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! Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks! The global pattern of centenarians highlights deep problems in demographyLate-life mortality ...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Okay, uh, for the first time in a long time, it is straightforwardly your job to tag us.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Because we haven't done a microsode in a while.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  I've just really forgotten how nervous it makes me.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  What?

• 0:26Speaker 01

  That you are going to judge my terrible tagline.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  That's, that's really the dynamic, just a long, stony silence after whatever you say.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the vibe.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Is that it, Aubrey?

• 0:36Speaker 01

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

• 0:46Speaker 00

  What?

• 0:49Speaker 00

  That's bait. That's bait. You wanted to see how disapproving I would be. What even was that?

• 0:58Speaker 00

  The true zone?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Nailed it!

• 1:02Speaker 00

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

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe that you are judging me harshly. Absolutely. Uh, I'm Aubrey Gordon.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  I'm Michael Hobbs.

• 1:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Same content.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Michael.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Aubrey.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Today.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Today.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  You are taking us into the true zone.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  Oh, God, you're gonna make it a thing all episode.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  I'm gonna call it back. It's my finest work yet.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  What do you know about blue zones, actually? Do you have like a definition? Are you, are you aware of the Netflix documentary and stuff?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  So 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.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I've been trying to stay fresh on it and like avoiding coverage of it, which has been hard. Because there has been like a high-profile debunking.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Of blue zones, as I understand it, yes?

• 2:13Speaker 00

  I really went on a journey with this, Aubrey.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  I want to take you on a journey with me.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  I can't wait.

• 2:19Speaker 00

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

• 2:28Speaker 01

  What?

• 2:28Speaker 00

  We're gonna tell a very complicated story eventually. But first, we just have to talk about like, the history of the concept of blue zones.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Throughout culture, throughout history, people have made claims that they're really old. Like, people would say, like, "I'm 140 years old." And they're oftentimes coupled with this idea that there's these like, 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.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  I just have always assumed that the sort of anti-aging world is like, the original wellness grift.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  It really is, yeah, yeah. So basically, the field of gerontology, which I've been reading a lot of the last couple of 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, you know, 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, like, looking for age records. You're gonna make a joke with the name, aren't you?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Does he?

• 3:54Speaker 00

  All right, just get it over with.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Does he, does he shoot his research right out of his neck?

• 3:59Speaker 00

  All right.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  I really love that you knew it was coming.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  I hear your little breath as I'm talking, like, "Here it comes. She wants to do a thing about the name."

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Of course. Listen, you knew that the first time you read that name. And you're like, "Oh, my dad joke co-host is gonna bust in like the fucking Kool-Aid man."

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  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. So one of the most consistent findings in old age research is that women live, you know, three 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.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  I've read various descriptions of this presentation, and it sounds like he was essentially laughed out of the room. Oh. Everyone at this conference was just like, the men are obviously exaggerating, right? If men are like, ha, ha, ha, I'm 150, it's guys being dudes.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Just a bunch of Brian Johnsons.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Just a bunch of fucking Brian Johnsons out here, right? And so at this conference, he meets another researcher named Michelle Poulan. And everyone is like, well, somebody's got to like, go confirm these ages, right? Like, they're obviously lying. It's just like every other fucking myth of these like, longevity communities, like, someone needs to go and like debunk this, whatever. So Michelle Poulan 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 Poulan 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.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Looking at the entire map of Sardinia, he has areas where there's tons of blue dots. Right, right, right. 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 like, 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.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:27Speaker 00

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

• 7:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Great, sure. I mean, I guess.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And also the author of like, there's like a Blue Zones cookbook and there's like, there's like a little Blue Zones mini empire.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  We will get to it. He's published, I think it's like eight books about Blue Zones.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  He really has made this his entire career. His bio is like 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 mentioned 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 like 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.

