Red flags over Blue Zones

Okinawa residents remain active and limber till they die, according to writer Dan Buettner. Illustration by C Y Gopinath using Midjourney

An Indian, a Chinese and an American learn about Blue Zones, places where an unusually large number of people live to a ripe old age,

The Indian says, "We don't need Blue Zones. We already have a Saffron Zone."

The Chinese says, "Ah yes, Blue Zones. Confucius created the first one 2,500 years ago. We call them Brue Zones."

The American says, "Awesome. I smell money. I bet I could make a business out of Blue Zones if I just packaged it right."

You'll probably be hearing much more about Blue Zones in the days ahead. Netflix has released a mini-series about Blue Zones called How to Live to be a 100. Search ‘blue zones' on Amazon and you'll see seven books on the topic including, as expected, The Blue Zones: Secrets of Living Longer and The Blue Zones Kitchen, all by Dan Buettner.

Buettner is an agreeable bro, the kind with whom you could go marathon cycling, which he did. Crossing the USA on a bike in 1986, aged 26, won him a Guinness World Record and led to his first book, Ameritrek.

Cut to 1999, when Buettner's curiosity led him to Okinawa, which apparently had strikingly more centenarians than Japan's average. Buettner wanted to know what they ate and did to live that long. He unearthed fascinating facts - they remain active and limber till they die through gardening, walking and other everyday activities.

They value ikigai, having a purpose in life. They have moais, community support groups. They stop eating when they're 80 per cent full, a practice called hara hachi bu.

Also read: ‘I'm running to keep up with the audience'

On a roll now, Buettner began searching for longevity secrets in the planet's four other demarcated Blue Zones: Italy's island of Sardinia; Greece's Ikaria; Loma Linda, an Adventist community in California; and Nicoya in Costa Rica.

He may have realised he was on the next big thing. The hidden secrets of a long life synthesised into an attractive package, with T-shirts and caps, marketed to Americans just dying, as it were, to live as long as possible.

You might find Buettner's lists of factors contributing to longevity whimsical. In Ikaria, he decided it must be raw honey, herbal teas, wine, loving marriages, and dancing and laughing. In Nicoya, it was doing things manually and eating lots of corn, squash and black beans, among others. From Sardinia, he conjectured that you could live longer if you lived in a steep place.

Buettner looks like a man in a hurry to find dots to join. When he had enough, he boiled everything down to four longevity principles, supposedly distilled from insights from the Blue Zones.

Eat wisely, mostly plant-based

Move naturally and move a lot

Have the right outlook, follow a faith and find a purpose

Connect - with family, friends, partners, community

In other words, Blue Zoners have been pretty much doing what sensible people everywhere have always been advised to do. There were no magic berries or arcane secrets.
Alas, the train was already moving. Buettner's Blue Zones company has raised millions and worked with city councils to create Blue Zones across the USA, starting with Albert Lea, Minnesota. The modest goal: add two years to everyone's life.

Since you can't wait for people to die to find out how much longer they'd lived, the project was deemed to have achieved its goal after the first two years based on small improvements in health metrics.

Americans love prescriptions, and the Blue Zones project is telling them that living to 100 is easy as pie. Just buy the book and the T-shirt, and follow four rules.

But there's something tragically superficial about Blue Zones.

Buettner doesn't dig very deep. He's a ferret, not a hound. His questions stop when he hears novel, catchy answers. Here are a few red flags he missed about Blue Zones.

Okinawa, Sardinia and Ikaria are among the least educated and poorest regions in their nations. Ikarian men love to drink and 99 per cent of them are smokers.

Their so-called "healthy" lifestyles are dictated by abject poverty. Okinawa has the highest murder rate and the second-lowest income in Japan. Thanks to the battering it took in World War II, it has high rates of PTSD.

As you'd expect under such conditions, most Blue Zoners actually die early. Okinawa has one of Japan's lowest life expectancies.

So how do even a handful manage to live so long?

Easy. Most people were born before birth records were kept and simply had no idea how old they were. They lied. In the USA itself, the number of centenarians has dropped by as much as 82 per cent in states that started keeping vital records.

A more likely reason is pension fraud. Driven by poverty and unemployment, many exaggerate their ages to become eligible for pensions. In 2010, a Japanese investigation found that 238,000 self-reported centenarians who had been collecting pensions were actually missing or dead, leaving just 40,399 with known addresses.
There is one giant lesson we can learn about longevity from the Blue Zones - stop worrying so much about how long you'll live. Just live.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper