What are Blue Zones?

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 1 Our episode on Blue Zones, which is

Speaker 1 not,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Well, I mean, I'll just go ahead and tell people right off the bat that a blue zone is supposedly an area on planet Earth where people,

Speaker 3 they have an extraordinary amount. or a higher than average amount rather of people that live to be 100 years old.

Speaker 1 Well, there you go. Now you know the ins and outs of blue zones, everybody.

Speaker 3 But the story behind blue zones is what's super interesting, I think.

Speaker 3 It started,

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And then in 2005, it really picked up steam because there was a National Geographic reporter named

Speaker 3 Dan Buttner 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?

Speaker 3 We got to figure this out because people there are living longer.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and the whole premise was, hey, don't you want to live longer? Let's find out what these people's secrets are.

Speaker 1 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, I think everyone agrees with that generally.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 A large part of that is based on how popular the concept of blue zones became. And you can thank Dan Buetner.
I believe his last name is Buetner. Like he just blew the whole thing up.

Speaker 1 And is all, 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 And sort of off the jump here, I want to talk one second about a side article I read in the 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.

Speaker 3 I just read a New York Times article last week about super agers.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 there have been smokers.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 people outside of your house and going out and seeing people. They said they tend to be extroverts.
So people that go out and socialize with other people was the one commonality between all of them.

Speaker 1 That sucks.

Speaker 1 Oh, no.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 You're like, I'm eating fish and olive oil. I'm walking every day.

Speaker 1 Doing everything else.

Speaker 3 I just don't want to talk to anyone but Yanni and Momo.

Speaker 1 I put my hand up by my face when I walk past somebody when I'm out walking every day.

Speaker 3 I thought it was really interesting because, you know, most of us in our Gen X category are dealing with aging parents. And

Speaker 3 I feel like everyone I know is going through it in some capacity.

Speaker 3 So I'm just reading a lot about that stuff lately.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's nice of you. Yeah.
Prepping yourself?

Speaker 3 Prepping myself so I don't do this to Ruby.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 3 You know?

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But they have other stuff too, like you need to have a sense of purpose. And anecdotally, I know that makes sense because

Speaker 1 a lot of people,

Speaker 1 I don't know if a lot is the right term, but there are definitely people who die very shortly after retiring. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Accounting is my purpose in life.

Speaker 1 And then once they retire, they don't have any numbers to crunch and they keel over dead.

Speaker 1 So that, I mean, anecdotally, that definitely makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. But this NatGeo article that Buetner wrote went viral.

Speaker 3 Buehtner was basically like, hey, this is it for me. He did a TED Talk

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 has developed quite a robust cottage industry around Blue Zones. He's written a lot of books.
He's written Blue Zone cookbooks. There's been a Blue Zone Netflix series.

Speaker 3 There are Blue Zone branded, like he copyrighted the term Blue Zone.

Speaker 3 Or trademarked it rather. And there are skincare products and iced teas and there's hot sauces and you can do a BlueZone retreat or pay monthly for a Blue Zone app.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of stuff that he's selling.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 He basically blew it up into a lifestyle brand.

Speaker 3 Yeah, which is one reason some people have come along and criticized it and said, wait a minute,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 put out a statement basically that said, hey,

Speaker 3 I think this is all just bad data.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he wrote a paper on it, essentially.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like bad record keeping on ages. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And this is not new. The idea of super agers or centenarians, centenarians, especially ones clustered together, has been long controversial.

Speaker 1 Anytime somebody's come along and been like, hey, we found a bunch of people who are living to their hundreds. Let's look at what they're doing so the rest of us can do that too.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And he wrote an article for National Geographic, just like Dan Buetner did in 2004. But this is in 1973.

Speaker 1 And he went to different parts of the world and where there were anecdotally, I guess, a bunch of centenarians living.

Speaker 1 And he investigated and he found, yes, there are some groups of people around the world who

Speaker 1 have some sort of secret to aging late in life because there's a bunch of hundred plus year olds who live in these usually isolated areas.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but he himself, and credit to Alexander Leaf, he he was like, you know what? This all like, even this was after the article was published.

