Are Blue Zones Debunked?

We all love the takedown of a wellness grifter, but this controversy fails to do so.

Are Blue Zones debunked? In the fall of 2024 and spring of 2025, a rash of mainstream news articles, social media posts, and podcast interviews certainly said so! The message was that Blue Zones—geographically distinct regions where people live longer on average—are not a real demographic phenomenon, but rather an artefact of bad records, age exaggeration, and pension fraud. And the trademarked Blue Zone diet, various Blue Zone-branded products, even certified Blue Zone Communities, all amount to no more than wishful thinking.

So, is it actually true that Blue Zones are fake? Spoiler: no. But, there’s a lot to this story, so let’s start at the beginning…

The Beginnings of “Blue Zones”

To understand why the claim that Blue Zones don’t really exist is so compelling—and why it’s controversial—we need to go back to how Blue Zones were first discovered.

Dr. Giovanni Pes is a medical researcher, epidemiologist and native Sardinian who became interested in longevity research in the 1990s because many members of his own family were very long lived, including his great grand-uncle who lived to 110. In 1996, he started collecting mortality data in Sardinia and discovered a region of the island with a 30% higher concentration of centenarians (people 100 years or older) compared to the rest of Sardinia. Most fascinatingly, there was almost no gender gap, which was surprising because, in general, females are about 5 times more likely to live to 100 than males. Had Dr. Pes just discovered a longevity hotspot?

Dr. Pes presented his findings at a conference in France in 1999, and… no one believed him.

To give you a little more context here, before the identification of the first modern Blue Zone in Sardinia, interest in exceptional human longevity was already sparked by earlier reports of so-called “longevity hotspots,” most notably Vilcabamba, a remote valley in Ecuador that gained international attention following a 1973 National Geographic article. Early accounts described unusually high numbers of centenarians, often attributing their longevity to factors like mineral-rich water, simple diets, and low-stress lifestyles. Later demographic analyses showed that these longevity claims were largely the result of inaccurate age reporting, missing records, and inconsistencies in documentation rather than true exceptional lifespan. It seems as though most of the supposed centenarians were exaggerating their age. Examinations of other rumored longevity hotspots also found them to be either incorrect or impossible to verify due to insufficient documentation. So, when Dr. Pes gave his presentation at that conference in 1999, it was a time when most researchers were skeptical that any such region existed.

Dr. Pes shared in a talk at the 2018 Global Wellness Summit that, after his presentation was met with incredulity, he thought his scientific career was over. Someone at that conference even told him that he should give his presentation in a nuraghe—stone ruins found throughout Sardinia—implying that his career was in ruins. Ouch!

Serendipitously however, Dr. Michel Poulain, a Belgian gerontological demographer, was also at the conference. During a coffee break, Dr. Poulain joined a small group of researchers who were all discussing their serious doubts about Dr. Pes’s findings. Because Dr. Poulain was an expert in age validation, this group of researchers suggested he go to Sardinia and check the documents to verify the veracity of Dr. Pes’ claims. And so, he did! This started a nearly 20-year-long collaboration between Dr. Pes and Dr. Poulain.

The history of false positives and failed validation efforts ultimately set the stage for a more rigorous, documentation-driven approach to identifying true longevity clusters—including the work of Dr. Pes and Dr. Poulain in Sardinia. In the spring of 2000, they spent 6 months visiting about 40 municipalities in two regions of Sardinia, Ogliastra and Barbagia, methodically and rigorously checking and cross-checking archival documentation and interviewing dozens of centenarians. Eventually, Dr. Poulain was convinced that this area of Sardinia did indeed exhibit extraordinary longevity, and confirmed that the probability of reaching 100 year old was about double compared to the rest of Sardinia.

As Dr. Pes and Dr. Poulain worked to verify the age claims of centenarians in Sardinia, they made a mark on a map with a blue pen every time they confirmed someone’s age. As the work developed, some parts of the map became full of blue dots—areas they began to refer to as “Blue Zones.”

Yes, we have the ubiquity of blue pens to thank for the term Blue Zone!

A Blue Zone is defined as a geographically and temporally distinct area where there is a higher proportion of long-lived people—nonagenarians, centenarians and supercentenarians, i.e., people living into their 90s, 100s and even 110 years old or older—compared to the surrounding area and the rest of the country to which the Blue Zone belongs. So, these are areas of the world where people have a higher likelihood of living to extreme old age. Importantly, these regions are defined not just by a higher proportion of people reaching advanced ages, but also by the fact that many of those individuals maintain relatively good health and functional independence well into late life. So, Blue Zones give researchers an opportunity to study the genetic, diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors that can help us live not just longer lives but also healthier lives. We’ll come back to the insight they’ve gleaned so far…

While Drs. Pes and Poulain were undergoing their rigorous age validation procedures in Sardinia, on the other side of the world, journalist Dan Buettner was in Okinawa on the invite of the Japanese Government, working on a story about the world’s longest lived people for National Geographic. (The longevity of Okinawans was well established at the time.) This work and a grant from the National Institute on Aging brought Mr. Buettner into the same sphere as Dr. Pes and Dr. Poulain. So, Dan Buettner ended up also going to Sardinia to do research for his Nat Geo story, and because his editor at National Geographic also really wanted a location in the US to be featured, Mr. Buettner also went to Loma Linda, California—a community of Seventh-day Adventists purported to live an average of 7 to 10 years longer than the rest of America.

In 2004, Dr. Poulain, Dr. Pes, and their research team published their findings in a landmark paper in the journal Experimental Gerontology, which coined the term Blue Zone for a scientific audience. And in 2005, Dan Buettner published “The Secrets of Long Life” cover story for National Geographic, where he wrote about following a day in the lives of three elders in Sardinia, Okinawa, and Loma Linda. And this is what brought the idea of Blue Zones to a wider audience.

Dr. Pes, Dr. Poulain, and Mr. Buettner then joined forces, and worked together to identify and validate additional Blue Zones. They investigated multiple regions believed to contain unusually high concentrations of centenarians, with expeditions typically taking a whole year. In some areas—such as Vilcabamba, Ecuador, or the Greek island of Crete—evidence for unusual longevity was lacking. But robust data supported the longevity hotspot claim for two additional regions: the peninsula of Nicoya in Costa Rica in 2007, and the island of Ikaria in Greece in 2008.

Dr. Poulain audited records and verified ages to determine whether unusually high longevity was truly present in each location. Dr. Pes worked to identify the dietary, behavioral, and environmental patterns associated with long life in these communities. And Dan Buettner led the expeditions—raising funds, coordinating fieldwork, and overseeing a team of writers, photographers, and support staff. Dan Buettner was also clearly the business man and the Blue Zone hype man, which helped him to get funding to accelerate this research, but also eventually opened it up for criticism.

Before we get to the controversy however, let’s summarize the (sometimes conflicting) takeaways from a couple of decades of Blue Zone research…

Lessons from Blue Zones: Genetics vs. Lifestyle

Once Blue Zones were identified and validated, the next obvious question was: what explains them? And what, if anything, can we learn from them to live longer, healthier lives?

Interestingly, Blue Zones seem to be somewhat dynamic, i.e., temporally defined in addition to geographically defined. For example, the Blue Zone in Nicoya, Costa Rica is shrinking, with a 2023 study showing that, while Nicoyan men born in 1905 have 33% lower mortality rates than the rest of the country, those born in 1945 actually have 10% higher rates, so they’re no longer living such unusually long lives. A similar 2024 study of the Okinawan Blue Zone shows that, while the older generations still experience significant longevity benefits, the younger generations show higher mortality rates compared to mainland Japan. On the flip side, new Blue Zones may emerge. There’s preliminary evidence for possible Blue Zones in The Netherlands (here) and China (here), and Dr. Poulain added the Caribbean Island of Martinique to his list of Blue Zones in 2019 (here).

Importantly, the temporal nature of Blue Zones does not invalidate their existence. Instead, their ebb and flow gives researchers even more data to look at to identify what factors contribute to exceptional longevity, because they can look at what changes lead to a shorter lifespan in one area, versus areas where longer lifespans are more stable, helping to tease out whether people live longer in these areas because of their genetics or because of their diet, lifestyle and environment.

Dr. Pes, Dr. Poulain, and other Blue Zone researchers have had two main hypotheses to explain the exceptional longevity that they observed in the Ogliastra region of Sardinia: 1) stabilization of rare gene variants associated with extended lifespans, thanks to the population being isolated; and 2) also thanks to geographic isolation, the preservation of specific “sociocultural and anthropological characteristics,” meaning, diet, lifestyle and environmental factors that extend lifespan.

When Blue Zone research began, it was believed that lifespan is about 20% determined by our genetics and 80% determined by everything else, thanks to a quite famous study of Danish twins published in 1996. More recent analyses of this same data set and other twin studies show our lifespan is about 50% determined by genetics.

So, the question is: Do people in Blue Zones just have better genes?

The answer is probably not. So far, more than two decades worth of research into Blue Zones, including Sardinia, have failed to show a concentration of longevity genes. It could be that the relevant genetic variants just haven’t been discovered yet, or that the explanation is epigenetic rather than genetic. But also, the lack of evidence supporting the first hypothesis strengthens the evidence for the second hypothesis, that the main contribution to extreme long life in Blue Zones is that these areas have so far succeeded in maintaining a traditional lifestyle. This includes a high level of physical activity that extends beyond the age of 80, low levels of stress, getting enough sleep, very high family and community support, and diets composed almost exclusively of locally-produced whole foods.

