A scene from Sardinia, Italy. For every longevity junkie trying to glean the secrets of faraway lands for their wellness regime, there is a doubter who believes good marketing and sensational storytelling are at play.Alessandro Vallainc/Getty Images
One evening on a recent family trip to Italy, as I stood up from the table after polishing off a hearty plate of linguine pescatore, our waiter leaned in to tell me a secret: The ingredients had been sourced from Sardinia, an Italian island he proudly pointed out is a Blue Zone.
I was aware of this fact, having seen Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, the Netflix documentary that popularized the idea that there are a handful of regions around the world where people are said to live exceptionally long and healthy lives. They include: Ikaria, Greece; Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Loma Linda, Calif.; and, yes, Sardinia, Italy.
In the documentary, host Dan Buettner outlines how the lives of people in these communities are shaped by daily low-impact activity well into old age, modest calorie intake, little processed food, moderate red wine consumption, a clear sense of purpose, low stress and a strong commitment to family, spirituality and community.
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To some, such a clear road map to a long and healthy life sounds too good to be true. For every longevity junkie trying to glean the secrets of faraway lands and add them onto their wellness regime – and Italian waiters trying to convince diners that extra decades of life are hidden in their plate of non-processed pasta – there is a doubter who chalks up the entire concept to good marketing and sensational storytelling.
Saul Justin Newman, a researcher at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies, contends that Blue Zone locations appear exceptional in part owing to shoddy birth records, common lies about old age and high instances of pension fraud. He may be on to something.
When the Greek government started checking on people receiving pensions, they discovered that almost three-quarters of supposed centenarians turned out to be dead. And in Okinawa, a survey of residents’ spirituality showed that nearly 95 per cent of them associated with no religion – despite faith being a Blue Zone staple.
Then there was the case of “Mr. Kato,” a man in Japan who was thought to be living well past 100, but who authorities found mummified in his room – where he lay for years as his younger relatives collected his old-age cheques.
It’s convenient to sweep those cases under the rug if you’re trying to build a business around longevity; peel the curtain, and you’ll see that there is money to be made by keeping the idea of the Blue Zones alive. Buettner himself built a whole company – Blue Zones LLC – on it. They sell cookbooks, diets, put their stamp on work sites, and dole out Blue Zone certifications to communities who apply and check certain wellness boxes. Today, their catalogue includes locations in Texas, Pennsylvania and Minnesota – places whose familiarity elicits the same dissonance in the mind as realizing that a pope can, in fact, be from Chicago. Suddenly, it all starts to seem like a money racket.
And yet, the principles that Buettner espouses hardly smell like snake oil. It raises the question: How much Blue Zone wisdom can we individually borrow in pursuit of our own longevity?
“The Blue Zones are real,” said Elaine Chin, a physician and longevity expert based in Toronto. “The challenge is for people to live like that outside of them.”
She’s right. While a few of Canada’s own cities appear to have a high concentration of centenarians, eating cleanly, exercising daily and spending time with community does not always happen naturally in our North American cities. Quite the opposite: urban lifestyles are often solitary.
Seniors walk on the beach in Okinawa, Japan. Blue Zone characteristics include eating cleanly, exercising daily avoiding stress and spending time with community.bee32/Getty Images
“We’re not built to live by ourselves and eat, sleep and exercise all in one room, as many of us do,” she said. “It’s not healthy. Here, you have to be disciplined to live a Blue Zone lifestyle.”
Chin sees Western urbanites making the common mistake of fixating on one Blue Zone guideline at the expense of others. For example, someone might be extremely diligent about not eating processed foods, only to stress out about diet and skip dinners with loved ones. But with balance and moderation, she said, one can “create their own Blue Zone environment.”
The next Blue Zones, in fact, may be created.
In 2023, Buettner’s company tried to denote Singapore a Blue Zone 2.0 for its high life expectancy, supposedly coming from strong health care and urban planning, as opposed to more holistic factors such as time spent in community, dietary habits or low stress levels. In other words, it’s an engineered Blue Zone rather than an emergent one – and some demographers, like Michel Poulain, who coined the term Blue Zones around the year 2000, do not recognize it as the real thing.
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Even more extreme would be Neom – the US$500-billion megacity being built in Saudi Arabia, with pristine water quality, no cars and high-end leisure centres. Who knows what such an environment could do for longevity?
At that scope, creating our own Blue Zones sounds like science fiction – but on an individual level, it’s more realistic. Perhaps, for one person, a Blue Zone life involves buying a membership to a fitness club and eating organic pasta. For another, it may be visiting their mother more often.
When it comes to the draw and controversy of the Blue Zones, maybe the take-away is not that there are mystical communities out there with unattainable secrets, but instead that we’ve strayed so far from our natural ways of living that we have to claw our way back to a life that’s a bit more human.
Besides, accepting that our own health spans depend less on where we are from, and more on how we live, is energizing – even more so than a nice Sardinian meal.