• 9:05Speaker 00

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

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Was. Look, Michael, yes, I personally died of dysentery like at least 30 times.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  He makes something called the Africa Trail CD-ROM after his Africa bike trip. Once he gets back from these various trips, he starts like 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 like 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 a live satellite uplink component to this. And then kids in the classrooms

• 10:19Speaker 00

  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, what is it about certain places that make people live longer? I still not 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 learning, live learning. Thing he like interviews a bunch of old people. Nothing really comes of that, though.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  So this remains a interest of his. And in 2004, he sees the article by Michelle 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 the central tension at the heart of this, and like, I think ultimately the downfall of blue zones is around this question of like, are we engaged in an academic endeavor? What explains why these people are old? Or are we engaged in like an advice giving endeavor?

• 11:43Speaker 01

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

• 11:53Speaker 00

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

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Right. They're trying to verify like, we think we're seeing this thing. Are we really seeing this thing?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 12:25Speaker 01

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

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Adding 10 years?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Secrets.

• 12:51Speaker 01

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

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  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 some, they offer three sets of best practices to emulate. The rest is up to you. So he infomercialled it. He went full, "There's got to be a better way."

• 13:43Speaker 00

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

• 13:49Speaker 01

  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. Like, it's just, it's wild how huckstery the like tone of this is.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  And he describes elsewhere that, you know, he went with the demographers. He went with Pez and Pulain to Sardinia to like, talk to people. He does this in other areas, too. The actual researchers have questionnaires that they give people about like, their diet and lifestyle habits. Or like, Pulain is like, "What, where are your school records? How do I find your birth certificate?" Like, he's, 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?" And like, not, not to cancel my own grandma on the show or whatever, but like-

• 14:37Speaker 01

  I can't wait to hear where this goes.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  But like, my grandmother's not a reliable narrator of how she breached 100, right? It's like asking like, naturally extremely thin people, how to be thin.

• 14:49Speaker 01

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

• 15:01Speaker 00

  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, right? It's like- We left the land where we had these simple lifestyles and now we live in this this desiccated version of human life. We're all packed in together, et cetera. 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, right? Like waking up with the sunrise.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  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 like walking the earth.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  He actually, I listened to a couple of 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 like that. That's lovely, right? Like finding these indigenous communities and like sharing stories of their societies. But like, I think that's what Dan thinks that he's doing. But what he's really doing is he's sort of, 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 like the welfare structure that they have in Italy? Or like, you know, what are the statins these people are taking, right? He's specifically seeking out these kind of like close to the land types of practices.

• 16:27Speaker 01

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

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  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 of a.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  That's the thing. He's describing them as like, 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.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  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. Send you a little description of that study.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  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 Adventists' 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.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  The average Adventist lived four to 10 years longer than the average Californian. That makes the Adventists one of the nation's most convincing cultures of longevity.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Something is very funny about the fact that the first-ever article, right, 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 like, 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, you know, 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

• 19:03Speaker 00

  years longer than the Mississippi average.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  This just isn't a blue zone.

• 19:07Speaker 01

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

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Dan later says, he's like, "Oh, the only reason this is in there is because my editors wanted somewhere in the United States."

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Huh?

• 19:20Speaker 00

  But then what's wild is he just like keeps it. So like, 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, "Well, 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."

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, what the fuck?

• 19:33Speaker 00

  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 Michelle Poulin to travel around the world and like confirm these areas. So eventually they're contacted by a researcher in Costa Rica. There's a small peninsula in Costa Rica called Nikoya where again, there's just a lot of people who live to 100. They also identify an island in Greece called Ikaria. In 2008, Dan publishes his book, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who Live the Longest. I read this book. It's an interesting mix of like very kind of normal

• 20:16Speaker 00

  lifestyle advice and like weird crank bullshit. So each of the little sections has like 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 sardini section.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:52Speaker 00

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

• 21:01Speaker 01

  It's like weird Weight Watchers brain kind of stuff.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  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?

