Maintenance Phase - Blue Zones

00:00:00.000 okay uh for the first time in a long time it is straightforwardly your job to tag us oh man

00:00:19.200 we haven't done a mic a micisode in a while i've just really forgotten how nervous it makes me

00:00:25.600 what that you are going to judge my terrible tagline that's that's really the dynamic just

00:00:31.580 a long stony silence after whatever you say yeah that's the vibe is that it aubrey uh hi everybody

00:00:38.000 and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that's getting you out of the blue zones and into

00:00:43.860 the true zones what that's bait that's bait you wanted to see how disapproving i would be

00:00:54.580 what even was that

00:00:56.600 the truth

00:00:59.500 nailed it

00:01:02.620 I was about to be like I can't believe you think I would judge you harshly

00:01:05.080 but I am judging you harshly

00:01:06.540 yeah I believe that you are judging me harshly

00:01:09.260 absolutely

00:01:09.940 I'm Aubrey Gordon

00:01:13.460 I'm Michael Hobbs

00:01:15.220 if you would like to support the show

00:01:16.920 you can do that at patreon.com

00:01:18.660 maintenance phase

00:01:19.820 you can also subscribe through Apple Podcast

00:01:23.000 premium uh it's the same content same content michael aubry today today you are taking us

00:01:30.880 into the true zone oh god you're gonna make it a thing all episode i'm gonna call it back

00:01:38.800 it's my finest work yet what do you know about blue zones actually do you have like a definition

00:01:45.740 are you are you aware of the netflix documentary and stuff so my understanding of blue zones is

00:01:50.040 that the idea is that there are some parts of the world where people live longer than other parts of

00:01:57.220 the world yes i've been trying to stay fresh on it and like avoiding coverage of it which has been

00:02:03.640 hard because there has been like a high profile debunking yes of blue zones as i understand it

00:02:12.700 yes i really went on a journey with this aubrey i want to take you on a journey with me i can't

00:02:19.000 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.

00:02:28.200 What?

00:02:28.760 We're going to tell a very complicated story eventually, but first we just have to talk about, like, the history of the concept of Blue Zones.

00:02:36.680 Okay.

00:02:37.340 Throughout culture, throughout history, people have made claims that they're really old.

00:02:41.660 Like, people would say, like, I'm 140 years old.

00:02:44.120 And they're oftentimes coupled with this idea that there's these, like, these remote, misty places where, like, everybody lives to 150.

00:02:52.900 These sort of fountain of youth myths, these have persisted throughout time.

00:02:56.520 And it was really easy to do this before the late 1800s because there was essentially no system of checking them.

00:03:03.060 I just have always assumed that the sort of anti-aging world is, like, the original wellness grift.

00:03:10.960 It really is. Yeah.

00:03:11.900 So basically the field of gerontology, which I've been reading a lot of the last couple

00:03:17.100 weeks, essentially grows out of efforts to validate these places.

00:03:21.180 The first time they're able to actually confirm one of these communities is in 1999.

00:03:26.440 There are people who are looking around Sardinia.

00:03:29.800 A lot of genetic research is done there because it has very low rates of immigration and the

00:03:34.700 population has just been kind of, you know, it's an island.

00:03:36.620 It's relatively far from Italy.

00:03:38.380 So it's always been of interest to researchers.

00:03:40.460 And so in the late 1990s, there is a researcher named Johnny Pez, who starts looking around

00:03:47.260 Sardinia and does like looking for age records.

00:03:50.280 You're going to make a joke about the name, aren't you?

00:03:53.000 All right.

00:03:54.660 Just get it over with.

00:03:56.300 Does he does he shoot his research right out of his neck? 0.61

00:03:59.080 All right.

00:04:00.780 I really love that you knew it was coming.

00:04:04.220 I hear your little breaths as I'm talking like, here it comes.

00:04:07.660 She wants to do a thing about the name.

00:04:09.160 Of course. Listen, you knew that the first time you read that name.

00:04:13.620 You were like, uh-oh, my dad joke co-host is going to bust in like the fucking Kool-Aid man. 0.99

00:04:21.080 Oh, yeah. 0.99

00:04:23.260 So Johnny Pez starts looking around, getting records around Sardinia.

00:04:28.880 And he identifies not Sardinia as a whole, but these very isolated areas in the highlands of Sardinia.

00:04:36.360 Very traditional shepherding communities.

00:04:37.940 He starts to notice that there's like a huge number of people over 100 there.

00:04:43.400 And the weirdest thing is that men seem to live as long as women. 0.81

00:04:47.480 So one of the most consistent findings in old age research is that women live, you know, three to 10 years longer than men. 0.85

00:04:55.540 And in this particular area, men are living just as long as women. 0.94

00:05:00.560 So he gets the records.

00:05:02.400 He writes this up.

00:05:03.420 and in 1999 he presents this to a conference of other gerontologists i've read various

00:05:09.300 descriptions of this presentation and it sounds like he was essentially laughed out of the room

00:05:12.940 oh everyone at this conference was just like the men are obviously exaggerating right if men are 0.99

00:05:17.940 like ha ha ha i'm 150 it's guys being dudes just a bunch of brian johnsons just a bunch of fucking 0.70

00:05:23.700 brian johnsons out here right and so at this conference he meets another researcher named 0.88

00:05:29.000 michelle poulain and everyone is like well somebody's got to like go confirm these ages 0.94

00:05:33.760 right like they're obviously lying it's just like every other fucking myth of these like

00:05:37.160 longevity communities like sure someone needs to go and like debunk this whatever so michelle 0.94

00:05:41.920 poulain spends the next four years traveling to this area this remote weird part of sardinia

00:05:48.900 to disconfirm the fact that all of these dudes are so old there this is where we get the term

00:05:55.400 blue zones when pulain was doing this he visited 40 different small municipalities and every time

00:06:01.620 he could confirm someone over 100 he would put a blue dot on his map looking at the entire map of

00:06:06.980 sardinia he has areas where there's tons of blue dots right right so we had the one preliminary

00:06:12.080 paper in 1999 which was like super brief like hey we think there's a lot of old people here

00:06:15.640 we then in 2004 get this very dry paper that is like here is what we have done to confirm these

00:06:21.820 people's ages. Like clergy records, there's municipal records, there's school records.

00:06:26.640 They're going out of their way to try to disconfirm that these people are over 100.

00:06:30.560 They basically published this paper being like, we can't disconfirm this. All evidence indicates

00:06:34.660 that like there's just a lot of dudes that are very old in this community. And so I'm going to

00:06:40.080 send you a couple paragraphs from the abstract of this paper. An alternative and interesting

00:06:46.260 hypothesis is that the high rate of inbreeding determined by frequent marriages between

00:06:51.740 consanguinious individuals and low immigration rates have progressively decreased the variability

00:06:58.000 of the genetic pool and facilitated the emergence of genetic characteristics that protect individuals

00:07:04.320 from diseases that are major causes of mortality, particularly in older individuals.

00:07:10.760 Given the exceptionally high prevalence of male centenarians in the blue zone,

00:07:15.220 it is reasonable to assume that either the environmental characteristics or the genetic

00:07:21.120 factors or both exert their favorable effect more strongly in men than in women so basically the

00:07:28.160 the first explanation for this is like oh it's just centuries of inbreeding have kind of by

00:07:33.920 coincidence given these people some sort of immunity to various other diseases that kill

00:07:38.760 old people i do like that the final sentence is like uh hey there's a lot of old men here so

00:07:45.140 here's what we're gonna float it's either genetics or environment yeah great sure i mean i guess so

00:07:54.660 that that is 2004 when this paper is published we then get the popularization of this this is where

00:08:02.240 we meet the protagonist for most of this episode dan buettner this is the guy who is eventually the

00:08:08.200 subject of the netflix documentary and also the author of like there's like a blue zones cookbook

00:08:14.440 and there's like there's like a little blue zones mini empire we will get to it he's published i

00:08:19.040 think it's like eight books about blue zones wow he really has made this his entire career

00:08:23.880 his bio is like weirdly murky i i've read a bunch of old interviews with him i listened to a bunch

00:08:29.320 of current podcast interviews with him and he sort of edits the way that he got into this field

00:08:34.640 he's in his 40s when he finds out about this so he has like an entire previous life he is raised in

00:08:40.940 the Twin Cities. According to one interview, but I haven't seen him mentioned anywhere else,

00:08:45.100 after college, he starts working at IBM. And then he's really into long distance cycling.

