The Longevity Hot Spots That Weren’t
In 1999, a Belgian demographer, Michel Poulain, heard about an Italian island where people lived to be 100 and older while remaining mentally and physically active. Intrigued, Poulain visited Sardinia, where he validated people’s ages according to their birth records. Using a blue pen as he crossed the island, he marked on a map the spots where he found the oldest villagers. “From that time, it is called the blue zone,” he explained to me over the phone in June.Four years after his first trip, Poulain published an academic paper on “blue zones,” as these sites became known, in the journal Experimental Gerontology. In the paper, he speculated about the factors that led to such long lives. Was it low levels of immigration plus high levels of inbreeding? More men than women lived longer; perhaps there was an environmental influence? Shortly after publication, Poulain got a call from Dan Buettner, a long-distance cyclist and National Geographic explorer. Buettner was chasing his own longevity hot spot—a city in Okinawa, Japan, where, he’d heard, people also lived to be very old. Buettner hoped to incorporate Poulain’s work and write about both locations; his National Geographic article on the blue zones ran in 2005.In subsequent articles, books, a TED talk, and eventually a hit Netflix series, Buettner and Poulain expanded their research, naming three more blue zones in Ikaria, Greece; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California. Along the way, Buettner, who has a gravelly voice and an easy charisma, developed theories about what made the blue zones special. It wasn’t genetics, he suggested, but the environment. Physical movement was built into peoples’ daily routines, through their work, their commutes, and the surrounding geography. Plant-based foods dominated their diets, and they reported a sense of purpose and belonging. The conditions of their lives stood in stark contrast to those of most Americans, Buettner observed on the first episode of the Netflix show, which aired in 2023. And the consequences for the United States were grim. Life expectancy here was notably declining when compared to peer countries. In 2023, it dropped to 76.4 years, the shortest it had been in almost 20 years.It probably isn’t a coincidence that, as life expectancy diminishes, we have grown fixated on living longer. Longevity has lately emerged as a wellness trend, if you can call it that, given how long humans have lusted after some version of a fountain of youth. In the first recorded story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a king desperately searches for the secret to everlasting life. But there is undeniably a renewed focus in medicine on uncovering the secrets of long life. Billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, has spent millions on anti-aging research, and Google maintains a secretive life science company, Calico, to research the biology of aging. On TikTok and X, longevity gurus and influencers suggest that we can combine lifestyle interventions with biomedical advancements to keep our bodies going—and going, and going.Buettner didn’t want to confine his and Poulain’s discoveries to written stories that might, at best, be recycled as fables. He wanted to effect real change in a world he saw becoming sicker around him. In 2009, he got a million-dollar grant from the AARP to see whether blue zones could be made, not just found. Buettner selected Albert Lea, Minnesota, near his home in Minneapolis, as the test city for a for-profit company he called the Blue Zones Project. “If you try to convince people to change their behavior, you fail,” he told me. “The whole idea was to change their environment so you’re setting them up for success instead of failure.” In the 15 years since it was established, the company, which Buettner eventually sold to the health care system Adventist Health, has enlisted more than 70 communities and more than four million people in the United States to participate.But there are a few problems. The Blue Zones Project markets itself as a public health program, but it doesn’t measure its outcomes as rigorously as comparable initiatives run by academic institutions, so it’s hard to tell how effective it is. It’s also expensive. Largely for cost-related reasons, many of the participating towns and cities gave up their certifications as Blue Zones communities. And as the company grapples with how to help people live longer, healthier lives, the original blue zones are facing their own identity crisis. The data that shows concentrated populations of centenarians, some critics now allege, is flawed. Can you turn a U.S. city into a blue zone if the zones don’t exist in the first place?In early June, I walked on the five-mile path that wraps around Fountain Lake in the center of Albert Lea. This was no ordinary sidewalk, but a “Blue Zones Walkway,” constructed as part of the city’s certification. Cathy Malakow-sky, the current head of Albert Lea’s Blue Zones Project, guided me through all the changes the town had made to transform itself. Malakowsky, who grew up in Iowa and moved to Albert Lea when she was a junior in high school, has an endearing Midwestern lilt to her voice. After going to college six miles away, she came back to marry her high school boyfriend and raise her children. She’s divorced now, but committed