It Is Likely That Blue Zones Don’t Exist
You know how everyone knows there are certain parts of the world where people live longer because of all the yogurt they eat (like Soviet Georgia) or what kind of diet they eat or whatever. They are called Blue Zones. Well, maybe not.
This is just a preprint article (meaning it hasn’t been peer reviewed yet), but it looks like all of those blue zones were just a combination of shoddy record keeping and pension fraud.
For a slightly deeper dive, read this Arstechnica snippet
…Newman found a staggering number of errors in the data for every blue zone. For instance, in 1997, there were 30,000 Italians claiming a pension while turning out to be dead. In Costa Rica, 42 percent of citizens over the age of 99 were found to have “misstated” their age in the 2000 census, shrinking the blue zone in that region after error correction so much that the estimated life expectancy plummeted to the bottom of the pack. And in 2010, more than 230,000 Japanese centenarians turned out to be missing, imaginary, dead, or the result of clerical errors, amounting to an error rate of 82 percent. “If equivalent rates of fake data were discovered in any other field… a major scandal would ensue,” Newman wrote. “In demography, however, such revelations seem to barely mention citation.”
(and thanks to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and the IgNobel Prize for unearthing this!)