The Blue Zones Are Bad Data

These locations aren't hotbeds of 100+ year-old people—a wild story of fraud and bad data.

Maybe you eat beans because that’s what 110-year-olds in Costa Rica do. Or drink wine from Sardinia at 5 pm because that’s what the 100+ year olds of Sardinia do. Or eat until you’re 80 percent full—something called hara hachi bu—because that’s what the oldest folks in Okinawa do.

If so, you’ve been had by the Blue Zones.

The Blue Zones are places on earth where people supposedly reach exceptionally old ages, often beyond 100. The idea started as a 2004 paper¹, which became a National Geographic cover story—and took off.

It spawned an entire industry of Blue Zones books, microwaveable meals, resorts, tours, and Blue Zones-certified communities. Netflix even did a Blue Zones documentary.

The pitch is this: if we copy the habits of Blue Zones people, we’ll also live to over 100.

The problem: No one ever really checked whether the people in these places are as old as they say they are².

Then someone finally did. Saul Justin Newman is a demographer at the University of Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and author of Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science. He spent the better part of a decade digging into the data on Blue Zones.

His finding: The data is terrible—very few people in these places reach past age 100. In fact, they might live shorter lives on average.

But Saul’s work is more than a debunking. It’s a strange, shocking, and hilarious saga. I spoke to Saul on Thursday’s Two Percent podcast.

You’ll learn: Just how bad some centenarian data is, tales of sweet old people defrauding the government, and how some Blue Zones were invented for a good story—and big business.

Listen here

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For the readers, the post will dive into why the Blue Zones are a myth.

Let’s roll …

Quick housekeeping

• ICYMI:

  • On Wednesday, we covered the Bare-Minimum Strength Plan—the least amount of exercise you have to do to maintain strength.

  • Friday’s post gathered 7 Ideas That Changed How I Lived.

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The Blue Zones Mistake: Bad Data

This saga started when Saul came across two papers published in major scientific journals that looked at lifespan—how long humans can live. These papers used data on supercentenarian and semi-supercentenarian death records.

But there were problems.

1. They came to opposite conclusions.

2. Their data were a mess.

In the first study, the authors had accidentally rounded most of their data to zero. If they hadn’t rounded, among other errors, their study would have reached the opposite conclusion. In the second, the authors “used the most biased mathematical model possible, and it was the only one that gave them a publishable result,” Saul said.

“So the fact that this [lifespan] debate was being undertaken with such terrible evidence was amazing to me,” he said. He started looking at more data on centenarians and supercentenarians.

That led him to dig into the Blue Zones. People in the Blue Zones weren’t living to extremely old ages. Instead, these locations just had terrible record-keeping.

Most very old people don’t have a birth certificate. Still today, a quarter of the world’s children don’t get a birth certificate. The U.S. didn’t hit full statewide birth certificate adoption until 1933.

What’s more, the way many countries track deaths is fundamentally flawed—and there are incentives for people to not report deaths of their older relatives.

The evidence, presented in four acts:

Act I: The United States

In 2025, Saul ran an analysis³ of American supercentenarians.

He found that in the U.S., the single best predictor of being a supercentenarian is not having a birth certificate.

Eighty-two percent of all American supercentenarians were born before statewide birth certification. When a state hit complete birth certificate coverage, its supercentenarian count fell about 80% per year.

Saul even went as far as tracking down the world’s oldest man.

The guy had multiple papers with different birthdates. “One of his birthdays was, by admission, made up by his family. And then he got married to the same woman three times, apparently without being divorced. He also changed his name, but there’s no record of the name change. [The story] is just astonishingly full of holes. But nobody cares, because it’s a story about a sweet old man reaching an astonishing age.”

Loma Linda, California is a famous American Blue Zone.

The Netflix documentary shows an overhead photo of Loma Linda. The town sits on the south side of the I-10 freeway. And the documentary claims that the people on the north side of I-10—literally hundreds of feet away in San Bernardino—live much shorter lives. When I saw that, I thought “that makes no sense.” So I asked Saul about it.

When the CDC independently measured Loma Linda’s average lifespan, he said, “it is nowhere near the best place in the U.S. At least a quarter of the U.S. and perhaps three-quarters of the U.S. has higher longevity than Loma Linda.”

