Living to 100 is about bad record keeping, not Blue Zones: researchers

Blues can hold records.

A researcher in England has identified a fatal bureaucratic flaw in the world’s “Blue Zones” – regions believed to be home to the planet’s longest-lived populations.

The five areas with a significant portion of its population living to be 100 or older – Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Kiaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California — all have something else in common beyond super seniors.

Namely, poor record-keeping and age data that “are rubbish to a truly shocking degree”, Saul Justin Newman of University College London told Agence France-Presse.

The term “Blue Zones” originally came from explorer Dan Buettner. In the early 2000s, he set out to find the keys to a long, happy, and healthy life by circling the best blue lifestyle spots.

However, Newman insists that the key to longevity is to “move where birth certificates are rare, teach the kids the pension scam and start lying”.

He used the example of Japan’s oldest living person, Sogen Kato, who went on to be 111 – or so the government thought.

When officials went to visit Cato on his birthday in 2010, they discovered the mummified remains and learned that he had likely died in 1978.

Kato was one of 82% of Japanese centenarians, about 230,000 people, who were dead or missing.

Newman’s findings are not exclusive to Japan either. 2008 research in Costa Rica found that, according to previous census data, 42% of the country’s centenarians were dishonest about their age.

He also found data from 2012 showing that 72% of Greece’s over-100 population was either dead or not real.

“They’re only alive on retirement day,” Newman said.

Even America’s only Blue Zone of Loma Linda, California—a town southwest of San Bernadino—can be too far. Buettner confessed to the New York Times that his editor pressured the traveler to “find America’s Blue Zone.”

Newman, whose work is being peer-reviewed, was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize – a spoof of the prestigious prize – for his research that challenged the Blue Zones.

The awards site notes that he found those areas “also corresponded to regions characterized by low incomes, low literacy rates, high crime rates and short life expectancies.”

In opposition, the Blue Zone researchers called Newman’s work “ethically and academically irresponsible”.

Instead, they claimed their team “accurately assessed all ages”.

However, Newman notes a systemic issue with their practice from the start.

“If you start with a birth certificate, it’s wrong, it’s copied to everything and you get completely consistent, completely wrong data,” he said.

However, age researcher Steve Horvath, who is developing his own anti-fraud age measurement system called a methylation clock, told AFP that Newman’s data “appear to be both rigorous and convincing”.