I think generally the “blue zone” approach to life is how my grandparents all lived… and yes, they virtually all lived to be 100. This was fine 80 years ago, and is probably still much better than most people are, sadly, living today.
But other than a baseline from which we hope to do better than I don’t see a ton of value in it. I guess its helpful to remind yourself at a minimum you need to eat well, exercise, try to moderate stress, and be socially engaged with a community.
But - I also see a ton of criticism of the whole “blue zone” labeling and such. I don’t really care one way or another, its not the modern and scientific approach to longevity I’m most interested in, but people should know the science behind it is questionable it seems.
I’ve heard that the key thing that is common in all the so-called blue zones is poor record keeping…
Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans
Countered by Buettner:
Dr. Saul Newman: debunking the ‘Blue Zone’ longevity myth
Places such as Okinawa in Japan and Sardinia in Italy, are famous for being home to a high number of people living well past the age of 100, also deemed as ‘Blue Zones’.
Some of the common factors in these various enclaves of centenarians are tight knit communities, who eat well, Mediterranean or plant-based diets, they don’t over exercise, instead having a busy domestic life with energetic chores is said to be sufficient for that.
But a new study (which is yet to be peer reviewed) from Dr Saul Newman, a researcher at the Australian National University, suggests the records in some of these places aren’t kept particularly well, and in some cases people are simply fibbing about their age.
Academic Paper:
A Commentary on Blue Zones®: A Critical Review of Age-Friendly Environments in the 21st Century and Beyond
Hong Kong has average lifespans longer than Okinawa
The lying about their ages may be correct in some locations. However, I believe that the Japanese society in Okinawa would be the outlier. The Japanese are a very honest and upright people. (If they find a dollar on the subway they report it to the police!) If they claim they are that old, they are… unless they’re senile. The Japanese I have met are as sharp as a whip though.
Now, in Japan, not reporting the death of the supercentenarian is completely plausible. Many elderly Japanese live alone and when they die, the death may not be reported to the government, so they are dead but still “alive” on the records due to poor reporting. They’re having a terrible problem with elderly living by themselves who die and nobody finds out for a long period of time. It’s called Kodokushi which means “lonely death”.
I wouldn’t concentrate the debate on this facts or possibilities that some of these centenarians are in fact younger but in the very clear message what makes people live longer and what can be implemented and improved in our lives and society.
Be and stay physically and psychologically active, have a purpose, be socially connected, have a reasonably good diet are good start. Even this forum purposely or unintentionally is an important factor of feeling socially connected, so it might help all of us live longer, not just because we get great and credible medical advice, but for its social function.
This will get you to 90-100. How do we go from there?
How far would you like to go?
How far would you like to go?
As a famous philosopher once said…
“To infinity and beyond!” 
That is one really difficult target to achieve. 
If we ignore the beyond part the infinity seems a little closer and might be achievable theoretically but practically is another problem, how. I was listening to Blagosklonny’s interview with @Krister_Kauppi the other day and was contemplating how would it be to go beyond 100. Would I like that? I might, I am curious enough but how much am I willing to risk or give to achieve it? Look at Bryan Johnson his life revolves around this goal and and I don’t want that. I would like to live a long and healthy life, be strong, mobile, agile and sound minded until the end and maybe even choose how and when to leave the stage. But I want to be curious and a bit self destructing on the way. Enjoy life, not just live and survive. If a few simple medical interventions will help I will gladly do it. But how much more would it take and how much more am I willing to give?
Now that’s philosophical. I agree with you. I will take the benefits of a fasting mimetic such as Rapamycin, but I won’t do CR. Life with CR is not a life worth living.
I want to enjoy life to 150, not endure it. Rapamycin makes me feel like a young man.
I have periods when I fast although I don’t think that is the same really as CR. I am perhaps on the hedonistic wing of biohacking in that I drink and over eat from time to time. I also don’t spend time in the gym (although I do exercise using an exercise frame).
Imagine trying to live to 120 like Lustgarten, counting every bit of food, even a few grams of onion, and calculating correlations, taking blood tests many times a year. Mostly eating whole foods. Then dying from a heart attack or cancer at 80. Or there is a longevity drug released that make another person who lived like a king with a multivitamin and a cholesterol-lowering drug live to 95.
At some point longevity increasing lifestyles are just that - and are sometimes like chinese water torture. But for those who enjoy ‘healthy eating’, etc, congratulations to them.
Every day for lunch I have a home cooked salad of fruit and vegetables with a protein on top. It’s healthy. It’s delicious. I can’t go back to an unhealthy alternative.
Although some would say the fruit isn’t all that great for you. Today was blueberries, canteloupe, avocado, cucumbers with a chicken breast.
Yeah but look at what Lustgarten eats. It’s like enormous amounts of salad and strawberries. My microbiome is tilted towards fat and salt and starches I think, rather than sweet. I can’t eat that lol. I prefer to not eat much sweet food.
I could do it in a flash.
Of course, I’d miss steak.
So occasionally, I can put some steak on my salad.
Diet is easier for me than exercise.
Unless you count the 6,000 steps I put in daily. That’s a piece of steak.
I think I’m going to have a steak for dinner.
Nah. That’d be a miss steak.
I would say it’s about finding a way that works for the specific person. I have lots of different interventions that I practice and they come naturally and automatically without me thinking of them. They have been integrated into my lifestyle. To for example try to just copy my interventions and implement them in another person’s life would most likely work in some months but after that they will go back to their old lifestyle. The longevity journey is a step by step process where each person needs to find what works for them. We can inspire from what other people do but I would highly recommend not to just copy and paste things. It takes time to build and optimize a lifestyle that makes a person feel well and live hopefully a long life.
It’s interesting to me to hear about the many diverse dietary lifestyles of the forum members.
So many things come into play, origin, what your mother fed you as a baby and child.
I think we tend to revert, at least those who are trying to eat a healthy diet, to the one that best fits us. We can see if our diet is best for us by using the many biomarkers that are available.
As we get older our tastes change and we continue to revert to diets that suit us.
I don’t advocate any diet that is unpleasant for us.
Calorie restriction and time-restricted feeding come naturally to me.
I remember as a child how I really didn’t want to eat breakfast, but at the time it was touted as being the most important meal of the day. Three meals a day is society’s norm, but may not be the best.
The calorie restriction part for me comes naturally from my diet which is heavily protein and fat-based. Since it is quite satiating the calorie restriction comes naturally.
My first meal of the day is often two eggs and bacon followed by yogurt with walnuts. Sometimes I have steak for breakfast. As I posted earlier my biomarkers are very good to excellent even though I am taking rapamycin.
Also, I do not advocate any diet, except for me.
Everyone needs to find the diet best for them. If your biomarkers are not good, maybe you need to change your diet.
I didn’t think about this, but it is not a given if one doesn’t prioritize health in many areas that one will even live to 80 in good health in the first place. There’s lot of things that can go wrong. The lustgarten approach might not be super effective in some areas, but the system of continous measurement and improvement, regularly… Might be very effective and good. A YOLO tactic of just taking a PCSK9 inhibitor and maybe some rapamycin, might actually make one not so proactive, and ignoring having a system in place to continously improve health.
If many of us did the LUSTGARTEN approach, maybe the system in itself will help the many of us live to good health for long. Maybe many will get bad health in another one. The odds are more in one’s favor with a system similar to his.
It’s very pleasurable to eat calorically dense food. That’s the limiting factor for many of us. But the system is most important and there’s probably a way to adapt the system to our own preferences, culture, taste, etc…
@scta123, agreed. Purpose, regular movement, social connection, relative lack of stress. Diet above all; Asian and Mediterranean societies tend to eat a lot of fish. Compare that to the San (Bushman) of Africa. A harsh environment of enforced chronic CR, dehydration, and physical labor resulting in malnutrition, small stature and modest lifespans. Much like traditional indigenous peoples in South America.
I was in a remote Ethiopian village, on the border with Kenya. These are ‘age set’ societies; you don’t have an age tied to the year you were born (not that they keep records), you are approximately: birth to 10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, and after that too old to count 
I was talking with a group of elders (over 40’s), tiny, wizened men who could have been 45 or 95, but when I tried to pin them down on age they began prevaricating. Not, I believe, because they were lying to me but because they have a much different version of reality, and my reality was not relevant to them. I’m not comparing Sardinia to a primitive, pre-literate African society, but in some cultures age, after a certain point, really is meaningless.
And a debunking of the debunker (Criticizing Saul Newman’s commentary):
There was a story this week in the Economist:
Here is a link to the full Economist Article: https://archive.ph/7XLYC
A response from Robert Young of the GRG Supercentenarian Research and Database Division
The Economist should have done more vetting before putting out this ridiculous story.
