Blue Zones

29:15There was a researcher from Tokyo in 1975 who went down there to be like, oh, I think these ages seem high. Let me go confirm it. So they spent years confirming the ages of people in Okinawa. They eventually write a book called The Okinawa Program, which was popular at the time, but is now kind of lost to history. And then Dan just writes himself into this as like, I went to Okinawa for the first time to discover this. You just saw a bestselling book about Okinawa and you went there. You're just a journalist, man. It's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's also an interesting thing now that sort of there's been the debunking, which we're about to get to.

29:49There's been more investigation of this sort of partnership between him and these two researchers at the 2000s. Apparently, they broke up at some point relatively recently, sometime between 2020 and 2023. Gianni Pez just left. He won't say why, but he's like, I'm not working with Dan anymore. And in 2009, as he's kind of expanding the Blue Zones empire, writing these bestselling books, Buechner patents the term Blue Zone. So basically, this is to prevent other people from like marketing it. Yeah, like those pesky researchers who came up with it. Exactly. That is how this feels. So Michel Poulain says that he had no idea that Dan patented the term Blue Zones.

30:30It's kind of funny. There's now two Blue Zones websites. So one run by Buechner is BlueZones.com. And Michel Poulain, who's like the actual researcher who did all the fucking yeoman's work to confirm the ages of all these locations, he runs LongevityBlueZones.com. Oh, it's not TwoZones.com? True zones. It's all coming back. The other, like, even beyond, like, leaving Dan Buettner out of it, when you look into what we now know about the actual blue zones, it's a much more complicated picture. So one of the things that I find really interesting about Sardinia, that's actually true for the Greek blue zone as well, is that the Sardinian blue zones have higher rates of smoking than the Italian average.

31:12Huh. If we're being systematic about this kind of lifestyle advice, shouldn't we be telling people to smoke? But obviously that would be insane because like we know that smoking is bad for you. Right. So that must be kind of a fluke. But then it's sort of like, well, wait a minute. If we know that it's bad for you and we're discarding it because other research indicates that it's bad for you, shouldn't we just be looking at research of what's good for you and what's bad for you? Yeah. If we're cherry picking stuff that is confirmed by other research, well, then we should just be doing the other research.

31:40Like what is the point of Sardinia then. This is like the tricky thing about all this stuff, right? Is that we're reaching for one weird trick, life hack kind of things that are like, what's the one step that you can take? Oh, I need to eat more nuts. Great. Yeah. Oh, I need to practice more incest. Awesome. Chardonnay and cousin fucking. The answers are once again, probably like a lot more complicated, a lot thornier than that. And probably not a uniformly rosy picture. Well, that to me is like the difference between the academic endeavor to figure out what's going on and the sort of like lifestyle advice endeavor because one of the best predictors actually of old age is not having children and having fewer children.

32:21That would be weird advice to give. Like if you want to live a long time, don't have kids. I do think as an academic endeavor it's really interesting to know that. Stressors might reduce your lifespan, like having kids is a stressor. I think to discover these sorts of patterns is super interesting, but that's not really lifestyle advice, right? The other one that he mentions a lot in all of the literature around blue zones is red wine. You know, in Sardinia, they drink so much red wine. In Greece, they drink all this red wine. But if you look at the actual numbers, people in the Sardinian blue zone drink less alcohol than Italians in general and drink less red wine than Sardinians.

32:57That's very funny. It seems like he's just going there and being like, oh, this guy drinks red wine. Red wine must be good for you without any actual checking of like, well, wait a minute, is this a population thing or just this one guy. It also turns out to be the same thing with this like eat until you're 80 % full thing. Like that is a cultural rule. Like that's something people say. But there's no evidence that people in the Sardinian blue zone eat less than other people in Italy. It just isn't clear how much of this stuff is really generalizable. There's also another thing in Sardinia specifically is, you know, Italy is a country with very traditional gender roles.

33:30And Sardinia especially is like even more like stratified by gender than other parts of Italy. And so one of the things that may actually explain why men specifically live so much longer in these like remote parts of Sardinia is that there's so much glorification of old men, often to the detriment of older women. If you're an aging woman in these areas of Sardinia, they don't consider it an obligation to care for you. So your kids are not going to take you in. Whereas if you're an older man, they will take you in. is this something we should replicate like patriarchy i'm not trying to like cancel sardinia but it's just like if we're interested in an academic endeavor of like hey what what explains this we would look at the good and the bad of these societies but when you go through these societies you know the thousands of different habits that make up people's lifestyles and you pick out the ones that you like what are we doing you might as well just say these are the things that i like even in the earlier quote that you pulled it was like yeah younger daughters and women take care of older people and men right yeah yeah yeah this is like a core organizing principle and like boy oh boy buddy why don't you break that shit out by gender and look a little bit at like what are the hell that comes for ladies because i'm guessing that someone is paying a price for that longevity in some way shape or form a quote that i was going to read you from the national geographic article earlier but i forgot is he's talking about like stress like the the less stressful lifestyles of Sardinia.

34:57And he's interviewing this guy, Tonino, who's like the pastoralist climbing around the mountains. He says, I do the work, admits Tonino, hooking Giovanna around the waist. My regazza does the worrying. Oh God, oh God, hey. So get your regazza to do the worrying. Oh God. So this was like my excuse to talk about how even before all the statistical debunking, everything we're about to get into, I just don't think the concept of Blue Zones is very fucking useful. I just think the whole thing is garbage. But now we're going to talk about the specific ways that Blue Zones may or may not be garbage. So this is the high profile debunking, yes?

35:36Exactly. This is why we're here today. Right. This is the reason for the season. So this essentially comes from just a random guy. This is a researcher at University College London named Saul Justin Newman, who it seems like basically just started reading about blue zones kind of in his spare time and was like, yo, fuck this, which I deeply sympathize with. I was going to say, it sounds like you and me. He is a biologist, but he's not. He's like a plant biologist. And all of his other publications are like kind of technical things. Well, then he's not like you and me. Yeah. Yeah. So in 2019, Saul Newman publishes a preprint paper.

36:19So like not peer review, just like a thing that he puts on the internet called Supercentenarians and the oldest old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans. He sort of republishes and updates this for 2024. It's now called Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud. He also has another paper from 2024 called The Global Pattern of Centenarians Highlights Deep Problems in Demography. So the core argument here is very like maintenance phase adjacent. It's basically that like we can't say anything about blue zones or about like the clustering of the old people because all of the data is garbage.

37:03Yeah. So he starts with a general critique of the sort of entire field of gerontology. he talks about how age is a really important risk factor, and yet there's no actual objective way to measure how old somebody is. It's especially difficult for centenarians because if somebody's 100 years old in 2024, that means they were born in 1924, which means we're relying on records from a very different time. Government capacities were very different. And because the field of gerontology essentially emerges in the 1970s, we're then going back to people born in the 1870s. Right. For context, the late 1800s is when the U.S.

37:45government issued its first nutrition guidelines. And one of those guidelines was be sure to eat vegetable ash. Oh, yeah. Burn up those vegetables and then chow it out on the onion ash. It was like, what's the correct dosage of heroin for your child? Right. Yes. When they have a little sniffle. When they have the sniffles. Yes. He says the field of gerontology and demography don't really take this seriously because they kind of assume that there's probably not that much error. And when there's error, it's probably random, right? Some people say they're a little older. Some people say they're a little younger.

38:17It's kind of a wash. But he says, no, errors are actually extremely common. And there are reasons why people exaggerate their age. And there's many reasons you wouldn't file a death certificate, right? Because if your mom is getting a pension, you can just be like, I am my mom. And then you get free money. Most of his papers are dedicated to criticizing these specific databases where people are trying to gather every single person who's over 100. There are various efforts to do this. There's a UN database. He essentially says these databases are just useless. So I'm going to send you kind of the thesis statement.

38:52According to uncorrected UN metrics, the blue zone regions with the highest late life survival are heavily enriched for states with absent or unreliable birth certificates. states with no centralized government, communist dictatorships, and countries actively engaged in war or genocide. New Caledonia is the best country in the world for life expectancy at age 100, despite being ranked 51st in the world for life expectancy at birth. One way to look at blue zones is like, oh, it's where people walk amongst the sheep and where they eat fresh roasted pumpkin every day. Or another way to look at it is it's places where they just don't keep very good records.

39:31He notes in France, almost every region in France where people live past 110 are like post-colonial regions, regions where there's been natural disasters, regions where records have been destroyed. And then you look at Paris, which has like all the rich people live in Paris. It has the best medical care. And Paris has way fewer people over 110. The mechanisms we know extend people's life expectancies. You don't find old people in places with those mechanisms. He also notes that when you look into the databases for people who do have their date of birth recorded, there's a suspiciously high number of them on the first of the month.

40:07And in some countries, they're missing like round numbers. Like you don't find people born in like the 10th and the 15th. And that's typical of human beings trying to come up with numbers that sound random. Oh no, Mike. Like when you ask people to pick a random number between one and 10, most people pick seven. Why do I feel called out by this? No, same, same, same, same. I absolutely would have picked seven. You find since the introduction of cesarean sections that there's a little bit more births on weekdays than weekends. Oh yeah, that's like a women in the workforce thing. But like even that, he says, that's only like a 2 % flex.

40:51Like we don't, it's not that big of a change weekday to weekend, the number of births. And yet for these round numbers, you find a fourfold difference for super centenarians. Jeez Louise. He then gets to the blue zones specifically. So this is a very long excerpt, but we're going to talk about it in detail. So I want you to read the whole thing. Substantial error rates were recently uncovered in every blue zone. In 1997, 30 ,000 Italian citizens were discovered to be claiming the pension whilst dead. In 2008, 42 % of Costa Rican 99-plus-year-olds were revealed to have misstated their age in the 2000 census.

41:36After limited error correction, the Nicoya Blue Zone shrunk by around 90%, and old-age life expectancy plummeted from world-leading to, quote, near the bottom of the pack. In 2010, over 230 ,000 Japanese centenarians were discovered to be missing imaginary clerical errors or dead, an error rate of 82 % in data then considered among the best in the world. Greece followed in 2012 when at least 72 % of Greek centenarians reported in the census were discovered to be dead or, depending on your perspective, committing pension fraud. He then goes into Okinawa specifically because it was the first blue zone identified.

42:22So here's this. In Okinawa, the anomalous pattern of centenarians is compounded by other error-generative processes. Japanese birth and marriage records are not generated by a central bureaucracy, but instead are hand-recorded by family members as koseki documents. On top of this self-report data, the large-scale bombing and invasion of Okinawa involved the destruction of entire cities and towns, obliterating around 90 % of Koseki records. Post-war Okinawans subsequently requested replacement documents described from memory through a US-led military government that largely spoke no Japanese and which used a different calendar.

43:07The number of replacement documents issued, a proxy measure of American bombing and shelling intensity, predicts 79 % of the variation in centenarian status across Okinawa. So it's a pretty strong case. Sure. We can't really say where people over 100 are. When we find large numbers of centenarians, it's mostly in these regions where like it just isn't very plausible that they're clustered there. And then another factor that predicts blue zones is like you don't have the fucking records. Yeah. So before we get into more of the detail and the debate about this, I want to take a slight detour into the story of – have you heard of Jean Calment, the oldest woman who ever lived, Aubrey?

43:53No, I have not. Okay. So this is a woman who was born in France in 1875. She has a daughter in 1898 when she's 22. In 1991, she is officially confirmed as the oldest person in the world. And then six years later, in 1997, she dies at the age of 122 years. around 20 years after she dies in 2018 there is a russian doctor in moscow who starts looking around at photos of her and is like she does not look 110 in these photos she looks way younger like suspiciously younger he also finds that earlier in her life gene has like a bump on the tip of her nose and then when she's older she doesn't have the bump anymore the sort of the initial questions attract the attention of another Russian guy named Nikolai Zak, who is a mathematician who starts doing the numbers.

44:55And he's saying that like, it's really fucking sketchy that the oldest person is 122 and the second oldest person is 119. It's like a really, really, really unlikely result that this woman was 122. They also start looking around. There's various like transcripts of interviews with her and they find other discrepancies. So she's born in 1875 and when she's growing up, there's a massive cholera epidemic in the small town in France where she lives that like she doesn't mention in any of her stories about growing up. She also says that she was friends with Vincent Van Gogh. People are just like, that's a weird move.

45:32they also note that her french id card has her eye color changes halfway through her life and they also note her signature like gets kind of loopier and changes over her life too your signature changing is like a known thing yeah people's signatures change over time but it is like they're sort of like death by a thousand cuts happening here so this this mathematician Nikolai Zak comes up with a theory that explains all of this. So according to him, Jean Calment died in 1934 and her daughter took over her life so that she wouldn't have to pay inheritance taxes. This aligns with kind of everything we know about old age claims.

46:17Like there's always been these mythical figures who say like, well, I'm like 131 million years old. And like, they never turn out to be true. So it's like another one. Boy, oh boy, oh boy. However, the theory that Jean Calment, like, faked her death is basically a conspiracy theory. Huh. So this little detour is based on a very good New Yorker article called, Was Jean Calment the oldest person who ever lived or a fraud? By Lauren Collins in 2020. Also a very good academic article called, The Real Facts, Supporting Jean Calment as the Oldest Ever Human by Jean Marie Rabin. So because she lived in the same city her whole life, relatively small city in France, and she married her own cousin, so her last name never changed.

47:01Good. Excellent. I didn't expect us to be here, but here we are nonetheless. There's tons of records confirming her. There's birth records. There's church records. There's marriage records. There's real estate purchases. the whole thing of like the mom dies but then the daughter takes over her identity we're not talking about her showing up in the records as her mom we're talking about someone who lives as gene calment for the rest of her life and maintains this idea that her daughter died every single person who knew her says like yeah she did not swap bodies the mother and daughter didn't even look similar this is a talented mr ripley situation like full on yeah there's also this funny thing like if she did all this to avoid the inheritance tax in 1934 the french inheritance tax was not particularly large it would have been around six percent of her assets there's also like the the efforts to confirm gene's old age were really extensive like they pulled school records and were like hey what's the name of your first grade teacher and she would know right people who do this kind of for a living like actual gerontologists who are experts in age verification, spent literally years poking at Gene Calment's story and did not find any inconsistencies.

48:18Like there are a couple of things like the Vincent van Gogh thing is really fucking weird. And it seems like that's just kind of like an exaggeration. And as you mentioned, like the fact that her signature changed over her life is just not that weird. And the discrepancy on her ID card is that it used to say her eyes were gray. And then eventually it said her eyes were black this is like true crime brain coming after dude you're like great great grandma the true crime brain shit is so bad it's also with the photos too he's like oh her nose is different but like we're talking about photos from the fucking 1920s and 1930s you can't really tell very much about somebody and this whole thing of like oh she looks different in this photo people look so different in different photos from like lighting effects the lenses you know what this is it's not true crime brain it's moon landing brain yeah yeah it's never happened before ergo it simply couldn't happen ergo this has to be a conspiracy to me the reason we're going down this detour you essentially have this pattern where like people who are close to the situation and who've looked into it are like yeah look we've we've also thought of the extremely obvious points that you're making like oh she could be lying and we looked into it and then there's this person who lives in Moscow, who's thousands of miles away, has no direct evidence of anything, no direct experience with the case or professional experience doing these kinds of investigations, who's just like, the math says she's not 122.

49:44Right. This pattern is basically what's going on with Saul Newman's debunking of the blue zones. Oh, no. His whole thing is like, demographers don't care about like bad data and stuff. But if you actually read the literature from gerontologists, they've always known that like most people who say they're over a hundred and very, very most people who say they're over 105 are fucking lying. Like the field is acutely aware of this and has gone to great lengths to disconfirm previous blue zones and previous people who said they were extremely old. So like there was a woman in Kazakhstan who said that she's 130.

50:24People go there and they're like, nah, there's like, I don't really know why, but like people in Cuba lie about their age a lot. And so people like gerontologists are always having to fly to Cuba and then look and be like, no, people who do this for a living and have made this their life's work are pretty good at disconfirming old age claims and are not reluctant to be like, no, this is not a blue zone or no, this is not a person who's 120. Right. This is the thing where we're like, we assume that unless someone is in like an extremely professionalized role that we recognize that they like haven't given any thought to their profession.

