Years ago I eagerly read the original "Blue Zone" book (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09L5RSR11). There's a whole slew of them now, from cookbooks to life advice book. I've discarded the whole thing, since I went carnivore.

Recently, we had some friends over for dinner, and they're both big proponents of the Blue Zone diet. It's not surprising, the idea was packaged really well. For the dinner, beef was out, but salmon was fine, so it all worked out. But talking about their diet made me delve further into the whole Blue Zone thing, and how the concept has fared.

Here's a summary of what blue zones are supposed to be from Dr Saul Justin Newman, who won an "Ig Noble" prize" for his research: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2024/sep/analysis-data-extreme-human-ageing-rotten-inside-out:

The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.

The locations in the original book were these:

• Okinawa, Japan
• Sardinia, Italy
• Nicoya Costa Rica
• Ikaria, Greece
• Loma Linda, California

Here's some of the characteristics of the "blue zone diet":

• Food is 95% plant based. Meat is a condiment, not a main course. Meat (usually pork) is eaten only about 5 times per month, and the serving size is small.
• Beans are a focus, eaten daily, at most meals.
• Veggies and carbs round out meals

There were other commonalities that they identified as well (sense of community, physical activity, etc), but these are the food related ones.

But this idea, that places exist where it's common for people to live to 100, has been proven to be completely false. The vast majority of the 100 year olds are dead, but not reported, so that their children can continue to receive the pensions.

More from Dr Newman:

Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.

I just put out a preprint analysing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality. The places consistently reaching 100 at the highest rates according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which doesn’t have a government) and Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were cancelled completely as a legal document in 2010 because they were so full of pension fraud. This data is just rotten from the inside out.

It really makes me think of the saying "A lie can travel halfway across the world before the truth has put its shoes on."

And it continues. The Netflix documentary on the blue zones is from 2023 - well after the claims of certain areas having exceptionally high longevity were debunked: https://www.bluezones.com/documentary/

And blue zones is now a trademarked concept. In 2024, Blue Zones, LLC was acquired by Adventist Health, a faith-based nonprofit health system operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. And for anyone that doesn't know, the Seventh-day Adventist Church are religiously vegetarian/vegan.

So they now have an even stronger incentive to ignore the truth about this data.