to Albert Lea. She began as a volunteer during the pilot project, and took over as the Blue Zones Project lead about two years ago.Later that day, Malakowsky gave me a tour of downtown. To obtain certification, cities must agree that at least 20 percent of residents; 25 percent of grocery stores, locally owned restaurants, and public schools; and 50 percent of the top 20 employers will adhere to a “healthy-living plan.” For workplaces, this can include offering healthier snack options, a break room with yoga mats, or suggested routes for employees to take walk breaks during the day. Cities also receive assessments from Blue Zones consultants for how to improve the built environment. Malakowsky pointed out new crosswalks and sidewalk extensions, along with stop signs that slow traffic. As part of the project, Albert Lea added flowerpots, benches, and trash cans that double as bike racks. “We have invested millions of dollars in sidewalks and trails to make walking easier,” Malakowsky said. At the end of the initiative’s first year, the Blue Zones Project announced that residents of Albert Lea had gained an average of 2.9 years of life expectancy. The project was deemed a success.As we got into Malakowsky’s car and drove to see more of Albert Lea’s trails, she told me about the Blue Zones Project’s True Vitality Test, which asks questions about diet, lifestyle, mental health, and social and work life. When she took it, the results said she would live until she was 88, but be healthy only until 80, unless she made changes to her diet. I noticed that the Blue Zones Project is replete with catchy—and trademarked—terminology. There’s the Life Radius, the Power 9, the 12 Pillars, and Vitality surveys, all borrowing lessons from the blue zones about how to eat, be active, and spend time in community.Jargon aside, there’s no doubt that the Blue Zones Project’s suggestions are generically good: Make your cities more walkable, improve your connections to your neighbors and family, and eat healthier foods. Naomi Imatome-Yun, the executive vice president of the company, told me it was “the largest public health project in the country.” And the blue zones tap into a powerful truth: that despite how much Americans spend on health care, our overall health is only minimally related to medical care—about 10 to 20 percent, according to research on the social determinants of health. This helps explain how the United States can spend an exorbitant amount of money on individual treatments while Americans remain so sick. Countless studies show, for instance, how income influences health outcomes. A 40-year-old man in the poorest 1 percent of the U.S. population will die, on average, 14.6 years sooner than a man in the top 1 percent. For women, the gap is about 10 years. A study done in Baltimore found a 20-year disparity between a man’s lifespan in a poor neighborhood and that of a man in a wealthy area.This idea has been in medicine’s shadow since at least the nineteenth century, when Rudolf Virchow, a German doctor considered to be one of the founders of “social medicine,” wrote a report on a typhus epidemic in Prussia from 1847 to 1848, saying that instead of medical intervention, it was social conditions that needed to improve in order to treat the disease. Virchow even became skeptical of germ theory, because he thought it would distract from the social factors that caused diseases. Poverty caused illness, not invisible pathology. Virchow helped establish Berlin’s sewer system, on the theory that sanitation systems are one of the most impactful health interventions.“From all evidence, the main determinant of your healthy life expectancy is the wealth of the family you’re born to, your occupation, and your level of education,” said Paul Crawshaw, a professor in public policy at England’s Teesside University, who has been working on place-based initiatives for decades. “The million-dollar question is can you really import that from one place to another?”The answer hits the participating towns in their pocketbooks. The Blue Zones Project is a for-profit company: It costs money to bring it into your town and get branded as a Blue Zones community. Private partners will sponsor the costs of the Blue Zones Project team, event planning, or advertising. Any larger changes made, often at Blue Zones Project’s recommendation, are funded by cities themselves. Once the sponsorship money goes away, so does the certification, which requires payment to be maintained each year.“I think any new intervention that’s trying to scale and is touted as promising should put it to the test,” said Atheendar Venkataramani, a health economist, internal medicine physician, and associate professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who runs clinical trials on place-based initiatives. “If you’re spending money on this, you’re not spending money on something else.”After the reported success of Albert Lea’s Blue Zones Project in 2011, Terry Branstad, Iowa’s governor at the time, enlisted the company to make Iowa the healthiest state in the country. In January 2012, a competition was announced among cities in Iowa to become the next Blue Zones demonstration sites. After visiting Albert Lea, I took a five-day road trip through the communities that had participated in the program, to see what, if any, effects still lingered.I was surprised to learn that, unlike Albert Lea, which was certified in 2016 and still maintains the credential, Mason City, Marion, Muscatine, and Iowa City, all former blue zones, are no longer. Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield had invested $25 million to pay for the Blue Zones certification. Once the money ran out, the Iowa cities couldn’t justify the cost, several government officials told me when I visited.The loss of certification didn’t mean that people gave up on bettering their communities. In Waterloo, Iowa, I visited All-In, a grocery store that opened in 2023. Sherman Wise, its co-owner, helped run the town’s Blue Zones Project. After the blue zones came and left Waterloo, the area around All-In was still a food desert—until Wise’s business became the first Black-owned independent grocery store in Waterloo. Wise wanted the store to be more than just a place to buy produce. It hosted an after-school program that taught children about cooking and healthy eating, and a class taught by a financial literacy coach. It collaborated with the Iowa Department of Corrections on life skills programs. Wise said that if the Blue Zones Project left a legacy, it was in the policies passed in order to reach certification. For example, schools changed their rules about the kinds of treats kids can bring in for their birthdays. Though the certification expired, those rules remain.Sue Beach, Waterloo’s other Blue Zones Project lead, said that she was very aware of the time limit. For a while, the initiative was kept alive by unpaid volunteers. “They wanted us to pay to continue to have the blue zone certification, but we really couldn’t do that,” she explained. In Marion, City Council member Sara Mentzer, the former lead for Marion’s Blue Zones Project, told me something similar. “The licensing was more than could be sustained,” she said. Mentzer now runs a different health initiative called Be Well Marion, which consists of programs supporting healthy eating, activity, and community involvement that are not dissimilar from the Blue Zones Project.In Mason City, officials told me that the city had recently spent $18 million developing a huge bike park and mountain biking trails. The town, home to two Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and the inspiration for The Music Man, didn’t need the Blue Zones Project to direct residents to do this; it’s what they wanted. Before leaving, I walked through an outsider-art sculpture park called Rancho Deluxe, which displayed a graffitied Blue Zones sign from the campaign hanging upside down.Brevard, North Carolina, launched a Blue Zones Project, but the city didn’t maintain the certification. A local reporter, Dan Dewitt, wrote that the City Council clashed with the company because it had been “pushing these initiatives for years” while “the real work was done by city staffers and consultants.” Nevertheless, the city still had to pay for the Blue Zones Project. In Phoenix, several community groups published a letter saying they didn’t want or need the Blue Zones Project, since it would take funding away from preexisting initiatives. “Projects like these often overshadow and push out cultural solutions that are already in place,” members wrote.The letter expressed a legitimate worry: that there might not be enough resources to fund the Blue Zones Project and similar projects already in the works. In August, the All-In grocery closed—first temporarily, then permanently. Other local stores had also recently shut down, The Gazette, a newspaper in Cedar Rapids, reported, and many people were now resorting to dollar stores to buy food.The blue zones have been used as a marketing tool for real estate development. One such development, a $600 million luxury tower in Miami, has a medical facility offering plastic surgery that is adorned with the Blue Zones brand.The Blue Zones Project describes itself as funded through private-public partnerships, but, as I learned in Iowa and Albert Lea, infrastructure changes are paid for by city funds, and governments have to approve any changes to policy. The fee pays for the advice from the Blue Zones Project, but also the branding. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that the blue zones were being used as a “marketing tool” for a real estate development in Ave Maria, a town in Florida. One such development, a $600 million luxury tower in Miami, has a medical facility offering plastic surgery that also is adorned with the Blue Zones brand. A website that tracks realty trends reported that blue zone communities “are experiencing high demand, prompting numerous real estate companies to seek opportunities within them.”Despite asking city officials and the Blue Zones Project directly, over and over, how much the certification costs, I was never told a straight figure. “The costs vary widely depending on population size, length of the project, sectors we will be working in,” Imatome-Yun said in an email. Because of the nature of the private-public partnerships, it’s not information that’s accessible through freedom of information requests. “I’m not supposed to talk about our financial agreement with Blue Zones,” Malakowsky said when I asked her.This September, the Annals of Improbable Research magazine gave Saul Newman, a demographer at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, an Ig Nobel Prize in Demography for a 2024 