The blues may hold clues.
A researcher in England has identified a bureaucratic fatal flaw in the world’s “Blue Zones” — regions believed to be home to the planet’s populations with the most longevity.
The five areas with a sizeable bit of its population living to be 100 or older — Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Kiaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California — all have something else in common beyond super seniors.
Namely, poor record keeping and age data that “is junk to a really shocking degree,” Saul Justin Newman of University College London told Agence France-Presse.
The term “Blue Zones” first came from explorer Dan Buettner. In the early 2000s, he globe trotted to find the keys to a long, happy and healthy life, circling the areas with the best lifestyles in blue.
Newman, however, snarkily contends that the key to longevity is to “move where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying.”
He used the example of Japan’s oldest living person, Sogen Kato, who pushed on to be 111 — or so the government thought.
When officials went to visit Kato on his birthday in 2010, they discovered mummified remains and learned he had likely died in 1978.
Kato was one of the 82% of Japanese centenarians, about 230,000 people, who were dead or missing.
Newman’s findings aren’t exclusive to Japan, either. Research from 2008 in Costa Rica found that, according to previous census data, 42% of the nation’s centenarians were dishonest about their age.
He also found 2012 data showing that 72% of Greece’s over-100-year-old population was either dead or not real.
“They’re only alive on pension day,” Newman said.
Even America’s only Blue Zone of Loma Linda, California — a city southwest of San Bernadino — may be far-fetched. Buettner confessed to the New York Times that his editor pressed the traveler “to find America’s Blue Zone.”
Newman, whose work is being peer-reviewed, was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize — a spoof of the prestigious award — for his research challenging the Blue Zones.
The award page notes that he found that those areas “also corresponded to regions characterized by low incomes, low literacy rates, high crime rates, and short lifespans.”
In rebuttal, the Blue Zone researchers called Newman’s work “ethically and academically irresponsible.”
Instead, they claimed that their team “meticulously validated all ages.”
However, Newman pinpoints a systemic issue with their practice from the get-go.
“If you start with a birth certificate that’s wrong, that gets copied to everything, and you get perfectly consistent, perfectly wrong records,” he said.
However, age researcher Steve Horvath, who is creating his own anti-fraud age-measuring system called a methylation clock, told AFP that Newman’s data “appears to be both rigorous and convincing.”
