Blue Zones are meant to help you live longer – but are they real?

Yahoo

17-03-2025

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.
In a January 2025 essay for The New York Times, he wrote that Blue Zones becoming a global phenomenon over the past two decades has not led to mass take-up of these healthier, life-extending lifestyles, but rather made the science of extreme longevity 'an immense joke'.
Newman was no less strident when we spoke recently. 'None of it makes sense; absolutely none of it,' he told me of how the research was first carried out. 'And what's shocking to me is that it's been so obvious for so long.'
According to the Global Wellness Institute, the wellness tourism industry was set to more than double in value from $651 billion in 2022 to $1.3 trillion this year, helped along by openings hitching their wagon to the Blue Zones name. Last year saw the world's first-ever 'Blue Zone retreat' at a five-star hotel in Papagayo, a ritzy enclave two hours north of Nicoya, where prices began at $4,000 for the six-day stay; a further two took place in February, while Thailand will host its first in May.
In Newman's view, the Blue Zones theory has two key problems: fallible record-keeping – and Buettner. Buettner, 64, a three-time Guinness World Record-setting cyclist, first began developing the idea in 2000, going on to use a grant from National Geographic and the US National Institute of Aging to study census data from countries around the world. Through that, he identified where people were living longest, and visited (along with demographers and record-checkers) to interview residents about their lives.
What united these super-agers – natural movement, purpose, low stress, largely plant-based diets, moderate alcohol consumption, strong familial relationships – caught public attention in the way seemingly simple health promises tend to, making Buettner famous (and, presumably, fairly rich). The Netflix series – which Buettner co-produced – earned three Emmys.
In 2020, he sold the trademarked Blue Zone brand, which offers 'long-term, evidence-backed policies and interventions that optimise environments' to the likes of supermarkets, restaurants and schools, to Adventist Health LLC, part of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which reported revenue of $910 million in 2023, and has a $100 million office and health facility in Miami Beach.
What Newman sees as his smoking gun is that in 2008, according to an independent review of the Costa Rica census, almost half of over-99s 'were simply lying about their age. Error correction caused Costa Rica's old-age life expectancy to plummet from 'world leading', to 'near the bottom of the pack',' he says. He alleges that part of the problem is that elderly people are 'only alive on pension day' – ie their relatives turn up to collect their cheque, or they have somehow succeeded in falsifying official documents to cash in long before they're eligible. History is filled with evidence of erroneous age validation, he believes, pointing to famous cases of supercentenarians like Jeanne Calment, known as 'the world's oldest woman', who smoked for 100 of her alleged 122 years and burned many of her personal papers (which would have verified her age) before she died.
And then, there is Buettner. Buettner requested Newman's help in searching for the sixth Blue Zone via a 'funny email that said he liked my statistical prowess and wanted to pay me some money to come along and get on board'. Was he tempted? 'I told him to bugger off. I mean, I can't be bought for a holiday… science doesn't come out of the end of the cheque-book.'
Newman also alleges that other scientists were contacted by Buettner, requesting assistance 'to find a Blue Zone in regions with 'marketable' cuisines'. (Buettner tells me both allegations are 'false', though later retracts this in relation to the email he sent Newman, in which he praised his 'pluck', and promised, 'I have a decent budget so we could do a good job – we could actually travel there and do the age verification together,' and calls him a 'wacko' instead.)
Newman's belief that this was only ever a for-profit enterprise was further strengthened last year. Loma Linda – where residents' long life expectancies were, according to the original work, the result of its high proportion of non-drinking Seventh-Day Adventists – was 'kind of an outlier', Buettner appeared to admit in a 2024 New York Times article, and that it was added to the list because his editor decreed that America must feature on the roster. (Buettner calls this too 'false', then sends me a pre-written mailout of rebuttals to what are clearly common criticisms, saying that 'we wanted to include an area where Americans live the longest'.)
On Loma Linda, Newman says of the city 100km east of LA: 'There's nothing to write home about, it's a dusty suburb in California. There's nothing there; there's no special sauce.' It hasn't been delisted from any Blue Zones material, however. 'The problem is that all of the supposedly unfoolable people, all the scientists, went along with this for 20 years. So how do you then trust these people to spot problems when for 20 years they've been staring at something that was come up with because the editor told [Buettner] to? There's no careful scientific process at all,' adds Newman.
