World’s Infamous Blue Zones Are Nonsense, Academic Claims

The concept of blue zones, areas of the world where people are said to live to be more than 100 years old, is utter nonsense, according to a researcher at the University College of London (UCL).

Saul Newman has thoroughly investigated the blue zones and concluded that it is all based on inaccurate data. According to Newman, the blue zones are a product of bad data collection and fraud. Blue zones have been the object of people’s fascination for years as the world seeks to determine what is behind the phenomenon of these centenarian zones.

There were investigative features, cookbooks with recipes from the zones, and even a Netflix documentary, but all that searching could have been for naught.

Blue zones are nonsense?

The world’s five blue zones are Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California. These drastically different areas of the world are all commonly known as the places that are supposedly home to the highest concentrations of centenarians.

However, according to Newman’s in-depth research, the high centenarian density of blue zones is a product of pension fraud and terrible record keeping.

“I found that the centenarians in the blue zones were missing or dead when the study was conducted,” said Newman.

Newman claimed that he tracked down most of the supposed centenarians and found there was a striking pattern between old age poverty and blue zones, suggesting a link with pension fraud.

“I tracked down 80 percent of the people in the world who are aged over 110 and found where they had been born, where they died, and analyzed the population level patterns,” he said in speaking to Al Jazeera.

“They were getting older on paper, but they were already dead,” Newman revealed.

Newman also cited the clerical errors of several of the blue zone nations as one of the main reasons blue zones are nonsense. Bureaucratic inconsistencies and blunders tend to stockpile over time and result in the miscalculation of population density and overall census data.

In 2010, the Japanese government admitted that 82 percent of its centenarian citizens had passed away. In 2012, Greece’s government stated that 72 percent of its over 100 population had passed away, yet were still collecting their pension checks.

Moreover, Newman found that the blue zones had another point in common: poor health throughout the population. He found it hard to believe that the places that showed a healthy population did not have as many centenarians as the blue zones.

“At the time, I had mapped more than 80% of the world’s 110-year-olds. And what was striking is that those 110-year-olds were not falling in regions with good health,” Newman said in an episode of the Vox Media podcast, “Today, Explained.”

He added, “They were…in regions that had terrible health, and surprisingly that was the shared characteristic of most blue zones.”

Newman also claims that missing birth certificates play a significant role, saying that the fraudulent claims of centenarians sometimes fly under the radar.