It looks to be a re-tread of this NONSENSE:
It’s not often I wholly dismiss an alleged “academic”, but the facts of the matter are that Saul Newman’s “junk debunkings” have been repeatedly rejected for publication by many peer reviewers, and he has a history of faking data, including a 2019 attack on the GRG which was rejected for publication. When I asked him in 2019 what “GRG data” he actually used, he was unwilling to provide any actual data…a clear sign that someone is HOAXING. Saul Newman went so far as to ridiculously claim that persons age 110+ can’t be proven to exist…the mainstream demographic community consider him “fringe” and not reliable, and he has associated with Nikolay Zak, the Russian fringer who attacked the Jeanne Calment case. Quite ironic that a “debunker” or two is actually making false debunkings. That said…two wrongs don’t make a right. Dan Buettner’s “Blue Zones” concepts, which unfairly transmogrified a scientific concept from Dr. Michel Poulain of Belgium, is a marketing of anecdotes that have some quasi-beneficial truths to it…for example, I agree that much of his diet and exercise advice is useful…but fail scientific tests of rigor under scrutiny (but not Saul Newman scrutiny). What’s NOT useful is picking 5 places on the map and falsely claiming that these are the “only” special (read: magical, exotic regions that a paid cruise to would help the user live longer) when in fact much of what is being said can be expanded to larger macro-regions. Much of the Mediterranean has favorable diet, culture, lifestyle, and climate, so why pretend that “only” the islands of Sardinia and Ikaria are special, when in fact we see the macroregions including Mediterranean Spain, France, and mainland Italy and most Greek islands showing similar favorable longevity? Let’s not forget that the current “Oldest Living Person”, Maria Branyas Morera of Spain, 116, lives in a region of Spain within the “Mediterranean” watershed, yet not a so-called “Blue Zone”. Lucile Randon (1904-2023), the previous “Oldest Living Person” from France, lived in the Mediterranean region of France also…why not call this a “Blue Zone” also?
Continuing with this half-truth, here is some more recent “Blue Zone” coverage:
On the one hand, it is true that certain communities can have a greater LIFE EXPECTANCY if they practice a lot of healthy practices.
On the other hand, it’s wrong to suggest that only certain marketed regions have these advantages. It’s also wrong to use terms such as “live ten years longer”…high life expectancy is NOT the same as “high life span”. A ten-year “life expectancy” advantage can quickly dwindle to no advantage at the highest ages, especially with such a small population base with relatively low genetic diversity.
We do know that the oldest living persons currently living in California live in northern California (Edie Ceccarelli, 115) in a redwood forest region (favorable climate…why not a Blue Zone?) and Los Angeles, California (Pearl Berg, 114). Neither live in a so-called marketed “Blue Zone”.
On the other hand, much of California has a favorable “Mediterranean” climate, and the state of California overall often shows high super-longevity among the oldest-old, although we know that there are pockets of unfavorable longevity in certain regions of California as well (such as South Central).
Unless a demography group is willing and able to do a worldwide statistical map of human life expectancy and human lifespan data, I think we must understand that the concept of “Blue Zones” remains like weather forecasting: we may get large-scale climate trends right, but individual local results may vary.
The bottom line: the marketed “Blue Zones” health advice on diet, lifestyle, climate, and exercise may be beneficial. Just remember that the picking of so-called “Zones” for this marketing are meant to be examples, not a full survey of every longevous region on Earth, and so not the full picture. If we understand this, we can use our common-sense logic and parse out the good parts, while not swallowing the whole story “hook, line, and sinker”…a fish reference (also a healthy diet option, generally).s
Yes, this does look like the same recycled MISINFORMATION from the similar 2019 story. Why re-run this junk story?
Let’s start with some of the misinformation:
- “And public records can be woefully unreliable. A government audit in 2010 uncovered 230,000 supposedly living Japanese centenarians who were dead or missing.”
This is NOT correct. For those who know the TRUE story: Japan has a long history as a closed, feudal society where every family member is registered in the family register (koseki). That means “no one’s case gets left behind”. What happened is that most of the “230,000” missing “centenarians” were actually persons who died in WWII and whose deaths went officially unreported, since many bodies were never located. There was NEVER an attempt by the government of Japan to claim that there were actually “230,000” living centenarians at the same time. Compare, for example, a recent annual Respect for the Aged Day report from Japan:
The number of centenarians was estimated at 92,139…nowhere near “230,000” despite being the highest estimate ever for Japan.
- Yep, it’s Saul Newman…AGAIN. The same fringe theorist who in 2019 ridiculously claimed that “supercentenarians don’t exist”.
Saul Newman, whose degree is in botany, not the field he is pretending to be an expert in. I think it’s shameful that he is managing to continue to be promoted in the media as an “expert” in a field where he has brought preconceived, erroneous notions and has also has a track record of publishing dubious “debunking” claims. Look more closely: the “research” cited for this Economist article is only a “working paper”, not actually a peer-reviewed journal article.