50:59Right. My God, the number of people who used to call my old work and be like, Hey, you guys are having a hard time getting gay marriage passed. I have an idea. What if you took it to court and you're like, Oh yeah, fucking nobody thought of that. Have you tried framing it like this? Totally. We've tried describing it differently. Yeah. Have you tried telling straight people to imagine if Yeah. Relationships weren't recognized. Nailed it. Fucking yeah. Yes, we have. So one thing that is so weird about this paper of Saul Newman's that like gets, goes super viral and there's all kinds of articles about like blue zones debunked is like it doesn't talk about blue zones.

51:39The whole thing is essentially debunking these like UN databases of everyone over a hundred. And it is true that those databases aren't that good, but also demographers know that they're not that good and they don't really use them. So wait, but how did we get from this paper that is pretty clearly just poking holes in the idea of super centenarians being at the levels that they're at to the blue zones have been debunked? Yeah, this is what drives me fucking crazy. Which is how all of this stuff got billed, right? We are now going to scroll up through your text messages, Aubrey, and we are going to reread the essentially only place in his entire document that Saul Newman talks about the blue zones.

52:22Substantial error rates were recently uncovered in every quote unquote blue zone. In 1997, 30 ,000 Italian citizens were discovered to be claiming the pension whilst dead. This has nothing to do with blue zones. This is basically just people not filing death certificates for their older relatives and potentially collecting the pensions. But the blue zones have nothing to do with people filing death certificates. They have to do with researchers interviewing people who are over 100 and confirming their birth records. This 2004 study that we talked about where Michelle Poulain gets like invited to go to Sardinia, they individually confirmed the ages of 600 people.

53:01Like it took years. They did actually remove one person from the roles because there's a thing in Italy where at times where there was high infant mortality when your baby died. Oftentimes you'd have another kid and give them a similar name or the same name. So there was this woman who seemed to die when she was 110, but they were using the birth certificate of her sister who died when she was like a year and a half old. Turned out she was actually 107. So again, they're not reluctant to remove people. Yeah. Okay, go for the next one. In 2008, 42 % of Costa Rican 99-plus-year-olds were revealed to have misstated their age in the 2000 census.

53:43That one's just irrelevant. People are not identifying blue zones by looking at census data and then just doing nothing else. After limited error correction, the Nicoya blue zone shrunk by around 90%, and old-age life expectancy plummeted from world-leading to, quote, near the bottom of the pack. So this one bugs me because this is based on a study by the guy who discovered the Nicoya Blue Zone. So there's a researcher there named Luis Rosero Bixby who discovered the Blue Zone, took incredible effort to confirm that these age records were real, and then eventually wrote an article called The Vanishing Advantage of Longevity in Nicoya, where he talks about like, yeah, we looked into all the age records and it turns out the Blue Zone, like where people live a long time, is actually smaller than we initially thought.

54:30So he's essentially debunking his own work, something that Saul Newman says nobody ever does. And then also he says there's this cohort shift where like people born before 1930 tend to live a long time in this region. Whereas people born after 1930, younger people are showing more signs of like poor health markers and shorter longevity. So again, that doesn't really debunk people that are 110 now. Right. That may actually just be a trend. That's just a trend. And like this is actually true in essentially all of the blue zones is that with globalization, a lot of people are emigrating. and there's more immigration and like patterns, lifestyle stuff is changing.

55:04Most of these blue zones are kind of not showing the effect that they used to. He's citing the work of demographers to say that demographers don't do this. In 2010, over 230 ,000 Japanese centenarians were discovered to be missing, imaginary, clerical errors, or dead. An error rate of 82 % in data then considered among the best in the world. So this one is bizarre. It's based on a BBC article about these 230 ,000 missing centenarians. That number is really weird because there's only 40 ,000 centenarians in all of Japan. So for there to be 230 ,000 missing centenarians, they're looking at the entire database of every single person who was born in Japan since 1872.

55:49Oh. All it is, is we have birth records for these people and we don't have death records for 230 ,000 people. So some of these are people who like went missing in World War II and just like no one ever filed a death certificate maybe because their relatives were dead too. This is fairly typical in this kind of data that you don't have a perfect match between every single birth and every single death being recorded. So there were people on the rolls that were like 150 years old. But I read a whole academic article about this where they were like no one really uses this particular database. Like this isn't showing up in life expectancy stuff.

56:22And also that error rate, if we're looking at all births since 1872, that's an extremely low error rate. Oh, yeah. It's a 0.5 % error rate. So this just has, again, nothing to do with blue zones. Blue zones are not being identified by like, oh, hey, there's this person who was born and 150 years later, we don't have a death certificate. That's not how they identified the Okinawa blue zone. Yeah. It just seems like this person is reaching for a bunch of problematic age-related data to be like, aha. Yeah. See? Okay, read the last one. There's one more left. Greece followed in 2012 when at least 72 % of Greek centenarians reported in the census were discovered to be dead or, depending on your perspective, committing pension fraud.

57:04So this one is actually true.

57:09Greece was under all this pressure during the Eurozone crisis to like tighten down its budget. And there were 9 ,000 people above 100 collecting a pension, which is hella fucking sketchy. That's like a rate of people over 100 higher than anywhere else in the world. They eventually recalculate and, you know, double check these things. It turns out there's about 2 ,000 people in the entire country over 100. So like people were fudging things around for their pensions. That is absolutely true. However, again, that has nothing to do with the Greek blue zone. The Greek blue zone is this little tiny island called Ikaria, which has a population, a total population of 8 ,000 people.

57:46When they started looking into this, so Johnny Pez and Michelle Poulain travel to Ikaria to confirm this, there were only 164 people over the age of 90 on this entire island, and they contacted them individually. That's what they're doing to confirm the blue zones, is they're literally going like door to door. Newman's entire argument is that like this must be pension fraud, but he doesn't really have any data that it's pension fraud. I mean, there's a couple of countries like Greece where like, okay, yeah, people are definitely fucking doing this. But like, this is another one of these like kind of welfare queen myths that we have in America too, that it's like, it's so easy to cheat welfare or whatever, but like, it's not that easy.

58:22And like pension fraud is something that is not looked well upon in most countries and is very easy to root out. Most government agencies have like inspectorates that will go and look at people like, okay, you say you're 107, you've been collecting a pension for like 40 years. Is this really true? There are many, many procedures in most countries to look into this stuff. And again, Newman just like, doesn't address that at all. He's like, well, Greece has a lot of people doing And like, yeah, but it was also really fucking obvious the minute they looked at it, that a lot of people were lying and they fixed it.

58:51A friend of mine was on SSDI for years, social security disability. And from time to time, because she was given like less than$900 a month to live on for all of her expenses. Right. There would be times when I would like get her groceries or something. I mean, to just be like, that's not possible. And any time I sent her any amount of money, I would reliably get a call from like the SSDI investigators in her state. No way. The smallest amount I got called for was$20. No way. I didn't actually know they did that. My God, man, the idea that like many, many, many people are out here committing pension fraud in nations that presumably care about where their money is going is not so.

59:40There are places like Greece where like there's actual evidence that this is taking place, but you have to present actual evidence. You can't just say, oh, all these people who say they're old are doing it for the pensions. And in his paper, the only actual blue zone that he like looks into is Okinawa. there's a paper in 2008 called they really are that old a validation study of centenarian prevalence in okinawa and there's also a 2011 paper by michelle poulain called exceptional longevity in okinawa a plea for in-depth validation where they talk about this challenge of like yeah a lot of the records were destroyed in world war ii but they actually look at like parts of okinawa where there was more destruction and places where the records were relatively intact and they don't find more centenarians in places where the records were destroyed.

1:00:26People have made extraordinary efforts. And this paper by Poulain about Okinawa is like really interesting. He's like, yeah, it's really fucking hard to confirm this. And like, we need to have better methods as a field. And, you know, this isn't the only place where like data is spotty. And we shouldn't just accept people's testimony that I'm 130. You have to kind of triangulate your way to concluding that like, there really just are a lot of old people here. And yes, I'm not endorsing the work of Michelle Poulain. Like this is also a guy who gives lifestyle advice, which I don't think is justified by the data.

1:00:58But the core point that I'm making is that if you want to debunk the blue zones, you have to actually debunk the blue zones, right? You have to debunk the specific work that gerontologists have done to confirm these places. You can't just say, well, Greece has a real big problem with pension fraud. And therefore this project where they spent years going door to door and confirming people's birth records in Greece is fake. Like these are just two completely separate things. You and I have talked about this before on the show that like your findings are your findings and you shouldn't like sugarcoat or change your findings, right?

1:01:33Based on sort of public response. And also we live in a world where findings like these get immediately translated into individual directives on how to live and what to eat. This is all super fascinating to me and I still feel really uneasy with the idea that there's a fucking Blue Zones cookbook. And if we're taking the research on the research's terms, there is nothing that I have heard thus far to indicate that the unique thread that sort of holds all of these places together is something about the foods that they all eat. Totally. I will also say in defense of Newman, like I'm, criticizing his conclusions here.

1:02:17However, he does have huge portions of his paper where he's like, yeah, they say that, you know, in Okinawa, it's the sweet potatoes that are making people live longer, but like they actually have lower sweet potato consumption than the rest of Japan. And Dan Buettner says like, oh, they love gardening in Okinawa, but like there's public surveys where people say that they garden less than other areas of Japan. And that's self-report. This is why I want to spend so much time like debunking the concept of blue zones on its own fucking terms before we got to this. Because like, yes, all this stuff about lifestyle is just like there isn't really data to back it up.

1:02:52Untangling causation from just like statistical flukes is really fucking hard. And it's so facile to just be like, they eat turmeric in Sardinia. And so you should eat turmeric and you'll live to 100. No. Right. It's worth finding out. And we haven't fucking found out yet. Well, the thing is, I don't want to go back to the inbreeding. Oh no, Michael. It's the most - This is my Bamu, by the way. You bringing up this much incest talk is really, I am learning I have a threshold. From what I've found from reading all this literature is that the phenomenon of people living past 110 is like kind of a distinct phenomenon from average life expectancy.

1:03:34And from all the data that I've found about it, it appears to be mostly genetic. People who live past 110 almost always have like two or three family members who live past 110. There appears to be something in some people that like literally makes them age more slowly. The fact that all of these blue zones are like remote regions where you have like genetically distinct populations. I think the original explanation in that 2004 paper is probably correct. something clustered in the Sardinian highlands over time and happens to make people age a little bit more slowly. I don't actually think it's going to be a lifestyle thing.

1:04:12Do you think it's atmospheric or genetic or something else? Yeah. I mean, there's one of the papers I read says longevity defined as top 10 % of survivors and beyond is transmitted as a quantitative genetic trait. I don't find the concept of centenarians all that useful when I think we should just look at life expectancy and we can find all kinds of information about what seems to extend life expectancy and like i i spent a decent amount of time looking into this and it's almost all like medical system stuff it's like getting cancer screenings 100 fucking percent shocking it's like vaccines that's the thing that keeps people alive is like health care i think this is just like a really complex and like super interesting field and it's just really hard to determine what affects life expectancy also because things are changing so quickly like you know lifestyles have changed so dramatically over the last 100 years that somebody who's living to 100 now it's just really hard to say what did it and also can we replicate the conditions of 1924 even if we wanted to yes and also we got to stop doing the kind of news coverage that is like somebody lived past 100 and now we're gonna ask them how they did it yeah yeah it's very cute and sweet that the grandma from texas told everybody she drinks a dr pepper every day and that's how she lived 210 or whatever it just isn't useful So that's not like health advice.

1:05:32It's not useful. And again, as you're noting, like most of the things that are going to make a big difference are going to be large scale correlations rather than like a clean causation relationship. And they're going to be systemic, not like individual practices. It's like such a weird conclusion at the end of the episode where we're like, yeah, blue zones are bullshit, but not for the reasons this guy says they're bullshit. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Saul Newman is saying that like people aren't really living to 100 in these areas. I'm saying they probably are living to 100 in these areas. Like, I think these areas are true.

1:06:04However, I don't think any of the lifestyle of life based on these things is useful. People in the highlands of Sardinia live a little bit differently than other people in Italy, but not that much. There isn't evidence that it's the fucking sweet potatoes or the gardening, but there isn't evidence that it's pension fraud either. You know what I'm realizing as we're talking about this is that this, the blue zone stuff has traveled a really similar path to a bunch of the BMI stuff, which is population level observations that then sort of worms its way into an opportunity to make money for somebody and becomes an individual directive.

1:06:43Exactly. It's a wild one to be like, oh, we're in the middle of one of those right now. We're doing a BMI, everybody. So in conclusion, they're not the blue zones. They're the true zones. Yeah. It's accurate. I told you it was a good tagline.

1:07:13Thank you.