And exploration of this second hypothesis has definitely turned up quite a lot of supporting data that aligns well with what other medical research and nutritional sciences tell us about a healthy diet, lifestyle and social and physical environment. And that’s exciting because it means that there’s things that we can all do to live like people do in Blue Zones, as well as broader public health policies and structural supports—like improving affordability of whole foods and access to safe environments for physical activity—that could be put in place, to extend our lifespan and healthspan.

So, what are the action items from Blue Zone research, the things we can focus on as individuals to improve our health and lengthen our lives? This is where the story gets more complicated because the answer to that question depends on who you ask!

Let’s start with Dan Buettner’s list, which he has trademarked and published in his books. To create this list, Mr. Buettner says he did a “deep-dive literature review,” interviewed 105 experts, and over 400 centenarians. He calls them The Power 9: Secrets to Living Life Longer, Better. They are:

1. Move Naturally. Blue Zone residents live lifestyles that make movement a normal part of their day, throughout the day.

2. Purpose. Blue Zone residents have a sense of purpose that gives them a reason to keep going.

3. Downshift. Blue Zone residents have habits that allow them to relax on a regular basis, and get plenty of sleep.

4. 80% Rule for Moderate Eating. This one is really about avoiding excess calories, summarized as eating three meals per day, a bigger breakfast and a lighter dinner, and no snacking.

5. The Plant Slant. Mr. Buettner says that Blue Zone residents eat a mostly vegetarian diet, with beans or other plant proteins daily, meat once a week or less and fish about three times per week. (This is not agreed upon by all Blue Zone researchers, see below.)

6. Moderate Alcohol Consumption. Residents of many Blue Zones have one to two glasses of wine daily. (Don’t get excited about this one, see below.)

7. Right Tribe. Blue Zone residents often are part of an intentional social circle of friends who not only share their lifestyle but also serve as a support system.

8. Loved Ones First. Blue Zone residents have strong family ties.

9. Belong. Mr. Buettner says that nearly all the Blue Zone residents are part of a faith community, and while the particular faith does not matter, participation in it does. (This is not agreed upon by all Blue Zone researchers, see below.)

One of the ongoing criticisms of Blue Zones is that the Power 9 appears to be influenced by Dan Buettner’s ideology, and isn’t fully representative of what people eat and how they live across Blue Zones. So, it’s important to emphasize that the Power 9 has not been formally tested or established through peer-reviewed research as a unified, evidence-based framework.

In fact, Dr. Michel Poulain disagrees with some of the Power 9 action items and interprets the data for others a little differently. For example, he says that “‘Plant Slant’… is not consistently prominent in Blue Zones.” Instead, he sees systems where people avoid over eating. Similarly he says that “‘Wine@5’, which encourages moderate alcohol consumption, may not fully align with Blue Zone science.” Nor does the recommendation to drink wine daily agree with current research, which shows that the healthiest amount of alcohol to consume is none.

So, Dr. Poulain’s Seven Principles of Blue Zones are:

1. Move Naturally

2. Eat Wisely—which emphasizes stopping when 80% full, eating mostly whole foods, and lots of fruits and veggies that are seasonal and local.

3. Avoid Stress & Get plenty of Sleep

4. Keep Strong Family Ties

5. Stimulate Strong Community Support—not necessarily faith based

6. Respect For the Planet

7. Having a Purpose in Life

There are certainly more similarities than differences between these two lists, but those differences do matter! And while the Power 9 gets more airtime, Dr. Poulain’s Seven Principles have a higher degree of overlap with the seven Lifestyle Medicine pillars proposed by Stanford University and the six pillars of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. I also want to add that what’s missing from both of these lists but other Blue Zone researchers have documented is the importance of smoking cessation and not abusing substances.

Focusing on the areas of agreement, these research-backed takeaways from Blue Zones are consistent with broader evidence in public health and lifestyle medicine—live an active lifestyle, eat mainly whole foods including plenty of fruits and veggies, get enough sleep, manage stress, and nurture social connection and community. Those areas of disagreement—the gap between the science and the storytelling—hint at a divide that grew among the key players in this story. That’s right—long before the famous (or infamous) critique of Blue Zones took hold, the tension was already building…

How the Business of Blue Zones Broke Up the Band

This brings us to an important part of the story, because as Blue Zones gained popularity, they became big business. And the fact is that Dan Buettner has profited from the concept.

Mr. Buettner trademarked the term “Blue Zone” in the United States in 2005, saying in an interview “People were already starting to use the term ‘Blue Zones’ in terrible ways. To promote beef and sweetened drinks, for example. Unless you protect the term, anybody can use it in the way they want.”

Dan Buettner has written ten books about the Blue Zones and their cuisines (5 of which are New York Times bestsellers); founded a multi-million dollar company, Blue Zones, LLC, which he sold in 2020 to Adventist Health but is still a consultant for; produced the Netflix series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, which came out in 2023; offers Blue Zone cooking courses (including a recorded online course that you can buy for $149); and regularly speaks at high-level events. The booking website KeySpeakers.com lists his speaker’s fee as between $75,000 and $125,000.

There are now many Blue Zone branded products for sale on BlueZones.com, including skin care products, coffee, herbal tea, honey, hot sauce, and frozen dinners (which are $14 each, and most of them are under 300 calories worth of food). You’ve also got Blue Zones Health which combines nutrition, health coaching, and primary care medicine, and which journalist Paul von Zielbauer discovered that several of the testimonials on the Blue Zones Health website are using a stock photos.

And the biggest ticket item, municipalities can work with Blue Zones, LLC to become a certified Blue Zone Community. This is a years long process where municipalities commit to reshaping their cities according to Blue Zone principles, like deterring driving while incentivizing walking, encouraging people to participate in more social activities, and promoting moderate consumption of meat and alcohol. The certification cost the City of Riverside, CA more than $20 million (as per here). Although, they did project they’d get $468 million in cumulative projected value, so hopefully they feel that it was worth it. Fort Worth, Texas is the largest US city to be a certified Blue Zone Community—among the “well-being improvements” the city experienced in its first four years after certification are fewer residents smoking (mirroring national trends) and more residents being active at least three times per week (also mirroring national trends).

So yes, Blue Zones became big business. And that didn’t sit well with Dr. Michel Poulain. Dr. Poulain has said that he had no idea that Mr. Buettner had trademarked the term Blue Zone, and was dismayed when he finally learned about the large fees Dan Buettner was charging.

With the collaboration already strained, the breaking point came when Chanel (yes, that Chanel) launched an antiaging skincare product in 2017 called Blue Serum, marketed as containing active ingredients from the Blue Zones, specifically: “green coffee from Costa Rica, olives from Sardinia, and mastic from Greece.”

Dan Buettner didn’t approve (this was way before the partnership between Blue Zones, LLC and Immunocologie on a skin care line, which was announced in 2024), so he requested that Chanel stop using the term Blue Zone. When Chanel declined to change the product branding and marketing, Mr. Buettner started legal proceedings and asked Dr. Poulain to testify.

The lawsuit was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Dr. Poulain said he was so frustrated that he not only refused to testify, he walked away from the decade-plus long collaboration with Dan Buettner. I also gather Chanel won the lawsuit, because Blue Serum is still for sale on Amazon with Blue Zone-related marketing language on its packaging.

The upshot was that Dr. Pes, Dr. Poulain and Mr. Buettner each went their separate ways. In fact, Dan Buettner basically edited Dr. Poulain out of the Netflix series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, with Dr. Poulain saying in one interview “I don’t appear, just at one moment you can see me from afar.” And for his part, Dr. Poulain has continued to be critical of the ways that Dan Buettner and Blue Zones, LLC is profiting from the academic research of Blue Zones. In a 2025 peer-reviewed article, Dr. Poulain stated “While researchers have pursued their rigorous age validation methodology recently applied to Martinique and South Galicia, and studied factors that contribute to exceptional longevity, Blue Zones, LLC, the company that initiated the Blue Zone projects in the US, has moved in a lucrative business direction by branding various services and goods labeled as Blue Zone products.” Yes, all signs point to a nasty break up.

This is why there are now two different “official” Blue Zones websites, each with its own “official” list of Blue Zones (which don’t match each other). One website is owned by Blue Zones, LLC (which operates a cluster of interconnected websites like BlueZonesHealth.com and BlueZonesKitchen.com) and reflects Dan Buettner’s views. The other website is owned by Dr. Poulain, who also recently founded a nonprofit organization called Living Blue Zone International. There are four Blue Zones that appear on both “official” lists: Sardinia, Okinawa, Nicoya, and Ikaria. They disagree on Loma Linda, Martinique, and Singapore.

Dr Poulain has said that he has never considered Loma Linda to be a true Blue Zone, instead viewing it as a religious community defined by shared lifestyle practices rather than a geographically distinct population exhibiting unusual longevity patterns. Unlike the other Blue Zones—which were identified through demographic analysis of entire populations—Loma Linda represents a self-selected group of Seventh-day Adventists whose longer lifespans are largely consistent with well-established health behaviors, such as not smoking, avoiding alcohol, maintaining strong social ties, and following a plant-forward diet. From a demographer’s perspective, this makes Loma Linda fundamentally different: it reflects the health outcomes of a specific lifestyle cohort, rather than a population-level longevity phenomenon emerging from a place itself. And Dan Buettner has said that he added Loma Linda to the 2005 National Geographic piece and his list of Blue Zones online because his editor wanted him to include a place in the U.S., and quote “I never bothered to delist it.” Also remember that Dan Buettner sold Blue Zones, LLC to Adventist Health in 2020, so there may be some other factors going into why Loma Linda is still listed as a Blue Zone on Dan Buettner’s website.

Dr. Poulain added the Caribbean island of Martinique to his list of Blue Zones in 2019. Dan Buettner says that he can’t comment on it since he wasn’t involved in that validation process. And Dan Buettner has added Singapore to his list as his “sixth Blue Zone”, but Dr. Poulain has expressed skepticism, saying that he thinks Dan Buettner has been “obliged to find a new story” to keep growing the business of Blue Zones.

Here’s the most important part though… as the business of Blue Zones strays from the science of Blue Zones, it has opened up the entire concept to criticism.

Of course, this criticism isn’t coming only from outside scientists. Dr. Poulain has also raised concerns about how Blue Zones have been translated into commercial and public health initiatives, particularly by Blue Zones, LLC. In a 2025 peer-reviewed article, he describes how Blue Zones projects have evolved into a lifestyle brand and criticizes them as neoliberal initiatives focused on self-responsibility that “overlook health disparities related to poverty, unemployment, education, and other social factors,” and that “lack direct connections to the health care sector but focus on promoting lifestyle without consistently providing medical evidence.” Oof.

And this is where we get to the heart of the controversy, the critique written by Dr. Saul Newman, which argues that the claims of exceptional longevity in Blue Zones are better explained by data errors and documentation failures than by true demographic patterns.

Dr. Saul Newman’s Critique and Ig Nobel Prize

As Blue Zones became more commercialized, they also attracted more scrutiny—from both journalists and scientists.

In 2019, Dr. Saul Newman, a research fellow at the University College London (who previously accused the Australian government of funding pro-alcohol research), posted a preprint article criticizing the statistics of Blue Zones. His argument is most supposed centenarians just don’t exist. He has since updated this preprint and posted a second preprint expanding on his criticism of Blue Zones research. Both articles have yet to pass peer review.

Dr. Newman shows that when record-keeping systems improve, many claims of extreme old age tend to fall apart. In the United States, the reported number of supercentenarians (people aged 110+) fell markedly after the introduction of formal birth certificates around 1900, which he interprets as earlier ages being inaccurately recorded—either unintentionally or through exaggeration. He cites a similar pattern in Greece; when authorities audited pension rolls, roughly 70% of supposed centenarians were found to actually be deceased. While in some cases, deaths were simply never officially recorded, in other cases, pensions were still being paid to people who had died and relatives were collecting payments. Dr. Newman also notes anomalies in some datasets—such as spikes in birthdays on the first of the month or on dates divisible by five—which he argues are consistent with fabricated or estimated birth dates.

Dr. Newman said in an interview: “I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyze). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.”

Dr. Newman’s first preprint drew limited mainstream attention until September 2024, when it received the Ig Nobel Prize in Demography, for “detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.”

The Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical award that honors genuine scientific research and achievements that, as their tagline says, “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think”. It’s organized by the Annals of Improbable Research and they get actual Nobel Laureates to hand out the awards. For example, one of the other awards the same year that Dr. Newman won went to Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen, for “exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk.” The research study “Factors Involved in the Ejection of Milk” was published in the Journal of Animal Science in 1939.

Not relevant, but a fun detail, Dr. Newman accepted his Ig Noble prize, wearing a Tetris suit and in verse with a poem that he composed for the occasion:

The secrets fell over
Like a lover in clover
When I checked the government books
The blue zones are poor
The records no more
The 100-year-olds are all crooks.

The secret, it seems
To live out your dreams
And make sure you keep living, not dying
Is to move where
Birth certificates are rare
Teach your kids pension fraud and start lying.

Aside: I love this so, so much and really do think more acceptance speeches should be in an AABCCB rhyming scheme.

It’s worth noting that it’s fairly unusual for an Ig Nobel Prize to be awarded to work that hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. For example, a recent analysis by GATech shows that about 88% of Ig Nobel Prizes relate to published studies, and the remaining 12% are for a mix of news articles, books, patents, reports, and other documents.

Dr. Newman’s preprints are going on 7 years without passing peer review. However, winning the Ig Nobel Prize brought significant attention from mainstream media, which in turn amplified the visibility and perceived credibility of his work. This led to a flurry of news articles, social media posts, and interviews claiming that Dr. Newman had successfully debunked Blue Zones.