paper on errors in centenarian age records. The sardonic awards are for research that “makes people laugh, and then think.” Their intended humor notwithstanding, the awards are well-respected.When I talked to Newman, it was before he won the prize, and he sounded exasperated. He had previously shown that other research on extreme age could be explained by a mistake in rounding numbers, he told me. When the mistake was corrected, evidence of remarkably long lives vanished. The research he criticized hasn’t been corrected or retracted. In his paper on the blue zones, Newman demonstrated that the factors predicting high ages in regions around the world consist of a lack of birth certificates, high poverty levels, and fewer 90-year-olds. This implies, he said, that shoddy paperwork and pension fraud—for instance, people saying elderly relatives are still alive in order to collect their welfare checks—are better explanations for blue zones than anything else. The high poverty rates in the blue zones may provide the motivation for such fraud.In Italy, recorded supercentenarians are more likely if a province has higher unemployment rates. People who are born in the Sardinian provinces Ogliastra and Medio Campidano are the least likely and second-least likely to survive from birth to age 55, Newman wrote, and according to Eurostat the Sardinian province of Olbia-Tempio has the eighth-fewest individuals alive over the age of 90—“yet somehow also ranked as the best province for survival to ages 100, 105, and 110.”When Newman looked at data from Japan’s statistics bureau, he didn’t find evidence that people who lived in Okinawa were healthier than those in the rest of the country. In fact, the island has high levels of obesity and alcohol consumption compared to other prefectures in Japan. It has the lowest per capita intake of sweet potatoes, a food profiled in the Blue Zones Netflix show as particularly healthy, and high meat consumption. Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones argued that people in Okinawa had strong “ikigai,” or sense of purpose, but Newman pointed out that Okinawans have the fourth-highest suicide rate in Japan for those over 65. The Power 9—Buettner’s top lifestyle prescriptions, inspired by the blue zones— “are directly contradicted in every single case,” Newman wrote, “usually through population-representative surveys of hundreds of thousands of people, with levels of inaccuracy that border on farce.”Some of Buettner’s collaborators issued a response to Newman’s research, arguing that “the ages of individuals in the officially recognized blue zones have been thoroughly validated, and their exceptional longevity is well-documented” through sources like civil databases and church archives. In a letter published on its website, the Blue Zones Project said that it doesn’t claim that blue zones hold more supercentenarians, but simply that they are healthy places with high life expectancies. The poverty that Newman alluded to, the letter explained, aided people living in the zones to avoid modernization and the Western diet. In Okinawa, it’s young people who “eat and drink too much” and have unhealthy lifestyles, which skewed the overall data. The letter pointed out that Newman’s paper was not peer-reviewed and had not been published in a journal.Beyond dubious demographic statistics, the other question hanging over the blue zones is how stable they are. At the end of 2023, a paper in the journal Demographic Research suggested that the blue zone in Costa Rica wasn’t so blue anymore. Using a new nationwide survey of 550,000 adults alive between 1990 and 2020, it found that those born before 1930 were living longer than expected, but not those born after. “Hotspots of extreme longevity are probably transient,” the paper concluded.Unsurprisingly, given what he sees as flawed research, Newman is skeptical about designing public health programs based on the blue zones. “You have someone with no medical expertise, no scientific expertise, and they are telling large sections of the population what to do, and they very easily get it very wrong,” he said to me about Buettner and the Blue Zones Project. “It might be nice to go and sit around the pot with grandma and then tell tales of the old time, but that’s not science.”And yet, in the midst of a culture that’s so focused on expensive supplements and individual health, it can be refreshing to encounter an accessible longevity philosophy that’s dedicated to making daily life healthier for everyone. Not through grueling exercise, fasting, or powdered greens, but through walking, eating delicious foods, and being surrounded by friends and family until old age. Perhaps the true virtue of the blue zones lies in how easily they lend themselves to marketing. In 1952, the psychologist G.D. Wiebe posed the question, after seeing the rise of advertising, “Why can’t you sell brotherhood and rational thinking like you sell soap?” The Blue Zones Project sells one version of a healthy lifestyle, and it can motivate coordination around policies and inspire the community to buy in. Is that such a bad thing?For his part, Poulain feels uncomfortable with how blue zones were commercialized as the idea was popularized, and he did not sign the letter that Buettner’s other collaborators wrote. He pointed out that the research he’s done doesn’t get at why people in