Speaker 3 He didn't just like sit back and collect his million-dollar check and say, oh, I guess that's that.

Speaker 3 He was like, wait a minute, this, like, some of this stuff is nagging at me and doesn't seem to make much sense.

Speaker 3 So 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 1 So he was like, all right.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 1 And 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 so that's right essentially what happened was an outsider a westerner got tripped up into what is probably some a custom um in the area it's like that people just kind of inflate their ages and the like people like alexander leaf are obsessed with finding out out exactly how that happens and not stopping to be like, I don't know if this is actually real.

Speaker 1 But 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's a, again, hats off because that's a, to, to put your own name out there as like, hey, I got it wrong. Like, uh, I don't know if I would have done it.

Speaker 1 You don't think so? We do that all the time. Oh, well, that's a good point.
Yeah, we correct ourselves.

Speaker 3 So 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,

Speaker 3 P-E-S, never heard that last name.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 3 He presented a paper at a demography conference, and then there was a, why is that funny? Because a demography conference is

Speaker 1 party central yeah i can imagine somebody going what segment of the population here is ready to party yeah or

Speaker 3 i wonder if they just stand around at break and look out on the street and they're like how many people you think are over there on that sidewalk

Speaker 1 i said what percentage of people are smoking marlborough lights

Speaker 3 So in that audience, though, where Giovanni Pest was presenting a paper, there was a guy named, another demographer, obviously, named Michael Poulin,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 the area where Buehtner wrote the article. Turns out Buetner wrote the article about this research on Sardinia that Giovanni Pess had done.

Speaker 1 Yes. So it's very easy to just assume that Dan Buetner came along and either piggybacked on Pess and Poulane's research or kind of invited himself into their little party.

Speaker 1 He was actually already looking into this.

Speaker 1 Like I think as far back as 99, he had set up a project to

Speaker 1 investigate how Okinawans, who are widely reputed for living into their hundreds,

Speaker 1 and we should say healthy, not like decrepit old balls of yarn. Like these are like healthy people who still move around and do stuff on a daily basis.
Yeah. How they were doing that.

Speaker 1 So long before Pez and Poulan put their stuff together,

Speaker 1 or I guess about the same time, but independently, Buetner was doing his own thing too. So he didn't just come along and steal their idea or their research.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. And as you'll see, they worked together for quite a while after this too.

Speaker 3 So Poulan 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,

Speaker 3 started cross-checking birth records and marriage records and anything he could get from archives in the town or from the church or whatever.

Speaker 3 And they are the ones, they put X's, when they clustered, they shaded it blue. And they're the ones, Poulan and Pess in 2000, that coined the term blue zone.

Speaker 3 Even though I guess Buetner trademarked it. So I don't know.
I'm not sure what happened there.

Speaker 1 I couldn't find anything about Poulan or Pez's reaction to him trademarking that.

Speaker 3 I wonder if it was...

Speaker 1 He did what?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So that I'm so now Dan Buetner had a name for this idea, this concept that he'd been working on for years.

Speaker 1 And he, yeah, he took it and ran with it and turned it into that lifestyle brand. Pez and Poulane essentially were like, okay, that's fine.
We're going to stay academic here

Speaker 1 and try to keep studying this. And Buetner would kind of come in and out of their research over the next couple decades.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And the key thing as far as the original three places in Buechner's article, like you mentioned, he had already studied Okinawa.
He picked up on what Poulan and Pez were doing with Sardinia.

Speaker 3 But Loma Linda, California is in there. And everyone was like, what the heck is Loma Linda got going on?