00:08:50.780 So he sets three Guinness Book of World Records for long distance cycling for like distance and

00:08:57.040 speed and stuff. He at one point bikes from Alaska down to the tip of Argentina. He then bikes across

00:09:03.980 the entire Soviet Union. He bikes around Africa. He starts writing books about this. So his book

00:09:09.720 about the soviet union one is called soviet trek he writes a book and does a pbs documentary called

00:09:14.760 africa trek he basically becomes one of these guys that is like frankly very good at turning

00:09:21.160 these experiences into publicity and into like products that he sells so you know like the

00:09:27.900 oregon trail was like a big deal in the 1990s was look michael yes i personally died of dysentery

00:09:35.640 like so many times 30 times he makes something called the africa trail cd rom after his africa

00:09:41.960 bike trip once he gets back from these various trips he starts like this online platform which

00:09:48.580 i can't even really figure out what it does but it's called quest network he says he's trying to

00:09:53.800 solve the world's mysteries so it appears to be this thing where people will go explore like mayan

00:10:01.300 ruins and they will have a satellite uplink to classrooms where kids can kind of watch live what

00:10:08.780 they're doing i don't know how the fuck they were doing this in the late 1990s to be honest like

00:10:11.980 dial up speeds but there's some sort of like a live satellite uplink component to this and then

00:10:18.400 kids in the classrooms can kind of vote on like should we explore east or should we explore west

00:10:23.460 it's like this weird online learning platform it appears to be quite successful this model

00:10:29.500 And in 1999, one of the mysteries that he's trying to solve is where are the oldest people?

00:10:36.660 Like what is it about certain places that make people live longer?

00:10:40.260 I still not really get this.

00:10:41.640 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.

00:10:53.160 So he goes there and does this kind of like online quest learning, live learning thing.

00:10:58.600 he like interviews a bunch of old people. Nothing really comes of that though. So this remains a 0.97

00:11:04.080 interest of his. And in 2004, he sees the article by Michel Poulain saying, hey, I investigated

00:11:11.140 these villages in Sardinia and everyone is very old there. This appears to be true. So in 2005,

00:11:17.800 he writes the article that kind of launches this entire concept of Blue Zones. There's an article

00:11:22.240 for National Geographic called The Secrets of Long Life. The central tension at the heart of

00:11:28.780 this, and like, I think ultimately the downfall of Blue Zones is around this question of like,

00:11:34.360 are we engaged in an academic endeavor? What explains why these people are old? Or are we

00:11:41.060 engaged in like an advice giving endeavor? Michael, I believe science has settled the

00:11:46.260 question it is inbreeding the scientific research we were just reading said inbreeding at this point

00:11:53.940 with the sardinia stuff there's no information about lifestyle things right there's been no

00:11:59.700 surveys of the diets of sardinians this is basically just like the field doing like very 0.57

00:12:05.240 boring yeoman's work of just trying to confirm like hey there's a lot of old people here right 0.69

00:12:09.320 they're trying to verify like we think we're seeing this thing are we really seeing this thing

00:12:15.420 I am going to send you the first couple paragraphs of Dan Buettner's National Geographic article,

00:12:21.880 and you can tell me which direction he decided to take.

00:12:25.040 What if I said you could add up to 10 years to your life?

00:12:29.060 Adding 10 years?

00:12:29.900 A long, healthy life is no accident.

00:12:32.400 It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits.

00:12:36.980 If you adopt the right lifestyle, experts say, chances are you may live up to a decade longer.

00:12:43.160 So what's the formula for success?

00:12:45.420 In recent years, researchers have fanned out across the globe

00:12:48.840 to find the secrets to long life.

00:12:51.740 In Sardinia, Italy, one team of demographers

00:12:55.040 found a hotspot of longevity in mountain villages

00:12:58.120 where men reach age 100 at an amazing rate.

00:13:02.400 Amazing.

00:13:03.000 On the islands of Okinawa, Japan,

00:13:05.360 another team examined a group that is among the longest-lived on Earth.

00:13:10.100 And in Loma Linda, California,

00:13:12.900 researchers studied a group of Seventh-day Adventists

00:13:15.780 who rank among America's longevity all-stars.

00:13:19.100 Residents of these three places produce a high rate of centenarians,

00:13:23.160 suffer a fraction of the diseases that commonly kill people

00:13:26.200 in other parts of the developed world,

00:13:27.880 and enjoy more healthy years of life.

00:13:31.120 In sum, they offer three sets of best practices to emulate.

00:13:35.740 The rest is up to you.

00:13:38.140 So he infomercialed it.

00:13:40.340 Yeah.

00:13:40.500 He went full, there's got to be a better way.

00:13:44.060 Yeah, he fully is just like, these are the tips that you can use in your life.

00:13:49.120 The whole thing is just like, is this you?

00:13:51.660 And it's black and white footage of someone opening a closet and a bunch of junk falling onto them.

00:13:56.580 Like, it's just, it's wild how huckstery the, like, tone of this is.

00:14:03.880 And he describes elsewhere that, you know, he went with the demographers.

00:14:08.160 He went with Pez and Poulain to Sardinia to like talk to people.

00:14:11.600 He does this in other areas too.

00:14:13.460 The actual researchers have questionnaires that they give people about like their diet

00:14:17.620 and lifestyle habits or like Poulain is like, where are your school records?

00:14:21.680 How do I find your birth certificate?

00:14:22.940 Like he's interested in like how to disconfirm or confirm that these people actually are

00:14:27.000 as old as they say they are.

00:14:28.500 Dan Buettner is basically just like, do you eat meat?

00:14:31.160 Do you ride your bike?

00:14:32.060 Oh, Lord.

00:14:33.240 And like not to cancel my own grandma on the show or whatever, but like.

00:14:36.900 i can't wait to hear where this goes but like my grandmother is not a reliable narrator of how

00:14:42.500 she reached 100 right it's like asking like naturally extremely thin people yes how to be

00:14:48.580 thin this idea that people have like information to offer on how their bodies got to be the way

00:14:56.180 that their bodies are is like true in very very limited cases and also we've talked a million

00:15:02.960 times on the show about how so many of these wellness myths begin with, I think, modern

00:15:07.720 society's very ambivalent attitude toward modernity and especially urbanization, right?

00:15:12.480 We left the land where we had these simple lifestyles and now we live in this desiccated

00:15:17.760 version of human life. We're all packed in together, et cetera. And so there's something 0.98

00:15:22.420 very telling about in the Sardinia section of this article, he has long descriptions of like

00:15:27.720 the shepherds walking the fields, right? Like waking up with the sunrise. They have fast food

00:15:34.160 in these areas in Sardinia. They have supermarkets. But he sort of edits that out as if every single

00:15:39.420 person is just like walking the earth. He actually, I listened to a couple of podcast

00:15:43.680 interviews with him and he says in one of the interviews when they're asking about like,

00:15:48.240 what do you consider to be your purpose in life? He says, my purpose is finding the traditional

00:15:54.240 peoples of the world and sharing their wisdom. That's like a kind of a nice thing to say and to

00:15:59.600 think. Like that's lovely, right? Like finding these indigenous communities and like sharing

00:16:02.840 stories of their societies. But like, I think that's what Dan thinks that he's doing. But what

00:16:07.340 he's really doing is he's sort of, he's looking for things that he thinks are replicable in this

00:16:11.820 very ideological way. He's not looking at like, oh yeah, what is like the welfare structure that

00:16:16.500 they have in Italy? Or like, you know, what are the statins these people are taking, right? He's

00:16:21.480 specifically seeking out these kind of like close to the land types of practices.

00:16:27.340 Right. And also it is a selective kind of nostalgia, right?

00:16:30.840 Yeah.

00:16:31.000 There is sort of this idea that we were healthier without really bothering to look at

00:16:36.880 what does the actual data say? How long were people living? And the answer is a lot shorter

00:16:43.480 of a time.