the blue zones live a long time—just that they do—but he disputed Newman’s claims, saying that he personally validated centenarians himself.Poulain and I talked four days before his seventy-seventh birthday. He incorporates blue zone principles into his own life, he explained: He prioritizes eating fruits and vegetables, rides his bike as much as he can, and says hello to others while out hiking. After we spoke, he emailed me a photo of himself, with a shock of white hair and a fluffy white beard, laughing and embracing a centenarian in Galicia, Spain, where he is in the process of certifying a new blue zone.Poulain and Buettner don’t speak any more. Poulain criticized Buettner for profiting off trademarks, and his company for not funding research into the factors that lead to longevity in the blue zones, all while pursuing commercial projects such as the Blue Zones–branded frozen meals that can be found in Whole Foods. Poulain worries that he may never discover what makes the original blue zones such healthy places to live—indeed, that the success of the brand is a danger to the blue zones themselves. “I had a researcher just today who in Ikaria cannot access centenarians because there were so many tourists arriving,” he said. “All because this is the island where you forget to die.”Is the Blue Zones Project a genuinely innovative program, or a trendy—and expensive—marketing ploy inspired by sound principles but uncertain data? The answer relies a lot on whether it works. In 2023, Dan Dewitt, the reporter from Brevard, compared statistics on Freeborn County—where Albert Lea is—from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute’s rankings of counties’ public health to analysis from the Blue Zones Project itself. The institute showed that Freeborn County had improved its statewide health ranking between 2011 and 2018, but in 2022, that improvement slowed down. The rate of smoking increased, and that year the county had a 35 percent obesity rate—higher than the state’s, and higher than in 2011. The number of physically inactive adults was around 27 percent. In 2023, Freeborn County was rated 51 out of 87 counties in Minnesota.It also seems possible that any positive change the Blue Zones Project touts might have happened without the company’s involvement. The company considers the Beach Cities of California—Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, and Redondo Beach—to be among its success stories; in these communities, it says, the program reduced smoking and childhood obesity, and constructed miles of bike and walking paths along the beaches. But if the towns had the money to participate in the program, Venkataramani said, they might have had the resources to achieve those same outcomes on their own.Most damningly, the evidence that the Blue Zones Project uses to illustrate its effectiveness is weak. The company assesses its communities through surveying from Gallup, the polling organization. In 2007, Gallup entered a partnership with Healthways, a health services company, to measure well-being at a national scale. When Healthways partnered with Blue Zones in 2009, it gave Gallup the job of evaluating Blue Zones Project communities. But the life expectancy improvement measurements from the Blue Zones Project come from the Blue Zones team, not from Gallup, said Dan Witters, a Gallup consultant and analyst. Witters confirmed that its surveys are not longitudinal samples, meaning compared over time, but rather successive random samples. Gallup evaluates people on 20 evidence-based metrics to see whether a community is improving compared to itself, and how that improvement compares to national surveys. There are no official control cities, though Gallup will compare a Blue Zones Project community to another city on which it has wellness data. Gallup isn’t, however, able to check whether those cities also have wellness programs of their own. The Build Healthy Places Network, an organization that keeps track of similar initiatives ongoing around the country, and what measurable impact they have, doesn’t list the Blue Zones Project in its database.“The question is, what are they telling us that a public health expert wouldn’t know?” Newman said. “Do I need someone to tell me that exercise is good for me? What benefit are these very expensive programs actually conveying?”As it stands, the Blue Zones Project’s approach to evaluation doesn’t pass the smell test for Venkataramani, the doctor and health economist. “The least valid design to make a causal inference is one where you’re kind of comparing yourself to yourself, but not anyone else,” he said, “using some sort of bespoke tool that may or may not be validated.” The Blue Zones Project’s Imatome-Yun didn’t respond to a request for comment on the company’s evaluation methods.Based on Gallup’s surveys, Witters argued, well-being does improve after blue zones are established, but he offered an interesting caveat: People with already high levels of well-being are more likely to know about the initiative, and those who both know about it and participate are those who show the biggest improvements. Crawshaw has seen this before, and it raises a troubling possibility. “A lot of health promotion initiatives that are not carefully designed to avoid this problem,” agreed Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, “end up benefiting an advantaged