” Newman says that when he looked into the claims about Blue Zones he found a pattern of significant data being routinely ignored if it didn’t fit the desired narrative, and statistical anomalies that could be better explained by administrative errors or cases of pension fraud. “It’s as if you gave the captain of the Titanic nine goes at it and he’s smacked into the iceberg every time,” Newman tells The Independent of the research. “What’s most astounding is that nobody in the academic community seems to have thought it’s ridiculous before this. It’s absurd.”
Take Sardinia, the original Blue Zone. While it was purported to be home to crowds of centenarians, EU figures show that the island only ranks around 36-44th for longevity in the continent. Many of those who were supposed to have reached very old age in their Italian idyll turned out to in fact be dead, they just hadn’t been reported as such to the authorities. “Sometimes the mafia is involved, sometimes it’s carers,” says Newman. “There’s a lot of cases in Italy where younger relatives have just kept claiming the pension even though granddad’s out the back in the olive garden.”
Kevin EG Perry: Collected Works 