00:16:44.100 That's the thing. He's describing them as like, these are traditional shepherding communities

00:16:48.640 and that's why they live so long. But there are thousands of traditional shepherding subsistence

00:16:55.200 farming communities in the world and they don't have long lifespans typically. So he goes through

00:17:00.780 the Sardinian example. He then goes to Okinawa, which is kind of the same sort of thing. A lot

00:17:06.100 of this fetishization of traditionalism. He then takes us to Loma Linda, California.

00:17:12.160 This whole section is about the Seventh-day Adventist community. These people have been

00:17:17.280 part of a study, basically like track their lifestyle and habits over time. So I'm going

00:17:22.700 to send you a little description of the study. From 1976 to 1988, the National Institutes of

00:17:29.720 Health funded a study of 34,000 California Adventists to see whether their health-oriented

00:17:36.040 lifestyle affected their life expectancy and risk of heart disease and cancer. The study found that

00:17:42.000 the Adventist's habit of consuming beans, soy milk, tomatoes, and other fruits lowered their

00:17:48.220 risk of developing certain cancers. It also suggested that eating whole wheat bread,

00:17:53.340 drinking five glasses of water a day, and most surprisingly, consuming four servings of nuts a

00:17:59.040 week had reduced their risk of heart disease. In the end, the study reached a stunning conclusion,

00:18:04.980 says Gary Fraser of Loma Linda University. The average Adventist lived four to ten years longer

00:18:11.100 than the average Californian. 1.00

00:18:13.480 That makes the Adventists

00:18:14.960 one of the nation's

00:18:15.960 most convincing cultures of longevity.

00:18:19.080 Something is very funny

00:18:20.240 about the fact that

00:18:21.100 the first ever article, right,

00:18:23.000 the popularization

00:18:24.440 of this concept of blue zones

00:18:27.100 includes three examples

00:18:28.920 and one of them

00:18:30.100 is not a blue zone.

00:18:31.660 The Seventh-day Adventists, 1.00

00:18:33.740 it's like a subgroup

00:18:34.960 within Loma Linda, California.

00:18:37.040 Loma Linda does not have

00:18:38.080 a particularly long lifespan.

00:18:40.880 It's only a very small subgroup, but like you can find groups like this all over the place in America.

00:18:47.940 The difference between the richest Americans and the poorest Americans is 14 years of lifespan.

00:18:54.420 So if you went to like, you know, Mississippi has one of the lowest life expectancies in America.

00:18:58.140 If you went to any country club in Mississippi, you would find a ton of people who live 10 years longer than the Mississippi average.

00:19:05.680 Sure.

00:19:05.860 This just isn't a blue zone.

00:19:07.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:19:08.580 It's just a group of people who belong to the same church in the same town.

00:19:13.080 Dan later says, he's like, oh, the only reason this is in there is because my editors wanted somewhere in the United States.

00:19:19.760 But then what's wild is he just like keeps it.

00:19:22.180 So like in other interviews, he's like, oh, I put it in there because of my editors.

00:19:25.780 And then like, oh, just stuck.

00:19:27.400 I'm like, well, why did it stick, Dan?

00:19:29.040 You're the one doing the Blue Zones thing. 0.95

00:19:30.780 You can just unstick it if you don't want to. 1.00

00:19:32.680 Yeah, what the fuck? 0.96

00:19:33.640 So after this article comes out in 2005, it blows up, and Dan essentially makes this the rest of his career. 0.98

00:19:40.300 He actually works directly with Johnny Pez and Michelle Poulain to travel around the world and, like, confirm these areas.

00:19:48.000 So eventually they're contacted by a researcher in Costa Rica.

00:19:51.540 There's a small peninsula in Costa Rica called Nikoya, where, again, there's just a lot of people who live to 100.

00:19:57.420 They also identify an island in Greece called Ikaria.

00:20:00.120 In 2008, Dan publishes his book, The Blue Zones, Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who

00:20:08.220 Live the Longest. I read this book. It's an interesting mix of like very kind of normal

00:20:16.040 lifestyle advice and like weird crank bullshit. So each of the little sections has like text boxes

00:20:22.120 that he breaks out with little tips, like little things that you could be doing. And this is one

00:20:27.720 of them from the Sardinia section. Goat's milk. When compared to cow's milk, goat's milk delivers

00:20:34.940 a powerful nutritional punch. One glass contains 13% more calcium, 25% more vitamin B6, 47% more

00:20:44.160 vitamin A, 134% more potassium, and three times more niacin. Mike, you just need goat milk.

00:20:52.760 I looked this up. The societies with the highest consumption of goat's milk,

00:20:56.240 mostly in south asia it's like pakistan and india and they don't have longer lifespans it's like

00:21:01.920 weird weight watchers brain kind of stuff that's like just swap out your white rice for brown rice

00:21:08.820 and you're on the way or whatever and it's like god none of those work he has a whole thing about

00:21:14.280 like turmeric has antioxidants and then in the okinawa section he's like soy is like a super

00:21:19.340 food and people who eat soy live longer and stuff and it's very like 2005 in that way right it's

00:21:24.860 very ted talky very life hacky very yeah like just this one weird trick i i do want to give the book

00:21:31.580 some credit i think as far as sort of fad diety or like fad lifestyle advice i've definitely seen

00:21:37.140 worse most of the advice is fine so he's like people in the blue zones move regularly he he's

00:21:42.780 a vegetarian and so he's like try to avoid meat try to avoid processed foods in both sardinia and

00:21:49.120 okinawa they have a rule that's basically eat until you're 80 percent full they phrase it

00:21:54.360 differently in both cultures, but it's essentially don't like eat until you're stuffed. He provides

00:21:59.200 a bunch of recipes and they're all kind of like fine. Like he's not saying like eat 500 calories

00:22:05.420 a day. It sounds like a lot of the stuff in here is like not going to hurt you. Yeah. It just sort

00:22:10.600 of has like horse blinders on. The other thing I wanted to mention, a major component of the

00:22:16.260 Blue Zones advice is like trying to find a purpose in your life and trying to build

00:22:21.180 wholesome intimate relationships and like i love this yeah these are some of the tips he says

00:22:26.820 volunteer for a new organization call text or email one friend or family member you haven't

00:22:31.900 connected with recently host a healthy potluck plan a vacation or some time off work schedule

00:22:37.060 a weekly get together with friends write a thank you note to your co-worker or friend

00:22:41.380 take time to rediscover a hobby you once loved yeah these all seem lovely we're always grading 0.72

00:22:46.580 on a fucking curve on this show but it's like just the fact that he actually talks about like

00:22:50.320 maybe trying to do things for other people yes this is maybe the first book we've ever talked 0.98

00:22:54.600 about that actually has this in there totally it's this and angela lansbury he also has a little bit

00:23:01.620 of kind of structural stuff and this this comes out in his interviews he he says like this isn't

00:23:10.080 really about like individual willpower it's about like the environments that we've created i mean 0.52

00:23:13.940 this is at odds with all of his other fucking like little life hacky advice but like he does

00:23:19.300 kind of acknowledge the basic realities that like American life makes this very difficult. So 0.96

00:23:23.820 this is from the book. In the Western world, accomplishment, status, and material wealth

00:23:30.280 are highly revered and require most of our time. Americans employed full-time work on average 43

00:23:37.260 hours a week and take the shortest paid vacations in the industrialized world.

00:23:42.580 Then when they do take time off, according to one source, 20% of them stay in touch with the office.

00:23:47.980 we generally hold working and being productive in high regard being busy often wins us esteem

00:23:54.980 few cultural institutions exist to encourage us to slow down unwind and de-stress is this amazing 0.99

00:24:01.880 is this scorching societal critique no but like by the standards of a fucking diet book i'll take it 0.89

00:24:07.920 god i'm really stuck on uh average of 43 hours a week were we ever so young there's also some 0.97

00:24:14.120 kind of bad advice. He does have the structural critique, but then he also fetishizes these

00:24:19.920 societies that don't really have the same structures in place. So here's his description

00:24:24.420 of Sardinia from the book. A final and subtle yet powerful Sardinian attribute is their positive

00:24:31.500 attitude toward elders. In America, being young is celebrated and growing old is often dreaded.

00:24:38.660 I have heard that most seniors polled said they'd rather die than be put in an assisted living

00:24:43.420 facility. But in America, we are increasingly having to care for our seniors outside the family.

