Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever

To be clear, your quote is not a claim the article makes. That sentence in the article is paraphrasing Saul Newman's claims. The article itself explicitly disavows the claim, treating Poulain and Buettner generously and giving them paragraphs upon paragraphs to respond (Newman got two paragraphs; Poulain and Buettner get twenty). The article's actual position, like the headline, is that "twenty-five years after the first blue zones were identified, it’s impossible to say whether they were ever real or not."

(I happen to agree with Newman and probably you -- it seems like there is a very clear answer to whether blue zones were ever real or not.)

Another suspected issue is dodging the draft during WW2 by pretending to be too old. In rural areas with shoddy record keeping you can get away with pretending to be your dead uncle.

> Dr Newman showed that the highest rates of achieving extreme old age are predicted by high poverty, the lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds. Poverty and pressure to commit pension fraud were shown to be excellent indicators of reaching ages 100+ in a way that is ‘the opposite of rational expectations’.

Blue Zones absolutely destroyed.

I can't tell if it's a feature or a flaw of academia that some topics can so be thoroughly proven/disproven, and yet so many researchers continue to devote their careers to it. Should more effort be given to enforcing existing knowledge and consensus, or is preserving intellectual freedom more important? Granted, I understand Blue Zone stuff is mostly due to marketing incentives...

The most amazing part of Blue Zones, IMO, is the staying power of a few mythological health Shangri-La places.

Debunked or not, people will repeat this idea for a generation or two until, ironically, anyone that's read the book has shuffled off this mortal coil.

> the ingredients to statistical longevity are well understood to minimally include: eat better and maintain a level of fitness.

I went to a talk recently where someone who did longevity research listed high-impact things vs low-impact things for a long life. They claimed things like (numbers are from memory)

* eating legumes - live 2 extra years

* eating vegatables - live 3-6 extra month.

* walk 5-6km a day - live 2 extra years

* run several km several times a week - live extra 3 months

I'm not going stop eating veggies and I'm not going to stop exercising but it did make me wonder if their research was true.

It is just good advice. I follow this fairly closely, not so much for life span (although that would be nice) but simply for health span.

Knowing my luck some hyper cancer will just come out from somewhere and take me out in a few weeks or I just slip down the stairs one day. But I try to sway the odds.

Community is the one that I feel is most under threat these days...

> eat healthy

It sounds so simple, yet incredibly controversial when we go into the details.

The people actually living up to 100+ years usually have been drinking/smoking or doing some other drugs to some extent, and that alone is a whole can of worm in the current climate.

> having friends

They are many unreported elderlies living alone in the middle of nowhere minding their business. I remember a documentary about a guy growing mushrooms (Shiitake) in the forest and only getting down to the town every 6 months to give them to his wife, and he'd get back to being alone until the next time.

I think you've missed the entire point of TFA.

It is, in fact, highly debatable whether blue zones exist at all. That is, it is highly debatable whether there are any places in the world where longevity is statistically significantly longer than anywhere else.

Newman says (and insists) that the answer is "there are none". Buettner insists "there are". One of them is wrong.

No, they were fraud. Eating healthy, exercising, and having friends is great advice for statistical longevity, but is distinct from the concept of "blue zones," which were just pension fraud.

Median life expectancy is affected by a much larger number of variables, and is also susceptible to just as much (if not more) number fudging and statisitical nudging. Maybe the country also has a large subset of obese alcoholics for example. If someone lives to be over 100, that in and of itself is a pretty valuable data point

Because people are interested in whether they, personally, could find a way to live longer. And so if you find places where you have bubbles of people who seem to cross a threshhold not really crossed in other places, you might tell yourself "maybe there's something special there".

The median life expectancy means you're only in the top half! But well... simply being well off means you're going to be more likely to hit above average there.

because that's generally not enough to separate lifestyle from genetics and environment.

Extreme agers are rare enough that they're highly unlikely to show up in median statistics. If there are people living exceptionally long, they're still a small proportion. You might get some mileage from percentile analysis (95%ile, 99%ile), and there may be robust research methodology along those lines (I'm not tapped into that).

Which actually does leverage your concept somewhat (increase the sample size to include more members, and reduce extreme outliers). There is also plenty of analysis which does benefit by median (vs. mean or maximum) analysis, or by looking closely at observed distributions and outlier characteristics.

Its even better to have a government pension that sends checks to your address as long as you are alive.

Alas, the easiest advice is the hardest to follow short term but the best to do long term.

Eat fewer calories. Consume as little added sugar as possible.

You don't have to eat much better. You can trivially supplement. It's far more important to eat less.

Yes and no. The article does not go into the full history of the phrase, but it goes back to the work of Dr Ancel Keys, who was a fascinating genius of a man, with an equally talented wife. He did his crucial work on nutrition in the post-war years and this included a massive study of what people ate around the world, for longevity.

In his findings, the Okinawa people scored highly but they were Japanese and Japan was not liked that much by Americans after the 1940s for some reason. The Mediterranean folks scored highly as well, so the advice was to follow that rather than the Japanese diet.

Ancel Keys did his work before the Boeing 747, affordable cars and the shipping container came along, so people in the so-called Blue Zones were not exposed to international cuisine or the Standard American Diet.

The sad fact is that the Standard American Diet (processed food) does tend to wreck many a blue zone, or even a high standard of cuisine. Also, from the article, good old capitalist greed gets in the way too. The Adventist community did well in the original studies because they were not eating meat, or most of them were not. They were vegan before the word vegan was invented, or at least the 'strict vegetarian' members of their community were. Nowadays it sounds like 'Adventist' + 'LLC', an unholy alliance, you just know it.

Despite blue zones no longer being real, all of the original research by Ancel Keys is legitimate. He had no ideological axe to grind, his work is just exceptional science, albeit easily knocked down by social media nutrition influencer types that happen to get funding from the beef and dairy industries.

Hence the clickbait of the article, times have changed, no longer do people live in communities that are spared from the Standard American Diet (processed food) and yet the OG Ancel Keys work doesn't get a mention.

Anything that promises anti-aging, better looks, making money, finding your soulmate, total safety and security, etc., is going to lend itself to outrageous marketing. Because these are some of the chief desires of humanity.

It was writer Bill Porter who said it best "The single best thing to increase longevity is to reduce stress.". This was in response to an anecdotal observation that a lot of Chinese hermits that lived in the mountains had exceptional life spans.

I mean they are fairly active, eat fairly lean meals and don't have much constant stress, so they are ideal conditions for longevity.

This is your personal opinion or general consensus?

Tell me you didn't read TFA without telling me.

And in fact, TFA is pretty sympathetic to your position, but not as absolutely certain as you are.

Blue zones do exist for sure. That's where you can park your car for 2 hours and have to place a blue card underneath your windshield that tells the time you left it there.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkeerschijfzone