What are Blue Zones?

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0:45Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, our episode on blue zones, which is not, well, we'll explain it. It's not immediately apparent what we're talking about. You have to kind of know the ins and outs. And I think that's kind of what we're going to do here is explain the ins and outs of blue zones. I don't know why I said all that. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'll just go and tell people right off the bat that a blue zone is supposedly an area on planet Earth where people, they have an extraordinary amount or a higher than average amount, rather, of people that live to be 100 years old.

1:26Well, there you go. Now you know the ins and outs of blue zones, everybody. But the story behind Blue Zones is what's super interesting, I think. It started, well, we're going to jump back to the 70s at one point, but it started out basically in 2004 when there was a paper that came out that said, hey, there's a large number of centenarians, people that live to be 100 at least, in a small area in the mountains of Sardinia, Italy. And the author of the papers shaded it blue on a map, called it a Blue Zone. And then in 2005, it really picked up steam because there was a National Geographic reporter named Dan Butner who wrote an article called The Secrets of Long Life in which he talked about Sardinia and his own finding of Okinawa, Japan and Loma Linda, California as two more blue zones and was like, hey, what's going on here?

2:19We got to figure this out because people there are living longer. Yeah. And the whole premise was, hey, don't you want to live longer? Let's find out what these people's secrets are, because clearly if there's a bunch of them clustered together, that means they're all doing something similarly. So let's get to the bottom of this, everybody. And the way that he put it, what if I said you could add up to 10 years of your life? A long, healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits. Yeah, I mean, I think everyone agrees with that generally. Sure. But one of the reasons why it does seem like there's a set of habits that you can engage in from the Mediterranean lifestyle or the Mediterranean diet to getting out there and walking every day.

3:07A large part of that is based on how popular the concept of Blue Zones became. And you can thank Dan Buettner. I believe his last name is Buettner. Like he just blew the whole thing up. And I don't want to say single-handedly because there are definitely people working behind the scenes. But he's the one who made it, who introduced it to popular culture. Yeah, for sure. And sort of off the jump here, I want to talk one second about a side article I read in New York Times recently. Because one of the things that you're going to hear him talk about or us talk about him talking about is one of the things you can do to live longer supposedly is tight social networks.

3:46I just read a New York Times article last week about super agers. And it's not necessarily people that live to be 100. That's what Blue Zones is talking about. But it's just people that live into their 80s and 90s without getting dementia. And it was a pretty robust study. They had a large cohort over like 25 years. And they said some of them drink booze every day. Some of them, they have been smokers. Some of them eat a lot of red meat. They said the one single thing that they found in common with all of them was social relationships, active social relationships with people outside of your house and going out and seeing people.

4:22They said they tend to be extroverts. So people that go out and socialize with other people was the one commonality between all of them. That sucks. Oh, no. I'm in big trouble, man. We got to get you out, buddy. I guess so. I'm going to have to update my wardrobe. You're like, I'm eating fish and olive oil and walking every day. Doing everything else. I just don't want to talk to anyone but Yumi and Momo. I put my hand up by my face when I walk past somebody when I'm out walking every day. I thought it was really interesting because, you know, most of us in our Gen X category are dealing with aging parents.

4:55And I feel like everyone I know is going through it in some capacity. So I'm just reading a lot about that stuff lately. Oh, that's nice of you. Prepping yourself? Prepping myself so I don't do this to Ruby. Nice. You know? Nice. So, yeah, tight social networks, that is a big one as far as the blue zones are concerned. And I guess that's the only one that really matters. But they have other stuff, too, like you need to have a sense of purpose. And anecdotally, I know that makes sense because a lot of people, I don't know if a lot's the right term, but there are definitely people who die very shortly after retiring.

5:34Yeah. And in the United States, your job in a lot of cases is your identity and your purpose in life. People are like, family, forget that. Accounting is my purpose in life. And then once they retire, they don't have any numbers to crunch and they keel over dead. So that, I mean, anecdotally, that definitely makes a lot of sense. Yeah, for sure. But this Nat Geo article that Buechner wrote went viral. um Buechner was basically like hey this is it for me he did a TED talk uh and and has developed quite a a robust uh cottage industry around Blue Zones uh he's written a lot of books he's written Blue Zone cookbooks uh there's been a Blue Zone uh Netflix series there are Blue Zone branded like he copyrighted the term Blue Zone right and or trademarked it rather and uh there are skin care products and iced teas and there's hot sauces and you can do a Blue Zone retreat or pay monthly for a Blue Zone app.

6:35There's a lot of stuff that he's selling. Yeah, for sure. He basically blew it up into a lifestyle brand. Yeah, which is one reason some people have come along and criticized it and said, wait a minute, is this like real science and real research or is this just creating a brand and making money? I mean, not with maybe nefarious intent or anything, But, like, let's look at the science. And a big person that you're going to hear come up a lot in this is a guy named Saul Justin Newman. And in 2019, he put out a statement, basically, that said, hey, I think this is all just bad data. Yeah, he wrote a paper on it, essentially.

7:20Yeah, like bad record keeping on ages. Yeah. And this is not new. The idea of super agers or centenarians, especially ones clustered together, has been long controversial. Anytime somebody's come along and been like, hey, we found a bunch of people are living to their hundreds. Let's look at what they're doing so the rest of us can do that, too. But back in 1973, there was a guy named Alexander Leaf. He was a physician and he got kind of caught up in this whole thing, just trying to figure it out. and he wrote an article for National Geographic, just like Dan Buettner did in 2004, but this is in 1973.

7:59And he went to different parts of the world where there were anecdotally, I guess, a bunch of centenarians living, and he investigated and he found, yes, there are some groups of people around the world who have some sort of secret to aging late in life because there's a bunch of 100-plus-year-olds who live in these usually isolated areas. Yeah, but he himself, and credit to Alexander Leaf, he was like, you know what, this is after the article was published. He didn't just sit back and collect his million-dollar check and say, oh, I guess that's that. He was like, wait a minute, some of this stuff is nagging at me and doesn't seem to make much sense.

8:43So he kind of went back on his own research even and started looking through these records, basically. And he, in one case, he saw a death certificate of a man who was allegedly 168 years old. And he was like, that's pushing it, I feel like. For sure. And in another area, he met a villager who claimed to be 122. He went back a year later and the guy said he was 134. So he was like, all right. Five years later, in 1978, he partnered with a couple of other scientists to sort of get down to the bottom of it all and dug through records in these places and found a lot of, like, discrepancies where people were off by decades on their actual age.

9:23And they reckon that, like, I think they're doing this because it brings them a lot of prestige. Instead of being, like, 80-something years old, they say they're 105, and all of a sudden they're, like, the village elder, you know? Right, exactly. But a fraudulent village elder. That's right. Essentially what happened was an outsider, a Westerner, got tripped up into what is probably a custom in the area. Like that people just kind of inflate their ages. And people like Alexander Leaf are obsessed with finding out exactly how that happens and not stopping to be like, I don't know if this is actually real.

10:02But yeah, hats off to Alexander Leaf for going back on his own findings and admitting like, no, this is probably not right. Because they concluded without a doubt that the Ecuadorians in this village of Vilcabamba were fraudulent. Yeah. And he's like, I'm sure that also applies to the other places too. So everybody just forget the article I wrote. Yeah. I mean, that's a, again, hats off, because to put your own name out there is like, hey, I got it wrong. Like, I don't know if I would have done it. You don't think so? We do that all the time. Oh, well, that's a good point. Yeah, we correct ourselves.

10:40So we're going to introduce you to a couple of more people that factor in pretty heavily here. In 1999, there was an Italian researcher named Giovanni Pes, P-E-S, never heard that last name. No. He presented a paper at a demography conference, and then there was a—why is that funny? Because a demography conference is like party central? Yeah, I can imagine somebody going, what segment of the population here is ready to party? Yeah, or I wonder if they just stand around at break and look out on the street, and they're like, how many people do you think are over there on that sidewalk? Is that right?

11:14I said 64. What percentage of those people are smoking Marlboro Lights? So in that audience, though, where Giovanni Pest was presenting a paper, there was a guy named another demographer, obviously, named Michael Poulin, a French guy. And he had recalled this fiasco in the early 70s. And he was like, wait a minute. He's talking about Sardinia, Italy, that, you know, originally the area where Buechner wrote the article. Turns out Buettner wrote the article about this research on Sardinia that Giovanni Pess had done. Yes. So it's very easy to just assume that Dan Buettner came along and either piggybacked on Pess and Poulain's research or kind of invited himself into their little party.

12:01He was actually already looking into this. Like, I think as far back as 99, he had set up a project to investigate how Okinawans, who are widely reputed for living into their hundreds, and we should say healthy, not like decrepit old balls of yarn. Like, these are healthy people who still move around and do stuff on a daily basis. Yeah. How they were doing that. So long before Pez and Poulin put their stuff together, or I guess about the same time, but independently, Buechner was doing his own thing, too. So he didn't just come along and steal their idea or their research. Yeah, for sure. And as you'll see, they worked together for quite a while after this, too.

12:46But so Poulin remembered the thing from the 70s and he was like, all right, I'm going to go to Sardinia myself and sort of dig into this. So he did that, started cross-checking birth records and marriage records and anything he could get from archives, you know, in the town or from the church or whatever. And they are the ones, they put X's, when they clustered, they shaded it blue. And they're the ones, Poulin and Pez in 2000, that coined the term blue zone. Even though, I guess, Buechner trademarked it. So, I don't know. I'm not sure what happened there. I couldn't find anything about Poulin or Pez's reaction to him trademarking that.

13:24I wonder if it was, he did what? So, yeah. It's like all the X's, whenever they confirmed somebody, they started to cluster so much that it just became a blue region. So now Dan Buettner had a name for this idea, this concept that he'd been working on for years. And he, yeah, he took it and ran with it and turned it into that lifestyle brand. Pez and Poulain essentially were like, OK, that's fine. We're going to stay academic here and try to keep studying this. And Buechner would kind of come in and out of their research over the next couple decades. Yeah. And the key thing, as far as the original three places in Buechner's article, like you mentioned, he had already studied Okinawa.

14:10He picked up on what Poulin and Pez were doing with Sardinia. But Loma Linda, California is in there. And everyone was like, what the heck does Loma Linda got going on? And just last year, Buechner told the New York Times that Loebelin was apparently included because the editor at Nat Geo said, we got to get an American Blue Zone in there. Yeah. Like this needs to be. I know it needs to be like applicable to our readers here. So a lot of critics, of course, are going to come out and say, like, that's that just kind of that's not science. No, you don't like editors don't dictate scientific methods or results.

14:46Right. So, yeah, that's a big criticism. but and I think also like I haven't seen anything that says Poulain or Pess are irritated by or just like Buechner or anything like that but just looking at the whole thing thing from the outside Buechner just keeps attracting just you know contradiction or naysayer after naysayer and Poulain and Pess are like dude we're doing like real science over here like, stop giving our work a bad name because you're out there selling Loma Linda because your editor told you to put it into the original article. Right. Or selling hot sauce. Yeah. Selling hot sauce. It's another great one.

15:29But so in, I guess, his defense, Buechner said, well, actually, Loma Linda, statistically speaking, people there tend to live anywhere between, I think, four to 10 years more than the average California resident. And there's actually a really good reason for that. There's a huge cluster of Seventh-day Adventists there. And you'll remember from our Kellogg live episode on the Kellogg brothers, the Seventh-day Adventists kind of inspired them in their health food movement. They don't tend to smoke or drink or eat meat. And so he was like, that's great. We're going to include them in there. So it's not like he just threw a dart like the Bay City Rollers and picked whatever city that it landed on.

16:16Like there was a reason why. And it turned out to be a pretty good business move because five years ago in 2020, Adventist Health, which is essentially the hospital arm of the Seventh-day Adventists, they bought. the Blue Zone trademarks and all of the brand. So they now own it, the Adventists do. Very interesting. All right, I'm going to ponder that. Let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk more about Blue Zones.

16:56Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page, as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen.

17:30I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:10So, Chuck, like I said, Buechner and Pess and Poulin all started working together in the early 2000s. And Buechner was funded by National Geographic. He was a fellow for them, I think even before he wrote the article for National Geographic. But they started funding expeditions to look for more blue zones. And in the mid-2000s, 2000s, the aughts, I guess, they identified two more, one in Costa Rica on the Nicoya Peninsula, and another one in Ikaria, Greece, which is between Greece and Turkey. It's an island between Greece and Turkey. It looks absolutely amazingly beautiful. But they added them to there because they went and studied the centenarians and said, yep, this qualifies as a blue zone.

18:59I was just laughing because I was wondering if the Nat Geo editor was like, I kind of want to retire near Sedona. See if you can find me some olds there. That's right. I heard there's ley lines there. I'm trying to sell the wife. Right. More recently than that, they've added more Blue Zones besides the area of Costa Rica and Ikaria, Greece. Singapore was added in 2023. That's in the book Blue Zones, Secrets for Living Longer. Colon, nothing to add here. Martinique in 2023, that was added as well. But this was not Buettner. Apparently, Poulain is the one that put that Caribbean island, which is a department of France, He put that one on the list because there were twice as many centenarians per capita than mainland France.

19:50And so they're saying like they're basically finding these things that happen and saying like, hey, that's that's a blue zone. We're going to call it that because we made up that name. Yeah, but according to Poulin's very strict definition, there has to be a higher than normal or usual percentage of centenarians, people who are over age 100, and that they typically are healthy, active. They're still living life, right? That is the true definition of a blue zone. I get the impression Buechner, including with Loma Linda, got a little fast and loose with the definition and that that's probably a point of contention.

20:30Well, they came up with each of them independently came up of their own list basically of things to do to live longer. Buechner has his they're called the power nine, which is trademarked. and Poon Lan calls his the seven principles. I didn't see if that was trademarked. I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so either. Here they are. One is move naturally, and that is basically like you're not going to the gym every day and quote-unquote working out. You're just moving through the world. You might be herding goats in this village every day or working in the garden all day long or just walking back and forth to the village to do your daily trading.

21:08They found that if you just move naturally through the world as you age instead of just sitting on the couch, then you're going to live longer. Yeah. If you have the same daily routine as Balki Bartakomus, you are probably going to live into your hundreds. Good one. Also, eating meat in very small proportions or not at all seems to be correlated with living a long life among blue zoners. Yeah. Usually, essentially plant-based diets, some fish depending on where you live. Yeah. And then Okinawans are very famous for something called harahachibu, which is the 80 % rule where you eat until you feel about 80 % full and then you stop, which is extremely clever because you get fuller and fuller after you start to feel full.

21:58So that rounds up to the full 100 % of fullness almost every time. Yumi taught me that. And it really works. It's also really difficult to stop eating when you're 80 % full when you're eating processed Western food. It's nearly impossible. But if you can pull it off, you're like, wow, this actually works. You should probably slow down, too. I bet that helps. That's what they say. Because all of a sudden, if you're like me, you're like, oh, God, I'm at 105%. Right. I was trying to stop. But also, if you slow down and really, like, you can sense the food that you're eating more, you can enjoy it more mindfully, too.

22:35So, I mean, yeah, for sure. Sense of purpose we talked about. It's called different things in different parts of the world. Costa Ricans call it Pura Vida. It's basically like, you know, do things that give you joy and like that you want to get out of bed and do. Like accounting. Right. Sure. If that's your thing. But yeah, I mean, it could be like a hobby. It can be anything. Like just having a reason that you're alive is that's your purpose. I think that's you got to have that, man. And I just hate to think that anybody doesn't feel like they have a purpose in life, especially like I get it.

23:11You go through like chunks of life, like say your early 20s where you're like, oh, my God, everybody else is more successful than me. And my life is off the rails already. And I'm only 20 years old. Everybody goes through that. So I can I can see like going through phases where you are lacking purpose or maybe direction is another way to put it. But like later in life to just feel like you've never had a purpose in life. I can't bear to think that that people feel like that, that anybody out there does. Yeah, for sure. Stress reduction is another. Reducing stress. I don't know why that's funny.

23:45But, you know, taking trips with your family, hanging out with your friends is kind of what I was talking about earlier with the social interaction. Right. And also get a lot of sleep. Yeah, that's very important, too. There's one that Buechner lists that Poulain doesn't. It's a religious faith. Apparently, they interviewed 263 centenarians together, and all except five of them belong to some sort of church or religion or a faith-based community. Surprisingly, most of them were Flying Spaghetti Monster followers. So you might want to look into that for longevity, too. Family first is another tenant.

24:29You know, live close to your family. Care for your old. Get together with your family. That's one. So, you know. We're both kind of screwed. Sure. What else? Strong social circles. That sort of ties into the other things we were talking about. But, yeah, you got to have those strong social ties. What about taking shots? Like taking a shot at your friend or taking a shot of whiskey? Taking a shot of booze, doing shots. Well, I mean, you know, they used to say that a couple of drinks a day, a couple of glasses of wine, like in Sardinia, Italy, is, you know, the kind of thing they do. They have wine with food, even during the daytime.

25:12They've now kind of gone back and say no amount of the World Health Organization, at least, saying no amount of alcohol is good for your health. So that was a disappointing finding. Yeah, that was another one that Poulain leaves off of his seven principles. He's French. Yeah, that's really saying something because they love the wine. I know. They like the wine. Yeah. So you mentioned Saul Justin Newman, who is the leading critic, I guess, of all of this. he says like yeah Buechner has turned this into a lifestyle brand and that smacks of all sorts of questionable stuff as far as science goes he goes even further than that he says the entire thing is based on a faulty premise in that there are no blue zones there are no clusters of centenarians who live in areas and live a longer life because of these lifestyle decisions and choices and things that they do, that just doesn't exist, that essentially the people who study this have been misled by their own data and that that's what is producing what seems like these blue zones.

26:25Yeah, and just in case you're wondering, he's a senior research fellow at the Center for Longitudinal Studies at the University of College of London. And he kind of starts out by saying like, hey, we noticed one thing. State issued birth certificates are really important. And 82 % of the super centenarians, and those are people over 100, were born before they started doing this widely, basically. So if we really had the real birth certificates of these people, that number of people living beyond 100 drops way, way down. Like essentially, everyone's lying about their age. Yeah, or mistaken about their age.

27:12But yeah, a lot of people apparently lie about their age. Also, Chuck, one of the other things that he pointed out is that if you study areas, especially in developed countries like Italy, England, and France, I think he specifically looked at, in areas with the biggest clusters of super centenarians, right? So I guess that's 101 on. Yeah. So those areas also tend to be more poverty stricken. The people have people living there make lower incomes. They have lower literacy rates, higher crime rates, very tellingly fewer 90 year olds, which is a big statistical anomaly because that suggests that people are just jumping into their hundreds.