The popularizer of the Blue Zones, a journalist, told the New York Times⁴ that he included Loma Linda because “his editor at National Geographic told him, ‘you need to find America’s blue zone.’”

“The next day, on the drive between [the Blue Zones popularizer’s] house in LA and Las Vegas, there’s a turn at Loma Linda Heights,” Saul said. “And for 20 years, he has marketed this as if there was the Fountain of Youth beneath the freeway next to the Costco.” The author of the original 2004 Blue Zone study never acknowledged Loma Linda as a Blue Zone.

Act II: Japan/Okinawa

In 2010, the Japanese government went looking for the oldest man in Tokyo, who was supposedly 111. They wanted to throw him a big party.

Government officials traveled to his house, where his granddaughter also lived.

The granddaughter told them the man was out visiting Gifu Prefecture, which was 250 miles away. A 111-year-old guy just out for a jaunt, naturally.

The government returned. This time the grandfather was apparently at his girlfriend’s house a few towns away. They tried again. Still, he was out and busy.

Eventually, the family gave up. They called the police to report that grandpa had barricaded himself in his room and was fighting off relatives.

When police opened the door, the guy was there—but he’d been dead for about 30 years.

The family had been collecting his pension checks for three decades—and collected six figures.

This led Japan to check everyone. And they were able to find 92% of centenarians—but 82% were dead. “That’s over 230,000 people who are dead in reality and alive on paper,” Saul said.

How could this happen? When someone dies in Japan, their death is self-reported by family members.

“It’s not like there’s a giant death radar machine the government can use to know when someone dies,” Saul said.

If a family doesn’t report a death, the government doesn’t know—and that family can keep cashing pension checks.

Or there could be an event that kills an entire family. That means there’d be no one left to report a death and correct the paperwork, so the government assumes that all of those people are still alive.

Case in point: World War II. Okinawa is a famous Blue Zone area. Towns around the area were destroyed during the war, killing entire households.

A town being destroyed in the war predicted about 80% of the variation in people reaching age 100. “So if your town’s been firebombed, everyone reaches 100 on paper,” Saul said. “Because they all died in 1944.”

Eating sweet potatoes was a key tip from Okinawa. Because of this, Netflix even put purple sweet potatoes on its poster promoting the Blue Zones documentary.

The problem: Japan has tracked national nutrition obsessively since 1975. Okinawans in the older age cohort had some of the worst health measures in the country, year after year—and Okinawa ranks dead last in Japan for sweet potato consumption.

Act III: Greece/Ikaria

Greece had more than 9,000 centenarians on the books.

Then the financial crisis hit, tanked their economy, and other European countries had to bail them out.

The German government suspected Greece might have a problem with its pension system. So they did a pension audit before they’d give Greece any bailout money.

The audit found that at least 72% of people over 100 were, in Saul’s words, “collecting the pension from the graveyard.”

After the audit, the famous Blue Zone island of Ikaria went to a normal rate of centenarians.

Act IV: The big picture

Which is all to say, these places that supposedly have many, many people over age 100 probably don’t.

“It’s simply a combination of pension fraud and clerical error,” Saul said. “It’s much easier to be an error in paperwork than someone who has outlived the rest of humanity.”

The entire theory also just doesn’t make sense.

Saul told me that there’s a joke in epidemiology that “every map is a poverty map.” Disease and bad health outcomes track with poverty. Many of the Blue Zones are poor and their citizens, on average, don’t live that long—yet small hotspots somehow manage to rack up a lot of centenarians.

In one study⁵, Saul looked at old-age populations provided by local governments and curated by the United Nations. He wrote:

[Our] analysis of 236 nations or states across 51 years reveals that late-life survival data is dominated by anomalies at all scales and in all time periods. Life expectancy at age 100 and late-life survival from ages 80 to 100+, which we term centenarian attainment rate, is highest in a seemingly random assortment of states. The top 10 ‘blue zone’ regions with the best survival to ages 100+ routinely includes Thailand, Kenya and Malawi – respectively now 212^th and 202^nd in the world for life expectancy, the non-self-governing territory of Western Sahara, and Puerto Rico where birth certificates are so unreliable they were recently declared invalid as a legal document.

I asked him who the oldest verified human being in history actually is. “Not the foggiest idea,” he said.