00:24:50.380 People over 65 in the U.S. will need long-term care for an average of three years,

00:24:55.300 and more than a third of them will not rely on help from family.

00:24:59.760 There are no long-term care facilities in the Sardinian Blue Zone. There, respect increases

00:25:05.820 with age. Younger generations feel a debt to the parents and grandparents who raised them.

00:25:11.000 all but one of the 50 or so centenarians i interviewed had a daughter or granddaughter

00:25:17.020 who actively cared for them there are no long-term care facilities in sardinia

00:25:21.520 it's like not something to emulate there is only the unpaid labor of young women family members i 0.96

00:25:29.880 get what he's getting at here like the thing about respecting elders completely fucking true

00:25:33.680 like absolutely but also we do need systems to take care of people it's also like hey man that

00:25:40.780 poll about not wanting to go to assisted living facilities i think probably has a lot more to do

00:25:46.960 with the specific state of assisted living facilities than yeah the fact of them he also

00:25:52.700 has a bit of the same problem with his thing of like surround yourself with good people and try

00:25:58.080 to form meaningful friendships he also keeps coming back to this idea that you should cut

00:26:02.780 people out of your life if they don't have the same health habits as you he has this whole section 1.00

00:26:08.020 called the right tribe oh no is this all the shit that's like your fat friends are making you fat 0.99

00:26:13.720 your depressed friends are making you depressed very explicitly so here's this know the people 0.99

00:26:19.220 who reinforce the right habits people who understand or live by blue zone secrets go

00:26:25.660 through your address book or your contact list of friends think about which ones support healthy

00:26:31.080 habits and challenge you mentally and which ones you can truly rely on in case of need i don't know

00:26:37.660 man be a vegetarian don't be bike around don't bike around whatever but it it feels really toxic

00:26:43.140 and bad to be like you should cut people out of your life if they don't have the same health

00:26:46.300 habits as you this pops up i would say every few years or so in like usually a new york times health

00:26:52.440 op-ed that someone's like you know what you should consider is dumping all your fat friends and all

00:26:58.240 your depressed friends and i'm like well alone again naturally god so i want to get into critiques

00:27:07.080 of like the blue zones just as a concept because you know this is now like a whole academic field

00:27:12.480 before we get to that i do want to talk a little bit about like my jokerfication when it comes to

00:27:19.620 dan buettner in his 2005 book he's pretty clear about the fact that like this came out of this

00:27:27.120 researcher johnny pez going to sardinia finding the records and then bringing michelle poulain

00:27:31.580 on board to like confirm the records and then publishing it in an academic journal and like

00:27:36.400 they were the ones like putting blue dots on paper and calling them blue zones for the clustering of

00:27:40.980 the dots, right? But then over time, Dan has like sort of edited them out. And if you go on

00:27:47.300 bluezones.com, which is run by Dan, this is how he describes the history of blue zones.

00:27:53.000 The term blue zones was first coined by blue zones founder, Dan Butner, a National Geographic

00:28:00.220 explorer and fellow and journalist during an exploratory project he led in 2004 after an

00:28:06.940 expedition to okinawa japan in 2000 to investigate the longevity there he set out to explore other

00:28:13.780 regions of the world with reportedly high longevity he did not coin the term it's it

00:28:18.580 it's right there in black and white man you didn't coin the term blue zones yeah he says here

00:28:24.100 he keeps doing this thing where he's like a team that i led to sardinia dude you didn't even hear 0.80

00:28:29.100 about this until after the fucking paper was published these are researchers going there 0.89

00:28:33.000 and like spending months tediously trying to confirm the ages of these old people you were 0.98

00:28:40.020 not involved you read a fucking paper and then you wrote about it for national geographic that's 0.98

00:28:44.560 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 0.99

00:28:49.000 the team michael you're just salty because we did that episode and i invented the food pyramid 0.92

00:28:54.400 you're just so mad and also even the okinawa stuff he writes himself into it he's like oh

00:29:00.660 in 1999 i went to okinawa but like there was a best-selling book in the 1990s about people in

00:29:06.420 okinawa living a long time this is a different team of researchers named craig and brad wilcox

00:29:11.800 who were working on confirming the ages of people in okinawa there was a researcher from tokyo in

00:29:16.680 1975 who went down there to be like oh i think these these ages seem high let me go confirm it

00:29:21.060 so they spent years confirming the ages of people in Okinawa. They eventually write a book called

00:29:26.740 The Okinawa Program, which was popular at the time, but it's now kind of lost to history.

00:29:31.320 And then Dan just writes himself into this as like, I went to Okinawa for the first time to

00:29:35.800 discover this. You just saw a bestselling book about Okinawa and you went there. You're just

00:29:42.580 a journalist, man. It's fine. There's also an interesting thing now that sort of there's been

00:29:48.260 the debunking, which we're about to get to. There's been more investigation of this sort

00:29:53.300 of partnership between him and these two researchers at the 2000s. Apparently, they broke

00:29:58.600 up at some point relatively recently, sometime between 2020 and 2023. Gianni Pez just left.

00:30:05.200 He won't say why, but he's like, I'm not working with Dan anymore. And in 2009, as he's kind

00:30:10.280 of expanding the Blue Zones empire, writing these bestselling books, Buechner patents

00:30:14.120 the term Blue Zones. So basically this is to prevent other people from like marketing it.

00:30:18.960 Yeah. Like those pesky researchers who came up with it. Exactly. That is how this feels. So

00:30:24.920 Michelle Poulain says that he, he had no idea that Dan patented the term Blue Zones.

00:30:30.200 It's kind of funny. There's now two Blue Zones websites. So one run by Buechner is bluezones.com

00:30:36.840 and Michelle Poulain, who's like the actual researcher who did all the fucking yeoman's work

00:30:40.880 to confirm the ages of all these locations. 0.90

00:30:43.220 He runs longevitybluezones.com.

00:30:45.540 Oh, it's not twozones.com?

00:30:48.240 True zones.

00:30:49.860 It's all coming back.

00:30:52.120 The other, like, even beyond, like, leaving Dan Buettner out of it,

00:30:55.680 when you look into what we now know about the actual blue zones,

00:31:00.160 it's a much more complicated picture.

00:31:02.000 So one of the things that I find really interesting about Sardinia,

00:31:04.420 that's actually true for the Greek blue zone as well,

00:31:06.200 is that the Sardinian blue zones have higher rates of smoking

00:31:09.800 than the Italian average.

00:31:12.220 If we're being systematic about this kind of lifestyle advice,

00:31:15.920 shouldn't we be telling people to smoke?

00:31:17.900 But obviously that would be insane

00:31:19.080 because like we know that smoking is bad for you.

00:31:21.620 Right.

00:31:21.900 So that must be kind of a fluke.

00:31:24.060 But then it's sort of like, well, wait a minute.

00:31:25.700 If we know that it's bad for you,

00:31:26.860 we're discarding it because other research indicates that it's bad for you.

00:31:29.700 Shouldn't we just be looking at research

00:31:31.240 of what's good for you and what's bad for you?

00:31:33.260 Yeah.

00:31:33.420 If we're cherry picking stuff that is confirmed by other research,

00:31:37.600 well we should just be doing the other research like what is the point of sardinia then this is

00:31:42.100 like the tricky thing about all this stuff right is that we're reaching for one weird trick life

00:31:47.200 hack kind of things that are like what's the one step that you can take oh i need to eat more nuts 0.98

00:31:52.500 great yeah oh i need to practice more incest awesome yeah chardonnay and cousin fucking the 0.92

00:31:57.700 answers are once again probably like a lot more complicated a lot thornier than that and probably 0.86

00:32:05.620 not a uniformly rosy picture well that to me is like the the difference between the academic

00:32:11.520 endeavor to figure out what's going on and the sort of like lifestyle advice endeavor because

00:32:15.800 one of the best predictors actually of old age is not having children and having fewer children

00:32:21.000 that would be weird advice to give like if you want to live a long time don't have kids

00:32:24.820 yeah but i do think as an academic endeavor it's really interesting to know that yeah stressors

00:32:29.440 might reduce your lifespan like having kids is a stressor i think to discover these sorts of

00:32:34.940 patterns is super interesting but that's not really lifestyle advice right yeah the other

00:32:39.240 one that he mentions a lot in all of the literature about around blue zones is red wine you know in

00:32:43.680 sardinia they drink so much red wine and in greece they drink all this red wine but if you look at

00:32:48.420 the actual numbers people in the sardinian blue zone drink less alcohol than italians in general

00:32:54.720 and drink less red wine than sardinians that's very funny it seems like he's just going there

00:32:59.900 and being like oh this guy drinks red wine red wine must be good for you without any actual

00:33:04.360 checking of like, well, wait a minute, is this a population thing or just this one guy?

00:33:08.520 Yeah.

00:33:08.720 It's also turns out to be the same thing with this like eat until you're 80% full

00:33:12.560 thing. Like that is a cultural rule. Like that's something people say, but there's no evidence that

00:33:18.860 people in the Sardinian blue zone eat less than other people in Italy. It just isn't clear how

00:33:24.240 much of this stuff is really generalizable. There's also another thing in Sardinia specifically is,

00:33:28.340 you know, Italy is a country with very traditional gender roles and Sardinia especially is like even

00:33:33.140 more like stratified by gender than other parts of Italy. And so one of the things that may actually

00:33:39.440 explain why men specifically live so much longer in these like remote parts of Sardinia is that

00:33:45.260 there's so much glorification of old men, often to the detriment of older women. If you're an aging

00:33:50.840 woman in these areas of Sardinia, they don't consider it an obligation to care for you. So

00:33:56.540 your kids are not going to take you in. Whereas if you're an older man, they will take you in.

00:34:00.460 is this something we should replicate like patriarchy i'm not trying to like cancel sardinia

00:34:06.200 but it's just like if we're interested in an academic endeavor of like hey what what explains

00:34:11.220 this we would look at the good and the bad of these societies but when you go through these

00:34:16.140 societies you know the thousands of different habits that make up people's lifestyles

00:34:19.460 and you pick out the ones that you like what are we doing you might as well just say these are the

00:34:23.900 things that i like even in the earlier quote that you pulled it was like yeah younger daughters and

00:34:29.660 women take care of older people and men right yeah yeah yeah this is like a core organizing 0.97

00:34:35.840 principle and like boy oh boy buddy why don't you break that shit out by gender and look a little 1.00

00:34:40.700 bit at like what are the hell that comes for ladies because i'm guessing that someone is paying 1.00

00:34:45.780 a price for that longevity in some way shape or form a quote that i was going to read you from

00:34:49.880 the national geographic article earlier but i forgot is he's talking about like stress like the

00:34:53.940 the less stressful lifestyles of Sardinia and he's interviewing this guy Tonino who's like the

00:35:00.040 pastoralist climbing around the mountains he says I do the work admits Tonino hooking Giovanna

00:35:05.080 around the waist my regazza does the worrying oh god oh god hey so get your regazza to do the

00:35:13.360 worrying oh god so this was like my excuse to talk about how even before all the statistical

00:35:20.060 debunking everything we're about to get into i just don't think the concept of blue zones is

00:35:24.660 very fucking useful i just think the whole thing is garbage but now we're going to talk about the

00:35:29.320 specific ways that blue zones may or may not be garbage so this is the high profile debunking yes 0.97

00:35:36.680 exactly this is why we're here today right this is the reason for the season so this essentially

00:35:41.800 comes from just a random guy this is a researcher at university college london named saul justin

00:35:49.340 Newman, who it seems like basically just started reading about Blue Zones kind of in his spare 0.92

00:35:55.080 time and was like, yo, fuck this, which I deeply sympathize with. I was going to say, 0.99

00:36:01.280 it sounds like you and me. He is a biologist, but he's not, he's like a plant biologist and

00:36:07.840 all of his other publications are like kind of technical things. Well, then he's not like you

00:36:11.760 and me yeah yeah exactly so in 2019 Saul Newman publishes a pre-print paper so like not peer

00:36:20.100 review just like a thing that he puts on the internet called super centenarians and the

00:36:25.080 oldest old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans he sort of

00:36:31.200 republishes and updates this for 2024 it's now called super centenarian and remarkable age

00:36:37.340 records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud. He also has another

00:36:43.520 paper from 2024 called The Global Pattern of Centenarians Highlights Deep Problems in Demography.

00:36:50.360 So the core argument here is very like maintenance phase adjacent. It's basically that like we can't

00:36:57.580 say anything about blue zones or about like the clustering of the old people because all of the 0.74

00:37:02.280 data is garbage. So he starts with a general critique of the sort of entire field of gerontology.

00:37:10.000 He talks about how age is a really important risk factor, and yet there's no actual objective way

00:37:16.800 to measure how old somebody is. It's especially difficult for centenarians because if somebody's

00:37:22.420 100 years old in 2024, that means they were born in 1924, which means we're relying on records

00:37:28.600 from like a very different time right government capacities were very different and because the

00:37:33.800 field of gerontology essentially emerges in the 1970s we're then going back to people born in the

00:37:38.360 1870s right for context the late 1800s is uh when the u.s government issued its first nutrition

00:37:46.960 guidelines and one of those guidelines was be sure to eat vegetable ash oh yeah burn up those

00:37:54.080 vegetables and then chow it out on the onion ash it was like what's the correct dosage of heroin

00:37:59.320 for your child right yes when they have a little sniffle when they have the sniffles yes he says

00:38:04.620 the the field of gerontology and demography don't really take this seriously because they kind of

00:38:08.800 assume that there's probably not that much error and when there's error it's probably random right

00:38:14.560 some people say they're a little older some people say they're a little younger it's kind of a wash

00:38:18.760 But he says, no, errors are actually extremely common.

00:38:22.760 And there are reasons why people exaggerate their age.

00:38:25.540 And there's many reasons you wouldn't file a death certificate, right?

00:38:28.340 Because if your mom is getting a pension, you can just be like, I am my mom.

00:38:31.840 And then you get free money.

00:38:34.040 Most of his papers are dedicated to criticizing these specific databases where people are

00:38:39.840 trying to gather every single person who's over 100.

00:38:42.660 There are various efforts to do this.

00:38:43.880 There's a UN database.

00:38:45.260 He essentially says these databases are just useless.

00:38:48.280 So I'm going to send you kind of the thesis statement.

00:38:51.520 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, states with no centralized government, communist dictatorships, and countries actively engaged in war or genocide.

00:39:11.780 New Caldonia is the best country in the world for life expectancy at age 100,

00:39:16.860 despite being ranked 51st in the world for life expectancy at birth.

00:39:20.920 One way to look at blue zones is like, oh, it's where people walk amongst the sheep

00:39:24.060 and where they eat fresh roasted pumpkin every day.

00:39:26.820 Or another way to look at it is it's places where they just don't keep very good records.

00:39:31.020 He notes in France, almost every region in France where people live past 110

00:39:36.180 are like post-colonial regions, regions where there's been natural disasters,

00:39:41.060 regions where records have been destroyed.

00:39:42.760 And then you look at Paris,

00:39:44.160 which has like all the rich people live in Paris.

00:39:46.460 It has the best medical care.

00:39:48.060 And Paris has way fewer people over 110.

00:39:50.980 The mechanisms we know extend people's life expectancies. 0.97

00:39:53.880 You don't find old people in places with those mechanisms.

00:39:56.680 He also notes that when you look into the databases

00:40:00.020 for people who do have their date of birth recorded,

00:40:03.720 there's a suspiciously high number of them

00:40:05.940 on the first of the month.

00:40:07.320 and in some countries they're missing like round numbers like you don't find people born in like

00:40:13.580 the 10th and the 15th and that's typical of human beings trying to come up with numbers that sound

00:40:20.720 random oh no mike like when you ask people to pick a random number between one and ten

00:40:26.560 most people pick seven why do i feel called out by this no complete same same i absolutely would

00:40:33.960 have picked seven you find since the introduction of cesarean sections that there's there's a little

00:40:40.920 bit more births on weekdays than weekends oh yeah that's like a women in the workforce thing but

00:40:47.040 like even that he says that's only like a two percent flex like we don't it's not that big

00:40:52.960 of a change weekday to weekend the number of births and yet for these round numbers you find

00:40:58.280 a four-fold difference for super centenarians.