population and creating an even bigger gap in health outcomes than existed to begin with.”Later in June, I moderated a panel at the Aspen Ideas: Health conference, where, as it happened, Dan Buettner was also speaking. After his conversation with Dean Ornish, a lifestyle medicine researcher, a crowd of people surrounded Buettner for 25 minutes before he broke off to sit with me on a bench on the Aspen Institute’s grounds. “We’re very Hippocratic in our approach,” Buettner told me. “None of our interventions would hurt anybody.” He added that a lot of the recommendations of the Blue Zones Project have been arrived at through trial and error. When I mentioned I had gone to Iowa, he shook his head, and said that, while he saluted the state’s efforts, the company had not been funded there for long enough to make the initiatives stick.I asked him about the importance of other social determinants when it came to health, like education or income inequality, and he said he had just returned from Scandinavia, where he was researching his next book. There, “everybody has access to health care, there’s better education, there’s better distribution of income,” he said. “I’m all for that. Tell me how you’re gonna do that in America. Good luck.”Buettner is a captivating public speaker. On the one hand, he captures the paradoxical simplicity and mystery of what it means to be well. On the other, he reminds us of concrete, achievable steps we can take for our health, such as eating more beans. When a woman approached him for a selfie, saying her daughter was a fan, he told her to record a video, and shot a face-to-cam message. I remembered how, in Albert Lea, Buettner’s footprints and signature were pressed into the wet cement of the Blue Zones Walkway—like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.Instead of lamenting what we can’t do, Buettner wanted to focus on what can be done: “We can go into a city, and we can analyze it and can make it more walkable and bikeable.” The other lesson he said he’d learned from the Blue Zones Project is that he doesn’t get involved in “political squabbles.” Austin, Texas, for instance, isn’t a blue zone because the city wanted the initiative to focus on Black neighborhoods. “I said I can’t do that,” Buettner told me—not because he didn’t want to, but because he didn’t know how. “This is a populationwide intervention, or we’re not coming. We’re not favoring Blacks or gay people or rich people or poor people.”Because Buettner sold the company to Adventist Health, he said he couldn’t speak to its current practices. “I don’t know exactly how it’s being operated,” he said. “I’m told that they use my blueprint, but so much is in the execution.” He agreed that there’s pressure to default to personal lifestyle changes, such as exercise programs and Zumba and diets. “When I managed things, I tried to keep our budgets focused on permanent or semipermanent changes to the environment,” he said. He had made the company for-profit, he explained, because he believed it would be more impactful that way: “The moment anybody can access a brand for free, it gets slapped on junk food.”Buettner is very skilled at presenting the blue zones, and the brand, in an appealing way. In January 2012, Eric Carter, a Macalester College professor and health geographer, was teaching at Grinnell College when the Blue Zones Project arrived in Iowa. “Buettner had a real gift for taking epidemiological and demographic research and translating it into terms that people could use to maybe potentially make changes in their own lives,” Carter said to me in his office in St. Paul. “Maybe the blue zones aren’t meant to be the panacea for our public health problems. Maybe it is just something that’s just for the wellness space.”Whether for the “wellness space” or not, the impulse to look to older times or other places for better ways of living is reminiscent of a phenomenon described in a 1981 article in Nutrition Today by William Jarvis, a prominent nutritionist: the “myth of the healthy savage,” or the desire to romanticize remote parts of the world for their supposed longevity. The Hunza people, an indigenous community in the Himalayas, were touted as a bastion of health long before the blue zones. In a 1964 book called Hunza Health Secrets, the author, Renee Taylor, wrote that the people who lived in the region, which is in Pakistan, had “no cancer, no heart attacks, and practically no other disease to cut down men and women in the prime of life.” Men between 125 and 145 years old allegedly played volleyball. But the fantasy of the healthy savage usually turns out to be just that: a fantasy. For Hunza, incomplete birth and death rates and inaccurate measurements of disease explained the seeming lack of illness there. When a team of Japanese scientists went to Hunza in 1955, they found high rates of cancer and heart disease after examining 277 people. “We had to teach them how to cure disease, instead of learning how to be free from diseases,” the scientists concluded.Earlier this year, in May, I went to Sardinia for a weekend, taking a Ryanair flight from London. I drove inland, away from the touristy coastal hotels, to the Blue Zones area, a town called Seulo. Eventually, I passed a Blue Zones–branded sign informing me I was entering a “centenarians village.”Turning into Seulo, I felt the gravitational pull of a health