Why it matters

I asked Saul whether he was just correcting the record—arguing over pub trivia, as he put it—or whether there was real harm in the Blue Zones being bunk.

He told me extreme old-age data is used to model the future and determine how much things cost.

If you want to know how long a 30-year-old will live, you look at the oldest people alive right now and assume the 30-year-old will live to that age or longer.

This assumption is used to determine pension contribution rates, life insurance pricing, and long-term healthcare planning.

If the models assume you’ll live longer than you will, “You have to pay way more every single day,” Saul said. Governments and insurance companies are using this bad data, and it’s costing us money.

Then there’s the wasted time of scientists. There are 100+ papers on Loma Linda, and more on other Blue Zones. There are genomic studies, biomarker studies, telomere studies. They’re all hunting for the magic behind a phenomenon that appears to be a fairy tale.

That time could be used to conduct other studies that actually improve our healthspan and lifespan.

And finally, 70+ American cities have paid the Blue Zones Project millions to become Blue Zones certified—money that could have gone to other projects. For example, Brevard, North Carolina paid $3 million over three years.

Towns and non-profits have paid large sums to be graded against a sketchy standard.

What Works

When people ask Saul for the secret to longevity, his most honest response is “be born in a rich place that has free health care.” That’s what the data suggests, anyway.

Nobody can act on that. So the market fills with things you can act on, whether or not they work.

What does work: See a doctor. Exercise. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t eat too much junk. Have some friends.

It’s free. It’s boring. You can find it anywhere on the map.

In that sense, the Blue Zones behaviors were fine. Most are decent, common-sense advice: walking, eating single-ingredient foods, having friends. The problem is the claims attached to them. And that steered science off course, cost us all money, and led us to believe a few things that may actually be harmful.

“Absurdly, one of the Blue Zone habits was drinking every day,” Saul said.

Is it possible that there are places on the map where people tend to live longer? Of course. Researchers and the Blue Zones creators have admitted⁶ initial Blue Zones “are waning right now.”

If I had to guess where people in the U.S. live longest on average, I’d look to well-educated, health-conscious, wealthy communities. For example, the wealthiest suburbs of big cities, resort towns like Aspen and Park City.

That, however, would have less to do with the town itself, and more to do with a combination of good health practices, good hospitals, and people having enough time and money for health.

Why the Blue Zones captured us

“We’re still in this mindset of Ponce de Leon,” Saul said. “We want there to be a fountain of youth [somewhere] because it’s easier than the tough reality of just taking care of your health. We’re all susceptible, even scientists, to this beautiful idea that things are better in a faraway place.”

He also pointed out the business genius of the whole longevity industry, going back to the first emperor of China: “If people don’t live forever, they can’t complain because they’re dead,” Saul said. “So your customer complaints division has very little to do.”

In 1825, a British actuary named Benjamin Gompertz figured out that once you hit 40, your odds of dying double roughly every eight years until they don’t double anymore because you’re dead.

A lot of people find that upsetting. Saul doesn’t.

The probability of any of us reaching 80 has never been higher, and those 80 years are unrecognizably better than 80 years in any previous era.

“It’s fine to not make it to 105,” Saul said.

Have fun, don’t die, and if you do die, don’t tell the government so your kids can keep collecting checks,

Michael

1. Poulain, M., Pes, G. M., Grasland, C., Carru, C., Ferrucci, L., Baggio, G., Franceschi, C., & Deiana, L. (2004). Identification of a geographic area characterized by extreme longevity in the Sardinia island: The AKEA study. Experimental Gerontology, 39(9), 1423–1429.

2. Years after Saul’s work, Blue Zones researchers published a defense in The Gerontologist detailing the birth records, church archives, and genealogical reconstructions used to validate ages in Sardinia. Saul’s answer is that consistent documents aren’t the same as accurate ones, and the argument is ongoing. The paper is: Austad, S. N., & Pes, G. M. (2025). The validity of blue zones demography: A response to critiques. The Gerontologist.

3. Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud. Saul Justin Newman. bioRxiv 704080; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/704080

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/well/live/blue-zones-longevity-aging.html

5. Newman, S. J. (2024, September 6). The global pattern of centenarians highlights deep problems in demography. medRxiv.

6. Paz, I. C. (2026, May 4). Are “blue zones” real? A science and wellness industry clash. STAT.