Blue Zones are meant to help you live longer but are they real?
If you've come to be buried in Quirimán, chances are you've had a pretty good life. Of the 50 or so graves in this hillside village on the Nicoya peninsula, eastern Costa Rica, a significant number of residents surpass the 80 and 90 mark – proof, perhaps, that the area is part of a much-vaunted 'Blue Zone'.
The designation was given almost 20 years ago to a handful of places around the world where people live the longest, healthiest lives, making this, and parts of Italy, Greece, Japan and the US, globally famous. The idea – that people in these hubs are 10 times more likely to live to 100 than the average American – has spawned eight books, a Netflix series and, across Costa Rica, everything from tasting menus to yoga retreats, tours, breweries and branded souvenir shops.
Fifteen kilometres away in the centre of Nicoya, however, the longevity-boosting lifestyle being touted has shrunk from view. Here, waking with the sun, tending to the land all day and eating only what you grow – hailed as the secrets to Nicoyans' long lives – are nowhere to be seen. The town's main intersection houses a McDonald's on one side, a KFC and Burger King on another. On a sunny Tuesday lunchtime they are packed, dozens of families in each outpost jostling over their Happy Meals and buckets of 'mega alitas' (chicken wings). In less than half a generation, the creep of fast food, cars and touch-of-a-button digital dominance seems to have killed this longevity hotspot off stone dead. Although, according to Blue Zones' principal detractor, they never existed to begin with.
Saul Newman, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at University College London, has spent the past five years as the chief thorn in Blue Zone architect Dan Buettner's side. In September, he won the Ig Nobel Prize (awarded to those who have made unusual contributions to science, the arts or humanities) for rubbishing the concept. The theory was originally born out of a 2004 paper on 'extreme longevity' in Sardinia and followed by a National Geographic article hailing the Italian island, Japan's Okinawa and Loma Linda in California as turning out the world's longest-living people (Nicoya was added in 2007, along with Ikaria, Greece, in 2009). But, according to Newman, it was built on 'junk data' – never more than a business idea crafted to shift magazine copies.
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