I want to acknowledge that, while longevity researchers say Dr. Newman’s preprints remain unpublished due to methodological flaws, false equivalencies and a disingenuous argument, Dr. Newman views this as a conspiracy, saying in one interview “Imagine you had to publish a debunking to the yeti in the yeti-hunting journal and the only people who peer review it are yeti experts, you’re not going to have a fun time. It’s not going to get published.”

Dr. Newman also says Dan Buettner once invited him to join an expedition in search of another Blue Zone, an opportunity to witness the age validation procedures firsthand. But Dr. Newman said that he wrote back saying “How am I gonna look for something that doesn’t exist? You haven’t proven the first five, what am I going to do—wander the Earth?”

The Nitty-Gritty Details of the Critique and Rebuttals

Given the ongoing skepticism of Blue Zones by many of my colleagues and followers, I want to go into a little more detail on the arguments Dr. Newman makes in his critiques, as well as the thorough rebuttals offered by Blue Zone researchers.

Dr. Newman argues against the existence of Blue Zones using an ecological and administrative-data approach that combines population-level correlations with discontinuities introduced by changes in record-keeping systems (such as the introduction of formal birth registration).

In his first preprint, he shows how U.S. supercentenarian records dropped sharply after state birth-certificate systems were introduced, and that remarkable-age records in Italy, England, and France are associated with poverty, deprivation, shorter life expectancy, worse health, and other indicators that are opposite to what one would expect if those places truly had unusually healthy survival. In his second preprint, Dr. Newman extends his argument globally, claiming that some of the top-ranked regions for survival to 100+ include places with implausibly poor underlying survival conditions or weak registration systems. Dr. Newman sees this as evidence that most records of extreme age can be explained by documentation errors, gaps in vital records, mistaken identities, or financial incentives like pension fraud.

Dr. Saul Newman said in an interview “What demographers call validation is actually just checking the consistency of documents. If documents are consistently wrong, then errors are not detectable.”

Dr. Newman’s logic is that when extreme-age claims cluster where documentation is weak, literacy and income are low, life expectancy is not especially high, or fraud incentives are present, the simplest explanation is that of data quality failure rather than “Blue Zones” being regions of exceptional longevity. Note that this argument is indirect. Rather than disproving individual cases, Dr. Newman’s critique argues that the overall pattern of where extreme ages appear doesn’t line up with what we’d expect based on health, lifespan, and demographic data, and is more easily explained by documentation failure, identity substitution, or pension fraud. Within this framework, Blue Zones are not treated as exceptional cases but as part of a broader pattern in which clusters of extreme age may arise from systematic data errors rather than true survival advantages.

Blue Zone researchers have published rebuttals and methodological responses (here, here, here, and here), arguing that Newman’s critique misfires because it targets the general problem of false extreme-age claims without fully accounting for the actual validation procedures used in Blue Zone identification and research.

Dr. Giovanni Pes says “The critic’s draft papers, which have been promoted in mainstream media, attempt to discredit the Blue Zones by presenting a series of false equivalencies. He argues that the excessive number of centenarians and supercentenarians in non-Blue Zone areas is due to poor demographic records, which is often the case. However, he ignores the fact that this criticism does not apply to Blue Zones, where ages have been rigorously validated with modern, accurate demographic methodology.”

Unreliable age claims are a well-known problem in gerontological demography, which is why researchers undergo rigorous validation procedures designed specifically to detect and eliminate the types of errors highlighted in the critique. In the official Blue Zones, age validation typically involves:

• Cross-checking multiple independent documentary sources (e.g., civil records, ecclesiastical records, family registries)

• Genealogical reconstruction to confirm identity continuity

• Structured interviews with claimants and relatives, used as supplementary evidence alongside documentary validation, with cross-referencing to verifiable historical events (e.g., wars, migrations, marriages, births) to corroborate life histories

• Exclusion of late-registered or unverifiable cases

• Verification across birth and death records

Cross-checking multiple independent documentary sources minimizes fraud, clerical error, memory error, and identity substitution.

Blue Zones are not simply defined by raw counts of centenarians or supercentenarians. For Sardinia, the process began with municipality birth registers for the 1880–1901 cohorts, with deaths at 100+ often identified via marginal annotations in civil registers, identifying people who died at 100+ from marginal death annotations, searching for additional surviving centenarians regardless of where they later lived (accounting for migration), validating the age of each centenarian individually, and then computing an Extreme Longevity Index (ELI) as the ratio of validated centenarians to births in the same cohorts. The researchers then used spatial smoothing to delineate the area where ELI peaked, marking the borders of the Blue Zone. This approach is intended to avoid biases introduced by population movement or selective survival.

Empirical work in Sardinia, Okinawa, Nicoya, and Ikaria shows that elevated survival to advanced ages persists relative to national averages and compared to surrounding populations even after validation and cohort adjustment. In some cases, validation studies have identified and excluded erroneous age claims, yet the overall pattern of unusually high late-life survival remains.

So, while Dr. Newman’s warning is generally correct, it does not overturn the existence of Blue Zones because those were validated with methods specifically designed to detect exactly those errors.

As Dr. Pes and Dr. Austad state in a 2025 peer-reviewed article “We now know that most self-reported claims of extreme longevity are false. That does not mean, however, that exceptionally old people and populations do not exist. It only means that identifying them is not a trivial task.”

They do all seem to be at an impasse, though, with Blue Zone researchers maintaining that the validation methods successfully address the issues raised, while Dr. Newman continues to argue that the underlying data remain fundamentally unreliable. Dan Buettner said in one interview “You have one guy, a sociologist, who has no formal training in demography and who’s never been to a Blue Zone making all these sorts of parallel claims.” Meanwhile Newman claps back to the rebuttals, saying “If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.” It does not sound like a constructive conversation is in the cards…

So, Are Blue Zones Debunked?

No, but not just because Dr. Newman’s preprints have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. As is so often the case, the story is more complicated than the headlines suggest.

What Dr. Newman’s work does well is remind us of something demographers have known for a long time: extreme-age claims are most often false. Bad records, missing documentation, and fraud can and do distort longevity data, and many historical “longevity hotspots” have fallen apart under scrutiny. That skepticism is valid. But that doesn’t mean all longevity research collapses with it. The original Blue Zones were identified precisely in response to those problems, using methods designed to catch the very errors Dr. Newman highlights. When you focus on those rigorously validated populations—Sardinia, Okinawa, Nicoya, and Ikaria—the signal of exceptional longevity still appears to hold.

At the same time, the commercial enterprise around Blue Zones has clearly outpaced the science. And even researchers like Dr. Poulain have raised concerns about how the concept has been translated into public health messaging and business ventures.

So we’re left with three overlapping but distinct realities:

• Blue Zones as a scientific concept: a small number (so far) of rigorously validated regions with unusually high survival to advanced ages

• Blue Zones as a narrative: simplified lifestyle takeaways that are partly supported by evidence, but not formally tested as a unified model

• Blue Zones as a business: a branded ecosystem that has amplified both the reach—and the criticism—of the concept

Conflating these three is what has fueled the controversy. If you strip away the hype, the core insight from Blue Zones is actually pretty uncontroversial: people tend to live longer, healthier lives in environments that support physical activity, social connection, sufficient sleep, low stress, and diets built around mostly whole foods. That’s not a secret, and it’s not unique to Blue Zones, but these regions provide real-world examples of what that can look like across an entire population.

And if there’s one takeaway from this whole controversy, it’s this: good science is rarely as simple (or as clickable) as the story told about it.

So no, Blue Zones aren’t debunked. But they’re also not magic. They’re a starting point for asking better questions about how we live—and how we might live better.

A Word of Thanks

In March, I posted a TikTok video with a nutritional analysis of a Sardinian minestrone recipe, which I introduced by saying something to the effect of “let’s take a closer look at this traditional dish from an area of the world where people live longer on average”. A comment left on that video—“Blue Zones are debunked!”—triggered several weeks of side quest, a 12-part video series (I do have a few follow-up videos planned), and this article. So, my first thank you goes out to the original commentor!

I had heard that there were problems with Blue Zone research but wasn’t familiar with the controversy. When all of the hype was happening in early 2025, my oldest daughter was going through a health crisis, so I didn’t have time or bandwidth to dig into this research at that time. But, I think it was easier to get clarity on the full scope of the criticism and rebuttal looking at this topic now, thanks to this article in Science and the collection of 2025 peer-reviewed rebuttal articles by Dr. Pes, Dr. Poulain, Dan Buettner, and others (here, here, here, and here). I hope that my colleagues who currently believe Blue Zones are debunked will read this along with my extensive list of citations and reconsider their positions. A note: a few weeks ago when I was researching this topic initially, all of the rebuttal articles were publicly available and open access. Two of them have since been removed and placed under embargo. I guess that means I inadvertently broke that embargo when I shared screenshots and quotes from those articles in my video series, oops! I’ve never seen articles go from open access to embargoes like this before, so I can’t help wondering if that means one or more of the key players saw my video series, squee! Anyway, because the papers were open access when I read them and I have a couple hundred screenshots to cross-reference, I decided to keep any quotes from the embargoed papers in my article above.

I also want to extend a special thank you to my paid subscribers. Your support of my work is essential to me being able to keep doing it! This week’s Nutrivore Newsletter is a departure from my usual formats and doesn’t include any special downloads, so I hope you’ll let me know what you think by commenting below or sending me an e-mail, and please tell me whether you’d appreciate more myth busting content from me!