• 21:13Speaker 00

  He has a whole thing about like 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.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Right. It's very TED Talk-y, very life hack-y, very like just this one weird trick.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  I do want to give the book some credit. I think as far as sort of fad diet-y or like 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. 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 like eat until you're stuffed. He provides a bunch of recipes and they're all kind of like, fine. Like, he's not saying like eat 500 calories a day.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  It sounds like a lot of the stuff in here is like, not gonna hurt you.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  It just sort of has like horse blinders on.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  The other thing I wanted to mention, a major component of the Blue Zone's advice is like, trying to find a purpose in your life and trying to build wholesome intimate relationships. And like, I love this.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, these all seem lovely.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  This is maybe the first book we've ever talked about that actually has this in there.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Totally. It's this and Angela Lansbury.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  He also has a little bit of kind of structural stuff and this, this comes out in his interviews. He, he says like, this isn't really about like individual willpower. It's about like the environments that we've created. I mean, this is at odds with all of his other fucking like little life hacky advice. But like, he does kind of acknowledge the basic realities that like, American life makes us very difficult. So this is from the book.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  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 de-stress."

• 24:00Speaker 00

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

• 24:07Speaker 01

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

• 24:13Speaker 00

  There's also some kind of bad advice. He, 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.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  "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.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  All but one of the 50 or so centenarians I interviewed had a daughter or granddaughter who actively cared for them."

• 25:18Speaker 00

  There are no long-term care facilities in Sardinia. It's like, not something to emulate.

• 25:24Speaker 01

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

• 25:29Speaker 00

  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 old people.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  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."

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Oh no, is this all the shit that's like, "Your fat friends are making you fat, your depressed friends are making you depressed."

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Very explicitly. So here's this.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  "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."

• 26:37Speaker 00

  I don't know, man. Be a vegetarian, don't be, bike around, don't bike around, whatever, but it, it feels really toxic and bad to be like, you should cut people out of your life if they don't have the same health habits as you.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  This pops up, I would say, every few years or so in like, 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."

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Oh god. So, I want to get into critiques of like, the Blue Zones, just as a concept, because you know, this is now like, a whole academic field. Before we get to that, I do want to talk a little bit about like, my jokerfication when it comes to Dan Buettner.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 27:21Speaker 00

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

• 27:52Speaker 01

  The term "Blue Zones" was first coined by Blue Zones founder, Dan Buettner.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  A National Geographic explorer and fellow and journalist. 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.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  He did not coin the term. It's it. It's right there in black and white, man. You didn't coin the term blue zones.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  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 like 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.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Michael, you're just salty because we did that episode and I invented the food pyramid. I'm just so mad.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  And also even the Okinawa stuff, he writes himself into it. He's like, oh, in 1999, I went to Okinawa. But like, there was a bestselling 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 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 bestselling book about Okinawa and you went there.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  You're just a journalist, man. It's fine.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  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 that the 2000s. Apparently they they broke up at some point relatively recently, sometime between 2020 and 2023. Gianni 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 bestselling books. Butner patents the term blue zone. So basically this is to prevent other people from like marketing it.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, like those pesky researchers who came up with it.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Exactly. That is how this feels. So Michelle Pouline says that he, he had no idea that Dan patented the term "blue zones."

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  It's kind of funny. There's now two blue zones websites. So one run by Butner is blueszones.com. And Michelle Pouline, who's like the actual researcher who did all the fucking yeoman's work to confirm the ages of all these locations, he runs longevityblueszones.com.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Oh, it's not twozones.com?

• 30:47Speaker 00

  True zones. It's all coming back. The other, like, even beyond, like, leaving Dan Butner out of it, when you look into what we now know about the actual blue zones, it's a much more complicated picture. So 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.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  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 like, we know that smoking is bad for you.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  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, and 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?

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  If we're cherry picking stuff that is confirmed by other research, well, then we should just be doing the other research. Like, what is the point of Sardinia, then?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  This is like, the tricky thing about all this stuff, right, 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.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Oh, I need to practice more incest? Awesome.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, Chardonnay and cousin fucking.

• 31:57Speaker 01

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

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Well, that to me is like, the, 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. That would be weird advice to give. Like, if you want to live a long time, don't have kids.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, for real.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  But I do think, as an academic endeavor, it's really interesting to know that.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Stressors might reduce your lifespan. Like, having kids is a I think to discover these sorts of patterns is super interesting, but that's not really lifestyle advice.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Right?

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. The other one that he mentions a lot in all of the literature about around blue zones is red wine. You know, in Sardinia, they drink so much red wine and 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.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  That's very funny.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  It 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?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  It's also turns out to be the same thing with this, like, 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.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  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 like even more like 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 like 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.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Is this something we should replicate? Like patriarchy? I'm not trying to like cancel Sardinia, but it's just like, if we're interested in academic endeavor of like, hey, what? What explains this? We would look at the good and the bad of these societies. But when you go through these societies, you know, 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.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Even in the earlier quote that you pulled, it was like, yeah, younger daughters and women. Take care of older people and men, right?

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  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 of like, what are the?

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 01

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

• 34:48Speaker 00

  A quote that I was going to read you from the National Geographic article earlier, but I forgot is he's talking about like stress, like the, the less stressful lifestyles of Zordania. 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."

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Oh, God. Hey.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  So get your ragazza to do the worrying.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  So this is the high profile debunking, yes?

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Exactly. This is why we're here today.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Right. This is the reason for the season.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, it sounds like you and me.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  He is a biologist, but he's not, he's like a plant biologist. And all of his other publications are like kind of technical things.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Well, then he's not like you and me.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So 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.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  It's basically that like, we can't say anything about blue zones or about like the clustering of the old people because all of the data is garbage.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  So he starts with a, a general critique of the, the sort of entire field of gerontology. He talks about how, you know, age is a really important risk factor. And yet there's no actual objective way to measure how old somebody is.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  It's especially difficult for centenarians because, you know, if somebody's 100 years old in 2024, that means they were born in 1924, which means we're relying on records from like a very different time, right? Government capacities were very different.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  And because the field of gerontology essentially emerges in the 1970s, we're then going back to people born in the 1870s.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 01

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

• 37:57Speaker 00

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

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Right. Yes.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  When they have a little sniffle. When they have the sniffles.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  He says the, 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, right? 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, right? Because if your mom is getting a pension, you can just be like, I am my mom. And then you get free money.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  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 the thesis statement.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  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 like 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.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Oh, no, Mike.

• 40:23Speaker 00

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

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Why do I feel called out by this?

• 40:30Speaker 00

  No, same, same, same, same.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  I absolutely would have picked 7.

• 40:34Speaker 00

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

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. That's like a women in the workforce thing.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  But like, 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.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Jeez Louise.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  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 Nikoya 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

• 41:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:16Speaker 00

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

• 42:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  So it’s a pretty strong case.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  We can’t really say where people over 100 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 like, you don't have the fucking records.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  So 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?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  No, I have not.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Okay, so 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.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  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 like, it's really fucking sketchy that the oldest person is 122 and the second oldest person is 119. It's like a really, really, really unlikely result that this woman was 122. They also start looking around, there's, there's various like transcripts of interviews with her. And they find other discrepancies. So she's born in 1875.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  And when she's growing up, there's a massive cholera epidemic in the small town in France where she lives that like, she doesn't mention in any of her stories about growing up. She also says that she was friends with Vincent Van Gogh. People are just like, that's a weird move.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  They also note that her French ID card has her eye color changes halfway through her life. And they also note her signature, like, gets kind of loopier and changes over her life, too.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Your signature changing is like a known thing.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:49Speaker 01

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

• 45:55Speaker 00

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

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Oh, hey.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  This aligns with kind of everything we know about old age claims. Like, there's always been these mythical figures who say, like, well, I'm like 131 million years old. And like, they never turn out to be true. So it's like, another one.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  However, the theory that Jean Calment, like, faked her death is basically a conspiracy theory.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 46:34Speaker 00

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

• 47:01Speaker 01

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

• 47:06Speaker 00

  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 like, 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 Jean Calment for the rest of her life and maintains this idea that her daughter died. Every single person who knew her says, like, yeah, she did not swap bodies. The mother and daughter didn't even- Look similar.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  This is a talented Mr. Ripley situation.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  Like, full on.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  There's also this funny thing, like, 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.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  There's also, like, the, the efforts to confirm Jean'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.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  People who do this kind of for a living, like, actual gerontologists who are experts in age verification, spent literally years poking at Jean Calment's story and did not find any inconsistencies. Like, there are a couple of things, like, the Vincent Van Gogh thing is really fucking weird, and it, it seems like that's just kind of like a, an exaggeration. And, as you mentioned, like, the fact that her signature changed over her life is just not that weird. And

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  This is like True Crime Brain coming after

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Dude.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Your, like, great-great-grandma.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  The True Crime Brain shit is so bad. It's also with the photos, too. He's like, ooh, her nose is different. But, like, we're talking about photos from the fucking 1920s and 1930s. You can't really tell very much about somebody. And this whole thing of like, ooh, she looks different in this photo. People look so different in different photos, from, like, lighting effects, the lenses.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  You know what this is? It's not True Crime Brain, it's Moon Landing Brain.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 01

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

• 49:15Speaker 00

  To me, the, the reason we're going down this detour, you essentially have this pattern where, like, people who are close to the situation and who've looked into it are like, yeah, look, we've, 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's, who lives in Moscow, who's 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.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  This, this pattern is basically what's going on with Saul Newman's Bunking of the blue zones.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  His whole thing is like, demographers don't care about like, bad data and stuff. But if you actually read the literature from gerontologists, they've always known that like, most people who say they're over 100 and very, very most people who say they're over 105 are fucking lying. Like, 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. So like, there was a woman in Kazakhstan who said that she's 130. People go there and they're like, nah. There's like, I don't really know why, but like, 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.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Right. This is the thing where we're like, we assume that unless someone is in like, an extremely professionalized role, that we recognize that they like, haven't given any thought to their profession.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Right? 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."

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Have you tried framing it like this?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 51:18Speaker 00

  Tried describing it differently.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you tried telling street people to imagine if their relationships weren't recognized?

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Nailed it.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Fucking, yeah. Yes, we have.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  So, one thing that is so weird about this paper of Saul Newman's that like, gets, 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 like, 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.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  So, wait, but how did we get from this paper that is pretty clearly just poking holes in the idea of super sentinarian? Being at the levels that they're at to the blue zones have been debunked.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is what drives me fucking crazy.

• 52:06Speaker 01

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

• 52:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:22Speaker 01

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

• 52:34Speaker 00

  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. The, the, this 2004 study that we talked about where Michelle Poulain gets like invited to go to Sardinia. They individually confirmed the ages of 600 people, like it took years.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  They did actually remove one person from the rolls 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.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Okay, go for the next one.

• 53:33Speaker 01

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

• 53:43Speaker 00

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

• 53:49Speaker 01

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

• 54:01Speaker 00

  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 Nikoya", where he talks about like, "Yeah, we looked into all the age records, and it turns out the blue zone, like 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 like,

• 54:46Speaker 00

  poor health markers and shorter longevity. So again, that doesn't really debunk people that are 110 now.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Right, that may actually just be a trend.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  That's just a trend, and like, 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 like, 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.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  "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."

• 55:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  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 data." 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.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just seems like this person is reaching for a bunch of problematic age-related data to be like, aha!

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  See?

• 56:50Speaker 00

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

• 56:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  So this one is actually true.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  Greece was under all this pressure during the Eurozone crisis to like 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, you know, double check these things. It turns out there's about 2,000 people in the entire country over 100. So like, 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, so Johnny Pez and Michelle Poulin travel to Ikaria to confirm this.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  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 like door to door. Newman's entire argument is that like this must be pension fraud, but he doesn't really have any data that it's pension fraud. I mean, there's a couple of countries like Greece where like, okay, yeah, people are definitely fucking doing this. But like, this is another one of these like kind of welfare queen myths that we have in America too. That's like, it's so easy to cheat welfare or whatever, but like, it's not that easy. And like pension fraud is something that has not looked well upon in most countries and is very easy to root out. Agencies have like inspectorates that will go and look at people like, okay, you say you're 107. You've been collecting a pension for like 40 years. Is this really true?