As you might expect Buettner, who has a reputation, A-list lifestyle and business to protect, has not taken Newman's public baiting well. 'Saul Newman is a plant scientist who masquerades as a demographer,' he tells me (early in his career, Newman worked as such for the Australian government). Asking for his views on demography 'is like calling your refrigerator repairman to get a quote on brain surgery,' Buettner adds. 'I've worked with real scientists. And we have this one, the academic equivalent of Krusty the Clown, who captures all these headlines.'
Buettner's dislike for his adversary (the feeling is clearly mutual) inevitably grows with every headline Newman accrues. On the day Newman's New York Times essay was published, I received multiple emails from Buettner – among many that had arrived following our prickly conversation – reeling off 'answers to my questions' that I had not, in fact, asked.
It is tempting to dismiss Buettner's outbursts as the ripostes of the scorned, but the matter is more complex than warring headlines between the two have made plain. He notes, importantly, that Newman's papers are preprints that have never been peer-reviewed – strange, perhaps, given the airtime heaped upon them. (Eight of Buettner's papers on the topic have.) One independent scientist described Newman's methods as 'unusual'; his data points often hinge on information from whole countries or regions, rather than the small geographical areas highlighted in the original work. Newman 'conveniently omits those in his zeal to criticise us, but obviously, his true interest isn't the truth, but self-aggrandisement,' says Buettner.
The accusations have cast a darkening cloud over Buettner, and the entire concept. On the Nicoya peninsula itself, though, the backlash has failed to filter through; being a Blue Zone remains a point of pride for some – and a serious draw for others.
It was reading about the longer lives of its residents that convinced Javier Ramirez, 58, to build a home in Quirimán eight years ago. Reading about the lifestyle and rich soil on the peninsula pushed the engineer to leave New York behind. His day-to-day now couldn't be more different than that he left, he says; Quirimán is a sleepy place where inhabitants grow corn and cows roam free. One of his neighbours is 103, while 'there's a man who's 96 years old, and he's bent over with a machete and he cuts grass – I've seen him with my own eyes. His son is 74 years old,' and performing the same intense manual labour, says Ramirez. To him, junk data or not, what he sees in Costa Rica's famed longevity capital is unequivocal proof of the Blue Zones concept.
For Luis Boltodano, a teacher from Santa Cruz, 25km north of central Nicoya, the boosted life expectancies along the peninsula come as no surprise. 'We Guanacastecos [from the Guanacaste region in the north of the Nicoya peninsula] have a saying that we are different people,' he explains. 'We are used to hanging out with family and friends, we are used to enjoying nature, we are used to enjoying life' – essential components of the Blue Zones theory. 'We don't kill ourselves thinking about what is going to happen.'
A look around the 42-year-old's neighbourhood is evidence enough of that effect. His neighbours, in their early 80s, still tend their farm; the man living next door is somewhere between 92 and 95. He shares a recent photo of one resident, Erlyn, looking decades younger than her years while posing beneath a glittering gold banner reading '100'.
Boltodano knows that his own generation, and that of his daughters, are unlikely to experience such fortune. The springing up of international fast food chains 'makes me sad', he says. 'In the last 10, 15 years, everything has changed in Nicoya,' with the lifestyle that made it famous 'fading away totally. Those elderly people, the ones that are living longer or are still alive, they didn't have what we have in this moment. They didn't know about fast food, they didn't know about technology, they didn't know what it was just to go to the supermarket and buy rice… they had to harvest everything, so they had to work, they had to be moving to eat.' Not even the healthiest of communities can remain immune from today's world, where 'we have everything just on the right side of our hand'.
That Blue Zones' colour is fading does not disprove his theory, Buettner believes – nor does it come as a surprise. The area 'has changed a ton since I was there', he says of Nicoya, its cluster of fast food joints a visible death knell. 'For me, that heralds the absolute end of that Blue Zone' – and not just in Costa Rica.
The problems have been creeping in for decades, he adds, since the 1940s. Gone are the days 'where the healthy choice is the easy choice and the most accessible; the cheapest foods were beans, corn tortillas and squash and whatever fruits that grew in their gardens'. The same is true in Okinawa, which has gone from the healthiest hub in Japan – per the theory, at least – to having one of its highest obesity rates; Buettner says it has been 'delisted', though the area still remains on the Blue Zones website.
'The corrosive effects of the standard American diet, automobiles as well as other mechanised conveniences as well as social media is destroying all Blue Zones. They're all succumbing to the disease of affluence – cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity.' Of the five zones that once were, only Sardinia and the Seventh-Day Adventists are 'still strong', he says. 'But, I suspect within a generation or so, they'll all be gone.'
Buettner says these major health changes happened after his research was carried out, therefore his theory still stands. But Newman takes a less forgiving view: 'The Okinawan, Sardinian and Costa Rican Blue Zones simply shifted or disappeared when the data and criticism arrived.'
Either way, the Blue Zones juggernaut refuses to stop rolling. Whether the data ever stacked up or not, the idea remains so alluring that businesses across the Nicoya peninsula continue to do a roaring trade, drawing in tourists who seemingly believe that a couple of weeks in which the words Blue Zones are tangentially attached can replicate the lifelong habits of native super-agers.
The Blue Zone tasting menu at a high-end restaurant in the tourist surfing haven of Nosara runs to a couple of hundred dollars per head; nearby is a brewery also using the concept's name, a helpful boost for dishing out craft pours. There is a branded store – or more accurately, four of them – selling products from hot sauce to hoodies; there are travel agencies and day-tours, yoga retreats, and cooking classes, none of which show signs of slowing.
Why are these businesses – which Buettner describes as 'horrible… It's all bunk; it's all taking advantage of something I have nothing to do with and something that I wouldn't get involved with' – booming? 'It's Shangri-La all over again,' Newman says. 'Of course it's compelling: no one wants to die. No one wants to go jogging. So when someone turns up and says, 'There's an exotic place far away where living for ever is very easy and you just need to do what they do,' it's extremely marketable.' To him, all the Blue Zones were and are is 'the fetishising of peasants', making megabucks out of the idea that a simple life is enough to transform anyone's health.
Worse to Newman is that it is not just companies profiting off the idea, but that it may actually be having a deleterious effect on public health in some of the world's poorest places. 'It's clearly making it worse because they've been recommending people drink every day [the Blue Zones website hails Sardinians' one or two glasses of red wine each day as central to their longer life expectancies]. I mean, if you were a doctor and you recommended this to your patients, you would just immediately be disbarred; there's no question. And for 20 years, that's been the advice from someone with no medical qualifications whatsoever.'
'More insidious' still is that acquiring cash for Blue Zone certification, which can run into the millions (or tens of millions), may be obscuring funding needs for older, ailing residents. 'All of that just completely gets ignored because of this; it's an excuse to leave these regions behind,' says Newman. 'Okinawa has twice the poverty rate of anywhere else in Japan. Twice. And the government now has an excuse to say, no, sorry, they're Blue Zones – we don't need to worry about everyone's health.'
That the Blue Zone badges are so costly does little to quieten Newman's cynicism. 'It's so expensive that the entire state of Iowa [which joined the Blue Zones project and then parted ways with it] could not afford it and opted out after three years, and all of that money would have gone to public health… We need to have a serious look at what is happening here, because it looks like a private company is capturing one of the few domains left in the public sphere, which is public health. And they're making billions.'
For Newman, the only way to stop the crusade is to introduce age-validation methods free of proven flawed record-keeping. He sees methylation – checking the ageing process of DNA genomes in the blood – as a superior means of ascertaining how old a person is, and one that couldn't fall victim to the same errors, or mistruths, its predecessor has.
Ditching paperwork completely 'is the only way out of the quagmire'; the only means of halting erroneous health claims, and the businesses that capitalise off the back of them, for good, he believes. 'Otherwise, yeah, it's all junk.'
Back at McDonald's Nicoya, it is clear that junk of another kind has already won; the smell of grease and stale air conditioning mingling over punters who, even a couple of decades ago, would have spent their afternoons labouring on their land, rather than over a Big Mac. Reverting to that lifestyle would be simple here, in a sense. But for as long as straightforward health advice has existed, so too has the failure to implement it – and Nicoyans, along with the rest of the world, are paying the price.
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