Longevity? More like poor record-keeping.
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So says a researcher in England, who claims to have identified a bureaucratic flaw in the world’s Blue Zones, regions believed to be home to populations with the most longevity.
Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Nicoya, Costa Rica, Kiaria, Greece, and Loma Linda, Calif., are the five areas identified for having sizeable populations living to 100 years or older.
However, Saul Justin Newman, of University College London, contends that all these areas are also home to poor record-keeping and age data that is “junk to a really shocking degree.”
The term ‘Blue Zones’ was created by explorer Dan Buettner who, in the early 2000s, travelled the world to find the keys to a long, happy and healthy life.
Newman is not buying what Buettner is selling and told Agence France-Presse, per the New York Post, that the key to longevity is to “move where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying.”
As an example, the researcher cited Japan’s oldest living person, Sogen Kato, who pushed to be 111 — allegedly.
Officials went to visit Kato on his birthday in 2010 and found mummified remains and learned that he had likely died in 1978.
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Kata was one of the 82% of Japanese centenarians — about 230,000 people — who were dead or missing.
Additionally, research from 2008 in Costa Rica found that, per previous census data, 42% of that nation’s centenarians were dishonest about their age.
Newman also found 2012 data showing that 72% of Greece’s over-100-year-old population was either dead or not real.
“They’re only alive on pension day,” Newman said.
The lone Blue Zone in the U.S. — Loma Linda, southwest of San Bernadino, Calif. — might be exaggerated.
Buettner told the New York Times that his editor pushed him “to find America’s Blue Zone.”
Newman’s work is peer-reviewed. He was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize — a spoof of the real deal — for his research challenging the Blue Zones.
Meanwhile, Blue Zone researchers called Newman’s work “ethically and academically irresponsible” and claimed that the Blue Zone team “meticulously validated all ages.”
Newman isn’t having any of it.
“If you start with a birth certificate that’s wrong, that gets copied to everything, and you get perfectly consistent, perfectly wrong records,” he said.