• 58:37Speaker 00

  There are many, many procedures in most countries to look into this stuff. And again, Newman just like, doesn't address that at all. He's like, well, Greece has a lot of people doing it. And like, 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.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  A friend of mine was on SSDI for years, social security disability. And from time to time, because she was given like, less than $900 a month to live on for all of her expenses, right? There would be times when I would like, get her groceries or something. I mean, to just be like, that's not possible.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  And anytime I sent her any amount of money, I would reliably get a call from like, the SSDI investigators in her state.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  No way.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  The smallest amount I got called for was $20.

• 59:26Speaker 00

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

• 59:27Speaker 01

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

• 59:40Speaker 00

  There are places like Greece where like, 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 like, looks into is Okinawa. There's a paper in 2008 called, "They Really Are That Old: A Validation Study of Centenarian Prevalence in Okinawa." And there's also a 2011 paper by Michelle Poulin called, "Exceptional Longevity in Okinawa: A Plea for In-Depth Validation", where they talk about this challenge of like, yeah, there are a lot of the records were destroyed in World War II. But they actually look at like, parts of Okinawa where there was more destruction and places where the records were relatively intact.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  And they don't find more centenarians in places where the records were destroyed. People have made extraordinary efforts. And this, this paper by Poulin about Okinawa is like, really interesting. He's like, yeah, it's really fucking hard to confirm this. And like, we need to have better methods as a field. And you know, this, this isn't the only place where like, data is. Spotty and we shouldn't just accept people's testimony that I'm 130. You have to kind of triangulate your way to concluding that like, there really just are a lot of old people here. And

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  I'm not endorsing the work of Michelle Poulin. Like, 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, right? 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. Like, these are just two completely separate things.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  You and I have talked about this before on the show that like, your findings are your findings and you shouldn't like sugarcoat or change your findings.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Right? Based on sort of public response. And also, we live in a world where findings like these get immediately translated into individual directives.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  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 and shit.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  If we're taking the research on the research'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

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  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, you know, in Okinawa, it's the sweet potatoes that are making people live longer. But like, they actually have lower sweet potato consumption than the rest of Japan. And Dan Buettner says like, oh, they love gardening in Okinawa. But like, there's public surveys where people say that they garden less than other areas of Japan.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  And that's self-report.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  I, this is why I want to spend so much time like debunking the concept of blue zones on its own fucking terms before we got to this. Because like, yes, this, all this stuff about lifestyle is Just like, there isn't really data to back it up. Untangling causation from just like 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.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Right. It's worth finding out and we haven't fucking found out yet.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  Well, well, well, the thing is, I don't want to go back to the inbreeding, but it's the most-

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  This is my bamu, by the way. You bringing up this much incest talk is really, I am learning I have a threshold.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  From what I've found from reading all this literature is that the phenomenon of people living past 110 is like kind of a distinct phenomenon from average life expectancy. And from all the data that I've found about it, 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 like literally makes them age more slowly. The fact that all of these blue zones are like remote regions where you have like genetically distinct populations. I think the original explanation in that 2004 paper is probably correct.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Do you think it's atmospheric or genetic or something else?

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  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, I, 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 like I, I spent a decent amount of time looking into this and it's almost all like medical system stuff. It's like getting cancer screenings.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  100 fucking percent. Shocking.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  It's like vaccines.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  That's the thing that keeps people alive is like healthcare.

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  I think this is just like a really complex and like super interesting field. And it's just really hard to determine what affects life expectancy. Also because things are changing so quickly, like, you know, lifestyles have changed. changed so dramatically over the last 100 years, but 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?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yes. And also, we gotta stop doing the kind of news coverage that is like, somebody lived past 100, and now we're gonna ask them how they did it?

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  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 or whatever.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  Isn't useful.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, yes.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  Saul Newman is saying that like, people aren't really living to 100 in these areas. I'm saying they probably are living to 100 in these areas. Like, I think these areas are true. However, I don't think any of the lifestyle of life based 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.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  You know what I'm realizing as we're talking about this is that this, 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.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  So in, in conclusion, they're not the blue zones, they're the true zones.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  That's accurate. I told you it was a good tagline. (laughing).