A Blue Zones critic won an Ig Nobel today. What changes for you?

The Blue Zones are five regions — Sardinia, Okinawa, Ikaria, Nicoya in Costa Rica and Loma Linda, California — reported to have unusual numbers of very old people, and one of the best-known stories about simple living and long life. Today at MIT, the first Ig Nobel Prize in Demography went to Saul Justin Newman of University College London for work arguing that places famous for very old people tend to have poor birth and death records. The Ig Nobels honor research that makes people laugh and then think; they are not a scientific verdict. If a longevity story you believed turns out to have cracks, how much of your life has to change? Less than you might think.

What Newman reports. His analysis is a preprint, first posted in 2019 and revised this March, not a peer-reviewed paper. One example carries the argument: Newman reports that when US states introduced birth certificates, supercentenarian records fell 69–82%, and that recorded birthdates cluster on days divisible by five, a pattern that can indicate inaccurate dates. The rest is behind the link.

What the Blue Zones researchers say. The demographers who identified the zones have described, from the first Sardinia paper in 2004 onward, validating ages against civil registers, church records and reconstructed genealogies — the standard of their field — and they stand by those ages. A detailed reply to Newman's preprint is likely, and we will link it when it comes. The disagreement is real, and not ours to settle.

Ben’s take

Commercial incentive is a reason to read the sources, not a verdict on them. Blue Zones is a trademark and a business as well as a research literature; so is a book about longevity, including the one we are writing. Ask us all the same question: what evidence supports the promise, and does it hold outside the seller's own account?

Loree’s take

Three questions are tangled here. Are the ages right? That is for demographers. Did the habits cause the long lives? Even perfect records could not show that; a region is not a trial. Is there evidence for the habits where you live? That one matters to you, and it does not come from Sardinia.

What does not change. The habits were never resting on Sardinia. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed its participants for more than eighty-five years and finds the quality of relationships the strongest predictor of health and happiness in later life. A 2023 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, drawing on 196 studies and more than 30 million people, found meeting basic activity guidelines associated with a 31% lower relative risk of death than inactivity. A meta-analysis in Psychosomatic Medicine (Cohen and colleagues, 2016) found a strong sense of purpose associated with roughly one-fifth lower mortality. All of it is observational; none of it proves that a changed habit buys a set number of years. And none of it asked a Sardinian for a birth certificate.