And let’s continue with some more FACTS.
Fact: Okinawa is not actually among the top 3 Japanese prefectures for life expectancy or centenarian rate:
While Okinawa’s longevity in the past was notable, and it is still high, it’s certainly not extraordinary. There’s really nothing to “debunk” here.
- More false debunking: “Few very old people have birth certificates. Some do not know their true age.” That might be true for the world population as a whole in 1900, but it’s definitely NOT the case for the areas that Saul allegedly studied. Japan, France, Britain, and Italy ALL had total population birth registration by the mid to late 1800s, and there’s clearly NO evidence that these areas continued to have “problems” with false supercentenarian claims in large numbers, with the exception of “paper-error” cases (such as a death went unrecorded, a typographical error, etc). However, those types of errors can be filtered out with the validation process. For data from the GRG and the IDL, the data for these 4 nations is already “cleaned” (filtered to remove false/errant claims) and passes statistical tests of certainty to a degree over 98%.
For the the USA, all areas have had substantial birth registration since 1919, and data prior to that had partial birth registration and lots of census records. While USA cases have some degree of data uncertainty in earlier records, the filtered USA data has shown very similarly to the validated data from Europe and Japan, with similar maximum ages, gender ratios, and annual mortality rates.
In other words, Saul Newman is trying to ‘solve’ a problem that is already resolved.
- The so-called “longevity regions” in his working paper don’t actually match up to his contentions, or his anti-blue zone rhetoric. First off, those marketing the “Blue Zone” concept don’t even claim that France is a “Blue zone”. For Italy, the highest rates of poverty appear to be in Sicily and Calabria, NOT Sardinia. And for Japan, Aomori prefecture has Japan’s lowest rate of life expectancy and among the highest rate of poverty, so once again Saul’s contentions don’t even fit well with his own data.
To be clear, we literally have the Economist perpetrating a “pseudo-debunker” fringe conspiracy theorist as an “Expert” when he has little to no scientific publications in this area and a track record of publications repeatedly turned down, and past false claims made. Kind of hard to believe someone’s credibility when it’s based on making false claims about false claims. It seems more likely that Saul Newman is attempting to attract attention to himself. Ok, so he managed to go from Australia to Oxford. Congratulations. But his Doctorate is in botany, not biogerontology.
If anyone here cares to contact the Economist, please do so. They need to be called out for spreadin misinformation about misinformation.
Sincerely,
Robert D. Young, Director, GRG Supercentenarian Research and Database Division
While I think this idea that these “zones” are super-special or “magical” longevity regions needs to be walked back, it is true that many of these areas have cultures that promote healthy diet and lifestyle.
For example,
The Mediterranean Sea diet, which has long been eaten in Italy, Greece, Spain, and other Mediterranean countries, has been considered a healthy diet, but research has shown that it is related not only to health but also to "youth. Dr. Atsushi Otsuka, Chief Professor of Dermatology, Kinki University School of Medicine, explains based on the latest research results.
I think we are in agreement that cultural “zones” can adapt healthy lifestyle choices, and that studies show that certain climates are also more favorable toward human longevity (mild, sunny “Mediterranean” weather, for example) vs others (Ireland’s cold, wet climate is not favorable for longevity). In any case, despite there being “some” problems with the Blue Zones as a marketing concept, the pseudo-debunking of this idea by a false “expert” with no actual expertise in this field and without data to back up his assertions is concerning. We know, for example, that areas such as Italy and France already had 98+% birth registration by the late 1800s. To falsely claim that high centenarian numbers in these areas of highly-documented populations are caused by “no birth records” is preposterous, and it makes a mockery of the actual debunking work done on pre-validated, not post-validated, data. That this article seems to not understand the distinction between the two is quite concerning.
In short, under scrutiny, Saul Newman’s “debunking” claims are without merit. That the Economist would pick up a “working paper” from a non-expert that hasn’t even been published yet, while not asking anyone else in the field for their views on this topic area, is disappointing.
Sincerely
Robert D. Young, Director, GRG Supercentenarian Research and Database Division
A good review of some of the science behind the blue zones:
Guest David Rehkopf is an expert in population health who says that where we live is one of the strongest influences on how long we live. While we know diet and health care are important, it has been tough to tease out what about these places allows people to live longer and healthier lives. By examining environmentally induced changes in DNA, we may be able to more quickly and more accurately quantify what aspects of environments promote longer, healthier lives, Rehkopf tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