Speaker 3 And just last year, Buechner told the New York Times that Loma Linda was apparently included because the editor at Nat Geo said, we got to get an American blue zone in there.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 you don't, like, editors don't dictate scientific methods or results, right? So, yeah, yeah, that's a big criticism. Um, but

Speaker 1 and I think also, like, I haven't seen anything that says Poulan or Pez

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 1 irritated by or just like Buetner or anything like that. But just looking at the whole thing from the outside, Buetner just keeps attracting just, you know,

Speaker 1 contradiction or naysayer after naysayer. And Poulan and Pez are like, dude, we're doing like real science over here.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Right. Or selling hot sauce.

Speaker 1 Yeah, selling hot hot sauce. It's another great one.

Speaker 1 But so in, I guess, his defense, Buehtner 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.

Speaker 1 And there's actually a really good reason for that. There's a huge cluster of Seventh-day Adventists there.

Speaker 1 And you'll remember from our Kellogg live episode on the Kellogg brothers, the the Seventh-day Adventists kind of inspired them in their health food movement.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So it's not like he just threw a dart like the Bay City rollers and picked whatever city that it landed on. Like there was a reason why.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So they now own it. The Adventists do.

Speaker 3 Very interesting.

Speaker 3 All right. I'm going to ponder that.
Let's take a break and we'll come back and talk more about Blue Zones.

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Speaker 1 So, Chuck, like I said, Buetner and Pess and Pouline all started working together in the early 2000s. And Buetner was funded by National Geographic.

Speaker 1 He was a fellow for for them, I think, even before he wrote the article for National Geographic. But they started funding expeditions to look for more blue zones.

Speaker 1 And in the mid-2000s, 2000, the aughts, I guess, they identified two more, one in Costa Rica on the Nicoya Peninsula, and another one in Akaria, Greece, which is between Greece and Turkey.

Speaker 1 It's an island between Greece and Turkey. It looks absolutely amazingly beautiful.

Speaker 1 But they added them to there because because they went and studied the centenarians and said, yep, this qualifies as a blue zone.

Speaker 3 I was just laughing because I was wondering if the Nat Geo editor was like,

Speaker 3 I kind of want to retire near Sedona. See if you can find me some olds there.

Speaker 1 That's right. I heard there's ley lines there.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to sell the wife.

Speaker 3 More recently than that, they've added more blue zones besides the area of Costa Rica and Icaria, Greece.

Speaker 3 Singapore was added in 2023. That's in the book Blue Zones, Secrets for Living Longer.

Speaker 1 Colon, nothing to add here.

Speaker 3 Martinique in 2023, that was added as well.

Speaker 3 But this was not Buechner. Apparently, Poulin

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so they're saying like, they're basically finding these things that happen and saying like, hey, that's a blue zone. We're going to call it that because we made up that name.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But according to Poulan's very strict definition, there has to be a higher than

Speaker 1 normal or usual percentage of centenarians, people who are over age 100,

Speaker 1 and that they typically are healthy, active. Yeah, yeah.
They're still living life, right? That is the true definition of a blue zone. I get the impression Buetner,

Speaker 1 including with Loma Linda, got a little fast and loose with the definition and that that's a probably a point of contention.

Speaker 3 Well, they came up with, each of them independently came up of their own list basically of things to do to live longer. Buetner has his, they're called the Power Nine, which is trademarked.

Speaker 3 And Poulan calls his the seven principles. I didn't see if that was trademarked.

Speaker 1 I don't think so.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You're just, you're moving through the world.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. If you have the same daily routine as Balky Bartakamus, you are probably going to live into your hundreds.

Speaker 3 Good Good one.

Speaker 1 Also, eating meat in very small proportions or not at all seems to be correlated with living a long life among blues owners. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Usually essentially plant-based diets, some fish, depending on where you live. Yeah.
And then Okinawans are very famous for something called harahachiibu,

Speaker 1 which is an 80%, 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.

Speaker 1 So that rounds up to the full 100% of fullness almost every time. Yumi taught me that, and it really works.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 You should probably slow down too. I bet that helps.

Speaker 1 That's what they say.

Speaker 3 Because all of a sudden, if you're like me, you're like, oh, God, I'm at 105%.

Speaker 1 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.
So, I mean, that's what they say. For sure.

Speaker 3 Sense of purpose we talked about. It's called different things in different parts of the world.
Costa Ricans call it pura vita.

Speaker 3 It's basically like, you know, do things that give you joy and like that you want to get out of bed and do.

Speaker 1 Like accounting.

Speaker 3 Right, sure, if that's your thing.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I 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.

Speaker 1 And I just hate to think that anybody doesn't feel like they have a purpose in life, especially like I get it.

Speaker 1 You 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But like later in life to just feel like you've never had a purpose in life, I can't bear to think that people feel like that, that anybody out there does.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. Stress reduction is another.

Speaker 3 Reducing stress. I don't know why that's funny, but

Speaker 3 taking trips with your family, hanging out with your friends. This is kind of what I was talking about earlier with the social interaction.
Right.

Speaker 3 And also get a lot of sleep.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's very important too. There was, there's one that Buetner lists that

Speaker 1 that Pulane 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Surprisingly, most of them were flying spaghetti monster followers.
So you might want to look into that for longevity, too.

Speaker 3 Family first is another tenant.

Speaker 3 You know, live close to your family.

Speaker 3 Care for your old. Get together with your family.
That's one. So, you know,

Speaker 3 we're both kind of screwed.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 3 What else? Strong social circles. That sort of ties into the other things we were talking about.

Speaker 3 But yeah,

Speaker 3 you got to have those strong social ties.

Speaker 1 What about taking shots?

Speaker 3 Like taking a shot shot at your friend or taking a shot of whiskey?

Speaker 1 Taking a shot of booze, doing shots.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, you know,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 They've now kind of gone back and said no amount of the World Health Organization, at least, is saying no amount of alcohol is good for your health.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that was a disappointing finding.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was another one that

Speaker 1 Poulane

Speaker 1 leaves off of his seven principles.

Speaker 3 He's French.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's really saying something because they love the wine.

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 1 They lack a dewine.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you mentioned Saul Justin Newman,

Speaker 1 who is the leading critic, I guess, of all of this.

Speaker 1 He says, like, yeah, Buetner has turned this into a lifestyle brand that smacks of all sorts of, you know, questionable stuff as far as science goes. He goes even further than that.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 live a longer life because of these lifestyle decisions and choices and things that they do. That just doesn't exist.

Speaker 1 That essentially the people who study this have been misled by their own data, and that's the that's what is producing what seems like these blue zones.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And just in case you're wondering, he's a

Speaker 3 senior research fellow at the Center for Longitudinal Studies at the University of College of London.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he kind of starts out by saying, like, hey, we noticed one thing.

Speaker 3 State-issued birth certificates are really important. And 82% of the super centenarians, so those are people over 100, were born before they started doing this widely basically so um

Speaker 3 if we really had the real birth certificates of these people um that number of people living beyond a hundred drops way way down like essentially everyone's lying about their age yeah or mis mistaken about their age but yeah a lot of people apparently lie about their age um

Speaker 1 Also, Chuck, one of the other things that he pointed out is that if you study areas, especially in developed countries like Italy, England, England, and France, I think he specifically looked at in areas with the biggest clusters of super centenarians, right?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I guess that's 101 on. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So those areas also tend to be more poverty stricken.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 people living there make lower incomes. They have lower literacy rates, higher crime rates.

Speaker 1 Very tellingly, fewer 90-year-olds, which is a big statistical anomaly because it suggests that people are just jumping into their hundreds. Who wants to be like, I'm 92?

Speaker 1 When you could be like, I'm 102, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that they also have, very paradoxically, lower than average life expectancies.

Speaker 1 So if you put all that together, like, you're like, how is anybody living into their hundreds in these areas, let alone whole clusters of people living into their hundreds? Don't make sense. I think

Speaker 1 Saul Newman's quote was feels hinky. Right.

Speaker 3 I think so.

Speaker 3 What he concluded was that

Speaker 3 in these places that might have high poverty, you're more likely to find what's called pension fraud. So it's family members saying, no, you know,

Speaker 3 grandpa Chuck is still alive in the back room.

Speaker 3 Keep those pension checks rolling in.

Speaker 3 And that's the thing. In 2010, there were more than 230,000 Japanese centenarians who were discovered to be either made up, dead, or missing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think Greece also started investigating their centenarians and ended up finding 200,000 people who no longer were alive. So

Speaker 1 that's definitely part of it.

Speaker 1 Another statistical anomaly that he points out that is very suggestive of this whole thing being wrong is that if you look at the birthdays for super centenarians, their birthdays aren't statistically random.

Speaker 1 They seem to be clustered around the first of the month. There's a much higher, I think 150% higher chance that

Speaker 1 a centenarian's birthday is on the first of the month than on the last of the month, which makes zero sense statistically speaking.

Speaker 3 It's like when I fill out any like tell us your age thing, I just go January 1st.

Speaker 1 Exactly. So do I.
We have the same birthday, same fake birthday. That's right.

Speaker 3 Here's another one is that, and this is sort of part of the basis of his whole thing is just that like these records are often wrong.

Speaker 3 they're very very common in the united states uh and this was in 1960 uh 66 of non-white females had multiple official ages uh in the year 1960 and their ages vary depending on what uh like what record you were looking at whether it was like the dmv or a marriage certificate or birth certificate and 30 of these variations were off by more than a decade yeah

Speaker 1 And he also drilled down a little more and he said, some of these like lifestyle claims and diet claims, they're not supported by data. In fact, the Okinawan cohort were

Speaker 1 they were basically said to have this amazing diet where that's probably a big part of what was helping them live longer.

Speaker 1 He said, no, if you've asked the government of Japan, people in Okinawa eat the least amount of vegetables of Japanese people as a whole, and they have the highest body mass index.

Speaker 1 So explain that, Pulane.

Speaker 3 All right, maybe we should take our second break and see if Pulane responds to your call out.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he might give us a ring and we'll be back right after this to finish up on Blue Zones.

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Speaker 3 All right, so we're back. When we last left you, Newman had sort of launched a, I don't know about an attack, but put out a paper that countered a lot of these claims about Blue Zones being a thing.

Speaker 3 It's a big splash in the media. And so Blue Zoners got together and they said, all right, we're going to write a letter back to you defending our work.
Like we will not, this will not stand.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and we should say

Speaker 1 Newman doesn't seem to think that Pulane is some hack or liar.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 Pulane is a well-respected demographer.

Speaker 1 Instead, I think what Newman is saying is there are errors in the records that Pulane is using. Right.
And once it's in there, when another record gets made from the original record,

Speaker 1 it just spreads like a virus, essentially. And so he's basically saying Pulane is using

Speaker 1 these faulty records without realizing it. And so

Speaker 1 an error introduced into your data would be totally undetectable in that sense. So he's not attacking Pulane specifically.
He's saying like the data itself is wrong from the get-go.

Speaker 3 Yeah, which kind of even negates some of the rebuttal because some of the points of the rebuttal were like, hey, we know that there are errors in fraud, but we go through a pretty rigorous verification process.

Speaker 3 And we think it's statistically sound.

Speaker 3 Like in Sardinia, you know, Italy, that was one of the first blue zones named. They said, you know, we have civil databases dating back to 1866.
We have church archives.

Speaker 3 We've got these handwritten records. And we have done full genealogies of entire villages and cross-check this stuff.
So again, you know, Poulan is trying to do the right thing.

Speaker 3 But Newman would probably go back and say, yeah, but those original records from 1866 weren't right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but then Poulan would counter, yes, I'm not just using one record. I cross-verify.
So he interviews the centenarians first and their families. That's where he gets the original age.

Speaker 1 And then he goes back and tries to find any support that he can for that. And he actually came up with a rating system

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 how quality a verification is.

Speaker 1 I think there's a starring system. There's also like an A ⁇

Speaker 1 or something system where like the highest quality verification is the centenarian saying their age and you've got all these other documents that say the the exact same thing.

Speaker 1 And that their, you know, a church record is not necessarily going to be based on

Speaker 1 a birth certificate or an army registration or something like that. So that's pretty independent.

Speaker 1 And then he takes it even further and says you want to do the same thing for the family members, for their parents, for their siblings, and make sure that along the way, somebody with a similar name didn't get mixed up, and that that's how their age got older and older and older.

Speaker 1 He's doing like legit methodology. So it is kind of tough to just kind of dismiss

Speaker 1 that particular thing,

Speaker 1 the techniques he has for verifying ages.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 Another rebuttal was that, hey, Newman,

Speaker 3 a lot of the fraud and errors that you're citing weren't even in blue zones. You're just saying that that happened.

Speaker 3 You know. I mean, if it's happening elsewhere, it's probably happening in blue zones as well would be my counter to that.
But, you know, that was what they came back with.

Speaker 1 Well, also in his paper, he does investigate actual blue zones like the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.

Speaker 1 Apparently, Costa Rica found out in 2008 that 42% of its population aged 99 or older misstated their age in the 2000 census.

Speaker 1 And that when they went back and did the math to actually adjust it to reality, the blue zone in Nicoya shrunk by 90%.

Speaker 1 So he did demonstrate that, yes, some of these blue zones are just absolutely wrong.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It got a little personal, it feels like, at the end, because they said, and also you're not a demographer and your paper wasn't peer-reviewed or it wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal, that is.

Speaker 1 And everyone says your breath stinks.

Speaker 3 Right. And you, sir, are a nitwit.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Although he was working at the Center for

Speaker 1 Longitudinal Studies, by definition, he was a professional studier of studies and going back and recreating studies to find out how valid they were.

Speaker 1 So he might not have been a demographer, but he was definitely qualified to evaluate the quality of a study for sure.

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 Dave helped us with this, and he found a New York Times article from 2024. And this kind of, I think,

Speaker 3 for me, kind of makes a lot of sense. It was from, it was a quote from Dr.
Nir Barzilai, I guess how you pronounce it. Sure.

Speaker 3 He's the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. And he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Eat all these good foods, stay physical, supportive friends and family.

Speaker 3 I think we can all agree that you'll live longer. But his quote is, are the concepts of blue zones consistent with what we know about aging? Absolutely.

Speaker 3 But the blue zones themselves and the theories behind them have not necessarily been validated scientifically. It's not a study.
It's an observation.

Speaker 3 It's an observation which is consistent with what we think we know about aging. And that's kind of where I landed was like,

Speaker 1 just say that.

Speaker 3 Say, hey, we've noticed this really interesting thing.

Speaker 3 And these are the commonalities for people that live longer in these areas rather than trying to say like, this is a blue zone and this is the data and the science behind it, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, there have been plenty of studies on blue zones and blue zone inhabitants. There's

Speaker 1 this kind of meta-analysis that was published in 2022, the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine by Magdaleni Magdaleni et al.

Speaker 1 I still don't know what et al. means, but you know what it generally means by context, right?

Speaker 3 And others, I think?

Speaker 1 Sure. Yeah.
Sure.

Speaker 1 But it examined essentially each of those lifestyle, you know, power nine or seven principles and the studies that support those. And there have been like really granular studies.

Speaker 1 They they referenced some that studied elderly Ikarians. Remember, Akaria Greece is one of the blue zones?

Speaker 1 Studied their grip strength, studied their flow-mediated dilation, which is a marker of the health of your endothelial cells, which make up the lining of your blood vessels.

Speaker 1 Like people have really studied this, and a lot of those studies have come back and been like, Yes, these people have better than average grip strength. Their flow-mediated dilation is off the charts.

Speaker 1 You've never seen anything like it. Everybody says it's just amazing.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 there have been studies that support it. It's just like, I think

Speaker 1 people brush it off because it is very easy to brush off. I kind of landed where you did, where if you take it as a whole,

Speaker 1 it does seem to be great, you know, great indicators, great ideas of how to live.

Speaker 1 But the science is being conducted, it's just not there where somebody's like, yes, definitively, these are right and these aren't right too.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 As far as Buetner and Poulin, they both agree

Speaker 3 that they think that blue zones are disappearing quickly and like there won't be any at a certain point,

Speaker 3 which is, I thought people were living longer. So I was kind of curious about that.
But they're finding fewer centenarians in Okinawa and other places.

Speaker 3 And they say it's the widespread adoption of Western diet.

Speaker 3 Newman came back. I feel like every time he's got a Google alert set for these guys.

Speaker 3 Newman came back and said, and I tend to agree with him here. He's like, that doesn't make any sense to me.

Speaker 3 He said, like, are all these 80-year-olds suddenly giving up a lifetime of healthy eating habits and going to McDonald's? Right. Just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 3 So he goes back again to the record keeping and saying it was never that to begin with.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It doesn't.
It just doesn't. Yeah.
It doesn't track. So if they do exist, though, one thing that Buetner and Poulan definitely agree on is,

Speaker 1 and actually Newman too, is that they're not going to find anymore. And the ones that do exist are going to shrink out to basically nothing.
It's just different explanations of why that is.

Speaker 1 But you can kiss blue zones goodbye, basically. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, you found some interesting stuff on genetics, too, because that's kind of the one thing we haven't talked about is

Speaker 3 diet, exercise, being around your family, and all that stuff is great, but genetics probably have to play a part, right?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, they found

Speaker 1 you would think so for sure. And they have found some stuff that says like, yes,

Speaker 1 these genes definitely do appear in certain populations more than others. Like, the Sardinians have a gene that

Speaker 1 makes them bitter super tasters, I think. And it's related to a lower fat intake.
Like, you avoid fats.

Speaker 3 So that's sensing. I think it's associated with, like, living longer, that specific gene.

Speaker 1 Right. So that makes a lot of sense.
Okay. That would definitely help you live longer.
But then there's other contradictory evidence that is kind of confounding.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think

Speaker 3 people 110 years or older, wow, in Okinawa, they had a slightly increased likelihood of possessing a gene variant that makes them more likely to develop Alzheimer's compared to, I think it was in Greece,

Speaker 3 that part of Greece that had the gene that supposedly protected. against Alzheimer's.
And they found the opposite to be true in Okinawa. Right.

Speaker 1 And yet they're both blue zone super centenarian

Speaker 1 areas. Yeah.
So, yeah. But surely it does have to play some sort of role.

Speaker 1 And I think in that original paper, Pez and Poulan speculated that inbreeding in that area of Sardinia was responsible for creating these essentially protective traits.

Speaker 1 There you have it. Either way, the Sardinians were like, please, what are you doing? Yeah, it's down of our business.

Speaker 3 Let me drink my lunch wine in peace.

Speaker 1 Well, supposedly, there are plenty of areas in the world who contact Buetner and Poulan and are like, hey,

Speaker 1 make sure you put us down as a blue zone because it attracts a lot of like healthy lifestyle tourists. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 And again, I mean, I don't know why this bugs me a little bit more than usual.

Speaker 3 I think it's great that they put out like tips for living longer. But there's something about like when it's marketed and branded that kind of, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I get you for sure.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm with you, man.

Speaker 1 Although if you live the blue zone lifestyle and you're loving life, hats off to you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Trademark Adventist Health.

Speaker 1 Since Chuck laughed a second ago, that's a traditional trigger for listener now.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 3 This is about circular economy and us complaining about appliances not lasting long.

Speaker 3 Hey guys, have something to say about about this. One thing that people should do is maintenance on the products that they buy.

Speaker 1 Yes, true.

Speaker 3 The fact that Chuck hates washers and dryers is because a lot of times products break down due to a lack of maintaining and caring for these products.

