GabyRecently, Dr. Sol Justin Newman of the UCL Longitudinal Studies Centre received the first-ever Ig Nobel Prize in demography. The award cited his “detective work” uncovering that many of the world’s oldest people were recorded in places with poorly maintained birth and death records.
Newman concludes that many records of supercentenarians (people aged 110 and older) are likely the result of poor record-keeping, clerical errors, and even pension fraud. So he argues there aren’t real “blue zones” where centenarian counts are genuinely above average.
The 34th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place on September 12, 2024, at the University of Massachusetts (USA). Since 1991, the Ig Nobel Prize, or the Anti-Nobel Prize, has been awarded annually to people behind witty and extraordinary discoveries that first make you laugh and then make you think.
Where did the doubts about the “blue zones” come from?
Newman’s work dealt a heavy blow to the fashionable theory of “blue zones,” which he says is largely made up. For decades, researchers and popular writers have pointed to supposed miracle regions — examples of blue zones include Loma Linda in California, Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Nicoya in Costa Rica, and Ikaria in Greece.
IFLScience reported that the idea of regions with exceptional lifespan gained wide popularity, and many people wondered why residents in those areas seemed to live so long.
However, Newman concluded the explanation has less to do with special lifestyles and more to do with questionable data.
In his new study, Newman found that the highest reported rates of reaching extreme old age correlate with three factors: high levels of poverty, a lack of birth certificates, and relatively few people in their 90s.
This work has even cast doubt on supposedly verified records of the world’s oldest people — in one case, a man listed as the oldest who appears to have three different birth dates.
Sol Justin Newman said, “Recently, significant errors have been found in every ‘blue zone.'”
“In 1997, records showed over 30,000 deceased Italian citizens were still being paid pensions. In 2008, 42 percent of 99-year-old residents of Costa Rica incorrectly reported their age in the 2000 census. After partially correcting those errors, the ‘blue zone’ of Nicoya shrank by 90 percent and life expectancy fell to nearly the country’s lowest level,” Newman said.
In 2010, more than 230,000 Japanese centenarians turned out to be missing from records because of clerical errors or because they were actually deceased.
Even the analyses of presumed causes of extreme longevity look suspicious. For example, a diet of vegetables and sweet potatoes has been touted as a key to Okinawa residents’ long lives. However, the Japanese government reported that the inhabitants of this so-called “blue zone” consume among the least vegetables and sweet potatoes in the country and have the highest body mass index in Japan.
Previously, Dr. Newman debunked other theories regarding extreme age.