00:41:01.580 Jeez Louise.

00:41:02.220 He then gets to the Blue Zones specifically.

00:41:07.800 So this is a very long excerpt, but we're going to talk about it in detail.

00:41:12.500 So I want you to read the whole thing.

00:41:14.660 Substantial error rates were recently uncovered in every Blue Zone.

00:41:18.920 In 1997, 30,000 Italian citizens were discovered to be claiming the pension whilst dead.

00:41:26.560 In 2008, 42% of Costa Rican 99-plus-year-olds were revealed to have misstated their age in the 2000 census.

00:41:35.940 After limited error correction, the Nicoya Blue Zone shrunk by around 90%,

00:41:41.900 and old-age life expectancy plummeted from world-leading to, quote, near the bottom of the pack.

00:41:48.520 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.

00:42:05.040 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.

00:42:16.020 He then goes into Okinawa specifically because it was the first Blue Zone identified. 0.65

00:42:22.300 So here's this.

00:42:25.380 In Okinawa, the anomalous pattern of centenarians is compounded by other error-generative processes.

00:42:32.720 Japanese birth and marriage records are not generated by a central bureaucracy,

00:42:37.280 but instead are hand-recorded by family members as koseki documents.

00:42:41.520 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.

00:42:54.620 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.

00:43:07.860 The number of replacement documents issued, a proxy measure of American bombing and shelling

00:43:13.080 intensity, predicts 79% of the variation in centenarian status across Okinawa.

00:43:19.700 So it's a pretty strong case. 0.99

00:43:21.120 Sure.

00:43:21.520 We can't really say where people over 100 are.

00:43:25.240 When we find large numbers of centenarians, it's mostly in these regions where like it

00:43:29.820 just isn't very plausible that they're clustered there. 0.99

00:43:32.560 And then another factor that predicts Blue Zones is like you don't have the fucking records. 0.97

00:43:38.680 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 Jean Calment, the oldest woman who ever lived, Aubrey? 0.99

00:43:53.140 No, I have not.

00:43:54.080 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.

00:44:10.260 And then six years later, in 1997, she dies at the age of 122 years.

00:44:17.900 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.

00:44:30.700 She looks way younger, like suspiciously younger.

00:44:33.520 He also finds that earlier in her life, Jean has like a bump on the tip of her nose. 0.89

00:44:40.660 And then when she's older, she doesn't have the bump anymore.

00:44:44.720 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.

00:44:55.020 And he's saying that like it's really fucking sketchy that the oldest person is 122 and the second oldest person is 119.

00:45:02.560 It's like a really, really, really unlikely result that this woman was 122. 0.73

00:45:07.420 They also start looking around.

00:45:08.380 There's various like transcripts of interviews with her and they find other discrepancies.

00:45:14.060 So she's born in 1875.

00:45:17.280 And when she's growing up, there's a massive cholera epidemic in the small town in France

00:45:21.960 where she lives that like she doesn't mention in any of her stories about growing up.

00:45:26.140 She also says that she was friends with Vincent Van Gogh.

00:45:29.540 people are just like that's a weird move they also note that her french id card has her eye

00:45:38.260 color changes halfway through her life and they also note her signature like gets kind of loopier

00:45:44.720 and changes over her life too your signature changing is like a known thing yeah people's

00:45:49.440 signatures change over time but it is like they're sort of like death by a thousand cuts happening

00:45:54.760 year so this this mathematician nicolai zach comes up with a theory that explains all of this

00:46:00.280 so according to him gene calment died in 1934 and her daughter took over her life

00:46:09.520 so that she wouldn't have to pay inheritance taxes oh hey this aligns with kind of everything

00:46:15.600 we know about old age claims like there's always been these mythical figures who say like well i'm

00:46:20.140 like 131 million years old and like they never turn out to be true so it's like another one boy

00:46:25.440 oh boy oh boy however the theory that jean calment like faked her death is basically a conspiracy

00:46:33.100 theory huh so this little detour is based on a very good new yorker article called was jean

00:46:39.080 calment the oldest person who ever lived or a fraud by lauren collins in 2020 also a very good

00:46:44.980 academic article called The Real Facts, Supporting Jean Calment as the Oldest Ever Human by Jean

00:46:50.340 Marie Rabin. So because she lived in the same city her whole life, a relatively small city in France,

00:46:57.020 and she married her own cousin, so her last name never changed.

00:47:01.700 Good. Excellent. I didn't expect us to be here, but here we are nonetheless.

00:47:07.840 There's tons of records confirming her. There's birth records. There's church records. There's

00:47:13.640 marriage records there's real estate purchases the whole thing of like the mom dies but then

00:47:19.720 the daughter takes over her identity we're not talking about her showing up in the records

00:47:24.620 as her mom we're talking about someone who lives as jean calment for the rest of her life and

00:47:31.300 maintains this idea that her daughter died every single person who knew her says like yeah she did

00:47:37.420 not swap bodies the mother and daughter didn't even look similar this is a talented mr ripley

00:47:43.020 situation like full on yeah there's also this funny thing like if she did all this to avoid

00:47:47.480 the inheritance tax in 1934 the french inheritance tax was not particularly large it would have been

00:47:51.940 around six percent of her assets there's also like the the efforts to confirm gene's old age

00:47:58.860 were really extensive like they pulled school records and were like hey what's the name of

00:48:03.660 your first grade teacher and she would know right people who do this kind of for a living like

00:48:08.200 actual gerontologists who are experts in

00:48:10.220 age verification, spent

00:48:12.080 literally years poking

00:48:14.000 at Jean Kelman's story and did

00:48:16.260 not find any inconsistencies.

00:48:18.600 Like, there are a couple things, like, the Vincent Van

00:48:20.280 Goethe thing is really fucking weird, and it

00:48:22.200 seems like that's just kind of, like, an exaggeration. 0.97

00:48:24.920 And, as you mentioned,

00:48:26.360 like, the fact that her signature changed over her

00:48:28.160 life is just not that weird.

00:48:30.360 And the discrepancy on her ID

00:48:32.160 card is that it used to say

00:48:34.040 her eyes were gray, and then eventually 0.93

00:48:36.140 it said her eyes were black. This is, like,

00:48:38.200 true crime brain coming after your like great great grandma the true crime brain shit is so 0.99

00:48:43.840 bad it's also with the photos too he's like oh her nose is different but like we're talking about 0.99

00:48:48.700 photos from the fucking 1920s and 1930s you can't really tell very much about somebody and this 0.75

00:48:54.040 whole thing of like oh she looks different in this photo people look so different in different photos 0.95

00:48:59.980 from like lighting effects the lenses you know what this is it's not true crime brain

00:49:05.700 it's moon landing brain yeah yeah it's never happened before ergo it simply couldn't happen

00:49:12.760 ergo this has to be a conspiracy to me the reason we're going down this detour you essentially have

00:49:18.100 this pattern where like people who are close to the situation and who've looked into it are like

00:49:23.200 yeah look we've we've also thought of the extremely obvious points that you're making like oh she could

00:49:27.620 be lying and we looked into it and then there's this person who's who lives in moscow who's

00:49:32.740 thousands of miles away, has no direct evidence of anything, no direct experience with the case

00:49:38.220 or professional experience doing these kinds of investigations, who's just like, the math says

00:49:42.880 she's not 122. Right. This, this pattern is basically what's going on with Saul Newman's

00:49:49.600 debunking of the blue zones. Oh no. His whole thing is like demographers don't care about like

00:49:56.000 bad data and stuff. But if you actually read the literature from gerontologists, they've always

00:50:01.540 known that like most people who say they're over a hundred and very, very most people who say they're 0.98

00:50:07.900 over 105 are fucking lying. Like the field is acutely aware of this and has gone to great lengths 0.91

00:50:14.260 to disconfirm previous blue zones and previous people who said they were extremely old. So like

00:50:21.300 there was a woman in Kazakhstan who said that she's 130. People go there and they're like, nah,

00:50:25.820 there's like, I don't really know why, but like people in Cuba lie about their age a lot.

00:50:30.060 And so people like gerontologists are always having to fly to Cuba and then look and be like, no, 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.

00:50:47.200 right this is the thing where we're like we assume that unless someone is in like an extremely

00:50:53.260 professionalized role that we recognize that they like haven't given any thought to their

00:50:59.220 profession right my god the number of people who used to call my old work and be like hey you guys

00:51:06.000 are having a hard time getting gay marriage passed i have an idea what if yeah you took it to court 0.97

00:51:11.960 and you're like oh yeah fucking nobody thought of that have you tried framing it like this 0.97

00:51:16.960 totally trying describing it differently yeah have you tried telling straight people to imagine if 0.97

00:51:23.020 their relationships weren't recognized yeah yes we have so one thing that is so weird about this

00:51:31.380 paper of Saul Newman's that like gets go super viral and there's all kinds of articles about

00:51:36.480 like blue zones debunked is like it doesn't talk about blue zones the whole thing is essentially

00:51:40.800 debunking these like un databases of everyone over a hundred and it is true that those databases

00:51:46.360 aren't that good but also demographers know that they're not that good and they don't really use

00:51:50.720 them so wait but how did we get from this paper that is pretty clearly just poking holes in the

00:51:58.100 idea of super centenarians being at the levels that they're at to the blue zones have been debunked

00:52:04.920 yeah this is what drives me fucking crazy which is how all of this stuff got billed right we are

00:52:10.300 now going to scroll up through your text messages, Aubrey, and we are going to reread the essentially 0.66

00:52:17.860 only place in his entire document that Saul Newman talks about the blue zones. Substantial error rates

00:52:23.960 were recently uncovered in every quote unquote blue zone. In 1997, 30,000 Italian citizens were

00:52:31.780 discovered to be claiming the pension whilst dead. This has nothing to do with blue zones. This is 0.80

00:52:36.200 basically just people not filing death certificates for their older relatives and potentially

00:52:41.220 collecting the pensions. But the blue zones have nothing to do with people filing death certificates.

00:52:46.120 They have to do with researchers interviewing people who are over 100 and confirming their

00:52:50.580 birth records. This 2004 study that we talked about where Michelle Poulain gets like invited

00:52:55.720 to go to Sardinia, they individually confirmed the ages of 600 people. Like it took years.

00:53:02.680 They did actually remove one person from the roles because there's a thing in Italy where at times where there was high infant mortality when your baby died.

00:53:13.520 Oftentimes you'd have another kid and give them a similar name or the same name.

00:53:18.060 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.

00:53:27.040 Turned out she was actually 107.

00:53:28.560 So again, they're not reluctant to remove people.

00:53:32.160 Yeah. Okay, go for the next one. In 2008, 42% of Costa Rican 99 plus year olds were revealed to

00:53:39.940 have misstated their age in the 2000 census. That one's just irrelevant. People are not

00:53:44.780 identifying blue zones by looking at census data and then just doing nothing else. After limited

00:53:50.300 error correction, the Nicoya blue zone shrunk by around 90% and old age life expectancy plummeted

00:53:58.100 from world-leading to, quote, near the bottom of the pack.

00:54:01.820 So this one bugs me because this is based on a study

00:54:05.280 by the guy who discovered the Nicoya Blue Zone.

00:54:08.700 So there's a researcher there named Luis Rosero Bixby

00:54:11.500 who discovered the Blue Zone,

00:54:14.060 took incredible effort to confirm that these age records were real,

00:54:18.540 and then eventually wrote an article called

00:54:20.340 The Vanishing Advantage of Longevity in Nicoya,

00:54:23.440 where he talks about, like, yeah, we looked into all the age records

00:54:26.160 And it turns out the blue zone, like where people live a long time, is actually smaller

00:54:29.180 than we initially thought.

00:54:30.720 So he's essentially debunking his own work, something that Saul Newman says nobody ever

00:54:34.580 does.

00:54:35.420 And then also he says there's this cohort shift where like people born before 1930 tend

00:54:39.880 to live a long time in this region, whereas people born after 1930, younger people are

00:54:44.760 showing more signs of like poor health markers and shorter longevity.

00:54:48.420 So again, that doesn't really debunk people that are 110 now.

00:54:51.680 Right.

00:54:51.740 That may actually just be a trend.

00:54:53.500 That's just a trend.

00:54:54.100 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.

00:55:03.980 Most of these blue zones are kind of not showing the effect that they used to.

00:55:07.240 He's citing the work of demographers to say that demographers don't do this.

00:55:12.300 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.

00:55:27.540 So this one is bizarre. It's based on a BBC article about these 230,000 missing centenarians.

00:55:33.560 That number is really weird because there's only 40,000 centenarians in all of Japan.

00:55:39.680 So for there to be 230,000 missing centenarians, they're looking at the entire database of

00:55:45.800 every single person who was born in Japan since 1872.

00:55:50.180 Oh, hey.

00:55:50.860 All it is, is we have birth records for these people and we don't have death records for

00:55:55.220 230,000 people.

00:55:56.640 So some of these are people who like went missing in World War II and just like no one

00:56:00.320 ever filed a death certificate, maybe because their relatives were dead too.

00:56:03.920 This is fairly typical in this kind of data that you don't have a perfect match between

00:56:08.060 every single birth and every single death being recorded. So there were people on the rolls

00:56:12.660 that were like 150 years old. But I read a whole academic article about this where they were like,

00:56:18.000 no one really uses this particular database. This isn't showing up in life expectancy stuff.

00:56:22.800 And also that error rate, if we're looking at all births since 1872, that's an extremely low

00:56:28.780 error rate. It's a 0.5% error rate. So this just has, again, nothing to do with blue zones.

00:56:35.020 Blue zones are not being identified by like,

00:56:37.240 oh, hey, there's this person who was born

00:56:38.740 and 150 years later, we don't have a death certificate.

00:56:41.180 That's not how they identified the Okinawa blue zone.

00:56:43.380 Yeah, it just seems like this person is reaching

00:56:45.580 for a bunch of problematic age-related data

00:56:48.240 to be like, aha, see?

00:56:50.680 Okay, read the last one.

00:56:51.440 There's one more left.

00:56:52.040 Greece followed in 2012 when at least 72%

00:56:55.820 of Greek centenarians reported in the census

00:56:58.500 were discovered to be dead or,

00:57:01.140 depending on your perspective, committing pension fraud. 0.79

00:57:04.580 So this one is actually true. Greece was under all this pressure during the Eurozone crisis to

00:57:12.580 tighten down its budget. And there were 9,000 people above 100 collecting a pension, which is

00:57:19.480 hella fucking sketchy. That's like a rate of people over 100 higher than anywhere else in

00:57:24.520 the world. They eventually recalculate and double check these things. It turns out there's about

00:57:28.820 2,000 people in the entire country over 100. So people were fudging things around for their

00:57:33.320 pensions. That is absolutely true. However, again, that has nothing to do with the Greek Blue Zone.

00:57:39.360 The Greek Blue Zone is this little tiny island called Ikaria, which has a population, a total

00:57:43.920 population of 8,000 people. When they started looking into this, so Johnny Pez and Michelle

00:57:49.080 Poulain traveled to Ikaria to confirm this, there were only 164 people over the age of 90

00:57:55.620 on this entire island, and they contacted them individually. That's what they're doing to

00:58:00.020 confirm the blue zones is they're literally going like door to door. Newman's entire argument is

00:58:05.120 like this must be pension fraud, but he doesn't really have any data that it's pension fraud. I

00:58:10.040 mean, there's a couple of countries like Greece where like, okay, yeah, people are definitely 0.98

00:58:12.760 fucking doing this. But like, this is another one of these like kind of welfare queen myths that we 0.94

00:58:16.880 have in America too, that it's like, it's so easy to cheat welfare or whatever. But like, it's not

00:58:21.320 that easy. And like pension fraud is something that is not looked well upon in most countries

00:58:26.800 and is very easy to root out most government agencies have like inspectorates that will go

00:58:31.880 and look at people like okay you you say you're 107 you've been collecting a pension for like 40

00:58:36.580 years is this really true there are many many procedures in most countries to look into this

00:58:40.840 stuff and again newman just like doesn't address that at all he's like well greece has a lot of

00:58:44.900 people doing it and like yeah but it was also really fucking obvious the minute they looked at

00:58:48.720 it that a lot of people were lying and they fixed it a friend of mine was on ssdi for years social

00:58:54.820 security disability. And from time to time, because she was given like less than $900 a

00:59:01.640 month to live on for all of her expenses, right? There would be times when I would like get her 0.76

00:59:06.980 groceries or something. I mean, to just be like, that's not possible. And anytime I sent her any

00:59:14.000 amount of money, I would reliably get a call from like the SSDI investigators in her state.

00:59:22.100 No way. The smallest amount I got called for was $20. No way. I didn't actually know they did that.

00:59:27.700 My God, man. The idea that like many, many, many people are out here committing pension fraud in

00:59:35.320 nations that presumably care about where their money is going is not so. There are places like

00:59:41.040 Greece where like there's actual evidence that this is taking place, but you have to present

00:59:45.080 actual evidence. You can't just say, oh, all these people who say they're old are doing it for the

00:59:49.160 pensions and in his paper the only actual blue zone that he like looks into is okinawa there's

00:59:56.080 a paper in 2008 called they really are that old a validation study of centenarian prevalence in

01:00:01.000 okinawa and there's also a 2011 paper by michelle poulain called exceptional longevity in okinawa

01:00:07.480 a plea for in-depth validation where they talk about this challenge of like yeah there a lot of

01:00:13.160 the records were destroyed in world war ii but they actually look at like parts of okinawa where

01:00:19.020 there was more destruction and places where the records were relatively intact. And they don't

01:00:23.440 find more centenarians in places where the records were destroyed. People have made extraordinary

01:00:27.880 efforts. And this paper by Poulain about Okinawa is really interesting. He's like, yeah, it's really

01:00:32.720 fucking hard to confirm this. And we need to have better methods as a field. And this isn't the only 0.61

01:00:38.640 place where data is spotty. And we shouldn't just accept people's testimony. I'm 130. You have to

01:00:44.800 kind of triangulate your way to concluding that like there really just are a lot of old people

01:00:49.600 here and yes i'm not endorsing the work of michelle poulain like this is also a guy who gives

01:00:55.280 lifestyle advice which i don't think is justified by the data but the core point that i'm making is

01:01:00.460 that if you want to debunk the blue zones you have to actually debunk the blue zones right you have

01:01:05.720 to debunk the specific work that gerontologists have done to confirm these places you can't just

01:01:11.740 say, well, Greece has a real big problem with pension fraud. And therefore this project where

01:01:18.060 they spent years going door to door and confirming people's birth records in Greece is fake. Like

01:01:22.960 these are just two completely separate things. You and I have talked about this before on the

01:01:27.060 show that like your findings are your findings and you shouldn't like sugarcoat or change your

01:01:31.820 findings. Right. Based on sort of public response. And also we live in a world where findings like

01:01:38.500 these get immediately translated into individual directives on how to live and what to eat

01:01:46.220 this is all super fascinating to me and i still feel really uneasy with the idea that there's a

01:01:53.680 fucking blue zones cookbook and if we're taking the research on the research's terms there is

01:02:01.500 nothing that i have heard thus far to indicate that the unique thread that sort of holds all 0.87

01:02:08.700 of these places together is something about the foods that they all totally i will also say in

01:02:14.280 defense of newman like i'm i'm criticizing his conclusions here however he does have huge

01:02:19.600 portions of his paper where he's like yeah they say that you know in okinawa it's the sweet potatoes

01:02:24.900 that are making people live longer but like they actually have lower sweet potato consumption than

01:02:28.920 the rest of japan and dan buechner says like oh they love gardening in okinawa but like there's

01:02:33.460 public surveys where people say that they garden less than other areas of japan and that's self

01:02:38.300 report this is why i want to spend so much time like debunking the concept of blue zones on its

01:02:44.080 own fucking terms before we got to this because like yes this all this stuff about lifestyle 0.51

01:02:48.980 is just like there isn't really data to back it up untangling causation from just like statistical 0.99

01:02:54.260 flukes is really fucking hard and it's so facile to just be like they eat turmeric in sardinia and

01:03:00.660 so you should eat turmeric and you'll live to 100 no right it's worth finding out and we haven't 0.99

01:03:06.660 fucking found out yet well right well the thing is i don't want to go back to the inbreeding 0.89

01:03:13.060 but no michael this is my bamu by the way you bringing up this much incest talk is really i 0.98

01:03:22.640 am learning i have a threshold from what i've found from reading all this literature is that

01:03:27.740 the phenomenon of people living past 110 is like kind of a distinct phenomenon from average life

01:03:33.600 expectancy and from all the data that i've found about it it appears to be mostly genetic people

01:03:38.820 who live past 110 almost always have like two or three family members who live past 110 there

01:03:45.260 appears to be something in some people that like literally makes them age more slowly the fact that

01:03:51.600 all of these blue zones are, like, remote regions where you have, like, genetically distinct

01:03:58.080 populations. I think the original explanation in that 2004 paper is probably correct.

01:04:03.280 Something clustered in the Sardinian highlands over time and happens to make people age a little

01:04:09.360 bit more slowly. I don't actually think it's going to be a lifestyle thing.

01:04:12.320 Do you think it's atmospheric or genetic or something else?

01:04:15.660 Yeah, I mean, there's one of the papers I read says longevity defined as top 10% of survivors

01:04:21.240 and beyond is transmitted as a quantitative genetic trait i don't find the concept of

01:04:26.580 centenarians all that useful when i i think we should just look at life expectancy and we can

01:04:32.680 find all kinds of information about what seems to extend life expectancy and like i i spent a

01:04:38.060 decent amount of time looking into this and it's almost all like medical system stuff it's like

01:04:42.060 getting cancer screen 100 fucking shocking it's like vaccines that's the thing that keeps people

01:04:47.900 alive is like healthcare. I think this is just like a really complex and like super interesting 0.71

01:04:52.280 field. And it's just really hard to determine what affects life expectancy. Also because things are

01:04:57.140 changing so quickly. Like, you know, lifestyles have changed so dramatically over the last 100

01:05:01.800 years that somebody who's living to 100 now, it's just really hard to say what did it. And also,

01:05:07.820 can we replicate the conditions of 1924, even if we wanted to? Yes. And also, we got to stop doing

01:05:15.300 the kind of news coverage that is like somebody lived past a hundred and now we're gonna ask them

01:05:19.940 how they did it yeah yeah it's very cute and sweet that the grandma from texas told everybody

01:05:25.280 she drinks a dr pepper every day and that's how she lived 210 or whatever just isn't useful that's

01:05:31.140 not like health advice it's not useful and again as you're noting like most of the things that are

01:05:36.600 going to make a big difference are going to be large-scale correlations rather than like a clean

01:05:41.180 causation relationship and they're going to be systemic not like individual practices it's like

01:05:48.180 such a weird conclusion at the end of the episode where we're like yeah blue zones are bullshit but 0.96

01:05:52.140 not for the reasons this guy says they're bullshit yeah yes yes Saul Newman is saying that like 0.90

01:05:57.440 people aren't really living to 100 in these areas I'm saying they probably are living to 100 these 0.79

01:06:02.440 areas like I think these areas are true however I don't think any of the lifestyle of life based

01:06:07.800 on these things is useful yeah people in the highlands of sardinia live a little bit differently

01:06:12.340 than other people in italy but not that much yeah there isn't evidence that it's the fucking sweet

01:06:16.340 potatoes or the gardening but there isn't evidence that it's pension fraud either you know what i'm 0.87

01:06:20.300 realizing as we're talking about this is that this the blue zone stuff has traveled a really similar

01:06:26.300 path to a bunch of the bmi stuff which is population level observations that then sort of

01:06:35.160 worms its way into an opportunity to make money for somebody and becomes an

01:06:41.940 individual directive.

01:06:43.700 It's a wild one to be like,

01:06:45.900 Oh,

01:06:46.300 we're in the middle of one of those right now.

01:06:48.620 We're doing a BMI everybody.

01:06:50.720 So in,

01:06:51.520 in conclusion,

01:06:52.800 they're not the blue zones.

01:06:54.060 They're the true zones.

01:06:55.360 Yeah. 0.99

01:06:55.940 It's accurate.

01:06:56.820 I told you it was a good tagline.

01:07:05.160 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - January 30, 2025

Blue Zones

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