Speaker 3 I'm a home improvement contractor and I can't tell you how many times I've moved appliances to see the total lack of care that these products go through.

Speaker 3 It's not just washers and dryers, but most things in your home that you buy. People fail to, one, read the instructions and two, read how to care for the products.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just thought that's some way. That's a good point, though.

Speaker 3 A lot of things these days require you to clean, maintain them so they do last longer. Take for example the clothes washer.
It has three different,

Speaker 3 our clothes washer has three different small filters that need to be cleaned out once a month. What?

Speaker 1 Jeez.

Speaker 3 And if you don't, eventually it'll break down the washer.

Speaker 3 My point being, if you take just a little time and save and read those manuals, you'll help them last longer and you won't have to throw away stuff that breaks and wears down.

Speaker 3 I love the episode and I do 100% agree that products are made to be thrown out and replaced.

Speaker 3 I just wanted to add that it's up to us as consumers to do our best best to keep the products that we buy running the best that we can. That's my two bits.
That is from Justin.

Speaker 3 And Justin, you are so right. And I

Speaker 3 shamefully never ever maintain much of anything like that.

Speaker 1 That's funny that Justin wrote that in because just yesterday I was cleaning the evaporator condenser coils. I can't remember, some coils in my fridge.
Okay. And look at you.

Speaker 1 Well, my fridge is not working very well, so I was really hoping that this this was the problem. Bob Vila said it was probably going to be the problem.

Speaker 1 But in that same article on Bob Vila's website, he says that you should do that. You should clean and dust your refrigerator's coils every three months.
Those are in the back of the fridge, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Or they're in the front bottom.
But

Speaker 1 they make brushes. I got brushes for it and everything that make the whole thing easy.
But I'm like, I have,

Speaker 1 this is the first time I've ever done anything like this. And I've had plenty of fridges.
So it makes me wonder how much longer other fridges could have lasted.

Speaker 3 I'm sure that's true, but oh boy, I don't want to see what's under and behind my fridge at this point. It's scary.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm going to go look for the filters in my washing machine that I never knew existed. Because I get jazzed by that kind of thing, but at the same time,

Speaker 1 after a while, you're like, I'm tired of doing this.

Speaker 3 I changed my air filters and things.

Speaker 1 You mean I looked at a house once, and these two dudes owned it. And I was like asking where the air handler was.
And

Speaker 1 the guy didn't know. And I was like, you know, where you put the air filter.
He's like, I don't think our system uses air filters. And I was like, dude.

Speaker 1 And we drove past the house the next day. And there was a HVAC truck in the driveway.
So I guess I

Speaker 1 turned them on to the existence of their air filters.

Speaker 3 That's great. Yeah, I actually do mine myself because it's not too hard.
But yeah,

Speaker 3 that's as far as I go and I should go further for sure.

Speaker 1 Are you cleaning out your drain lines? That's another big one.

Speaker 3 Drain line for what?

Speaker 1 For your HVAC.

Speaker 1 The little white PVC line that's like running from your air handler where you put the air filter.

Speaker 1 Huh? There is a, there, so this is, this drains the condensation from your air handler, and you should use about an eighth of a cup. of just regular simple green.
Oh, mix in with a gallon of water.

Speaker 1 Get yourself a funnel, pour it in there, let it come out the bottom. You do that once a month during the hot months and it will keep your

Speaker 1 drain line from getting clogged up with gunk.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I'm shamefully lazy about anything like that. I'm so bad at maintenance.

Speaker 1 I'll come over and show you. It'll be fun.
We'll make an afternoon of maintaining stuff around your house. You buy the

Speaker 1 subs, though.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I was about to say, I'll bring the subs, you bring the simple green, and we'll party.

Speaker 1 All right, man, that sounds like a great idea. Well, thanks for this, Justin.
You You really just kicked off a new tradition for me and Chuck. Monthly, I would say.

Speaker 1 And if you want to be like Justin and kick off a new monthly tradition for me and Chuck, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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