Citations

Amigo I. Shades of blue. Science. 2024;386(6724):840-845. doi:10.1126/science.adu7169

Austad SN, Pes GM. The validity of Blue Zones demography: a response to critiques. Gerontologist. 2025;65(12):gnaf246. doi:10.1093/geront/gnaf246

Brincat C. Do people in Blue Zones actually live longer? Popular Science. Published 2025. Accessed April 18, 2026.

Buettner D. Lessons From the Blue Zones: There is No Silver Bullet (or Magic Pill) for a Long, Healthy Life. Am J Lifestyle Med. Published online May 1, 2025. doi:10.1177/15598276251334310

Buettner D. The secrets of long life. National Geographic. 2005 Nov.

Buettner D, Skemp S. Blue Zones: Lessons From the World's Longest Lived. Am J Lifestyle Med. 2016;10(5):318-321. Published 2016 Jul 7. doi:10.1177/1559827616637066

Caruso C, Accardi G, Aiello A, Calabrò A, Zarcone R, Candore G. The longevity of blue zones: myth or reality. J Gerontol Geriatr. 2025;73(2):55-66. doi:10.36150/2499-6564-N865

Carvan T. Dr Saul Newman has uncovered the “secret” to living to 110. ANU News. Published September 30, 2024. Accessed April 18, 2026.

Deeg DJH, van Tilburg T, Visser M, Braam A, Stringa N, Timmermans EJ. Identification of a “Blue Zone” in the Netherlands: A Genetic, Personal, Sociocultural, and Environmental Profile. Gerontologist. 2024;64(11):gnae132. doi:10.1093/geront/gnae132

Demsas J. Are Blue Zones a mirage? Good on Paper podcast. The Atlantic. Published April 2025. Accessed April 18, 2026.

Global Wellness Summit. Blue Zones: The full and fascinating story begins. YouTube. Published 2018. Accessed April 17, 2026.

Herskind AM, McGue M, Holm NV, Sørensen TI, Harvald B, Vaupel JW. The heritability of human longevity: a population-based study of 2872 Danish twin pairs born 1870-1900. Hum Genet. 1996;97(3):319-323. doi:10.1007/BF02185763

Huang Y, Mark Jacquez G. Identification of a Blue Zone in a Typical Chinese Longevity Region. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2017;14(6):571. Published 2017 May 28. doi:10.3390/ijerph14060571

Kreouzi M, Theodorakis N, Constantinou C. Lessons Learned From Blue Zones, Lifestyle Medicine Pillars and Beyond: An Update on the Contributions of Behavior and Genetics to Wellbeing and Longevity. Am J Lifestyle Med. 2022;18(6):750-765. Published 2022 Aug 20. doi:10.1177/15598276221118494

Kyle T. Debunking the Blue Zone Diet and Winning an Ig Nobel Prize. ConscienHealth. Published 2024. Accessed April 18, 2026.

Newman SJ. Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud [preprint]. bioRxiv. Published 2019. Updated 2024. Accessed April 18, 2026.

Newman SJ. The global pattern of centenarians highlights deep problems in demography [preprint]. medRxiv. Published 2024. Accessed April 18, 2026.

Poulain M, Herm A, Pes G. The Blue Zones: areas of exceptional longevity around the world. Vienna Yearbook of Population Research. 2013;11:87-108.

Poulain M, Herm A. Blue Zone, a Demographic Concept and Beyond. Am J Lifestyle Med. Published online May 28, 2025. doi:10.1177/15598276251342502

Poulain M, Herm A. Blue Zone: A model to live longer and better. In: Poulain M, Mackowicz J, eds. Positive Ageing and Learning From Centenarians : Living Longer and Better. London: Routledge Taylor & Francis; 2022:1-17.

Poulain M, Herm A. Exceptional longevity in Okinawa: Demographic trends since 1975. J Intern Med. 2024;295(4):387-399. doi:10.1111/joim.13764

Poulain M, Pes GM, Grasland C, et al. Identification of a geographic area characterized by extreme longevity in the Sardinia island: the AKEA study. Exp Gerontol. 2004;39(9):1423-1429. doi:10.1016/j.exger.2004.06.016

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Roundtable on Population Health Improvement; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice; Institute of Medicine. Lessons from the Blue Zones®. In: Business Engagement in Building Healthy Communities: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 2015. Accessed April 18, 2026.

Shenhar B, Pridham G, De Oliveira TL, et al. Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50% when confounding factors are addressed. Science. 2026;391(6784):504-510. doi:10.1126/science.adz1187

von Zielbauer P. The trouble with Blue Zones. Aging With Strength. Published 2025. Accessed April 18, 2026.