intervention that was simpler. The myth of the blue zone isn’t a rejection of modernity per se, but of the material and social conditions of our time making us so sick, a promise to return to something more nurturing, something that exists underneath. Throughout Seulo, photos of elderly people hung on stone walls; the streets were empty. I saw hardly anyone, much less anyone older. I tried to eat lunch, but the only restaurant open was a delicatessen serving only sausage, and I don’t eat meat. In a café, my boyfriend ordered a coffee while I watched the other lone customer play a slot-machine game. As we drove out of town on a windy road, I ate a protein bar from my purse. We passed a sign, and I typed the words into Google Translate on my phone. “La Comunità più longeva al mondo”: the longest-lived community in the world.
In 1999, a Belgian demographer, Michel Poulain, heard about an Italian island where people lived to be 100 and older while remaining mentally and physically active. Intrigued, Poulain visited Sardinia, where he validated people’s ages according to their birth records. Using a blue pen as he crossed the island, he marked on a map the spots where he found the oldest villagers. “From that time, it is called the blue zone,” he explained to me over the phone in June.Four years after his first trip, Poulain published an academic paper on “blue zones,” as these sites became known, in the journal Experimental Gerontology. In the paper, he speculated about the factors that led to such long lives. Was it low levels of immigration plus high levels of inbreeding? More men than women lived longer; perhaps there was an environmental influence? Shortly after publication, Poulain got a call from Dan Buettner, a long-distance cyclist and National Geographic explorer. Buettner was chasing his own longevity hot spot—a city in Okinawa, Japan, where, he’d heard, people also lived to be very old. Buettner hoped to incorporate Poulain’s work and write about both locations; his National Geographic article on the blue zones ran in 2005.In subsequent articles, books, a TED talk, and eventually a hit Netflix series, Buettner and Poulain expanded their research, naming three more blue zones in Ikaria, Greece; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California. Along the way, Buettner, who has a gravelly voice and an easy charisma, developed theories about what made the blue zones special. It wasn’t genetics, he suggested, but the environment. Physical movement was built into peoples’ daily routines, through their work, their commutes, and the surrounding geography. Plant-based foods dominated their diets, and they reported a sense of purpose and belonging. The conditions of their lives stood in stark contrast to those of most Americans, Buettner observed on the first episode of the Netflix show, which aired in 2023. And the consequences for the United States were grim. Life expectancy here was notably declining when compared to peer countries. In 2023, it dropped to 76.4 years, the shortest it had been in almost 20 years.It probably isn’t a coincidence that, as life expectancy diminishes, we have grown fixated on living longer. Longevity has lately emerged as a wellness trend, if you can call it that, given how long humans have lusted after some version of a fountain of youth. In the first recorded story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a king desperately searches for the secret to everlasting life. But there is undeniably a renewed focus in medicine on uncovering the secrets of long life. Billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, has spent millions on anti-aging research, and Google maintains a secretive life science company, Calico, to research the biology of aging. On TikTok and X, longevity gurus and influencers suggest that we can combine lifestyle interventions with biomedical advancements to keep our bodies going—and going, and going.Buettner didn’t want to confine his and Poulain’s discoveries to written stories that might, at best, be recycled as fables. He wanted to effect real change in a world he saw becoming sicker around him. In 2009, he got a million-dollar grant from the AARP to see whether blue zones could be made, not just found. Buettner selected Albert Lea, Minnesota, near his home in Minneapolis, as the test city for a for-profit company he called the Blue Zones Project. “If you try to convince people to change their behavior, you fail,” he told me. “The whole idea was to change their environment so you’re setting them up for success instead of failure.” In the 15 years since it was established, the company, which Buettner eventually sold to the health care system Adventist Health, has enlisted more than 70 communities and more than four million people in the United States to participate.But there are a few problems. The Blue Zones Project markets itself as a public health program, but it doesn’t measure its outcomes as rigorously as comparable initiatives run by academic institutions, so it’s hard to tell how effective it is. It’s also expensive. Largely for cost-related reasons, many of the participating towns and cities gave up their certifications as Blue Zones communities. And as the company grapples with how to help people live longer, healthier lives, the original blue zones are facing their own identity crisis. The data that shows concentrated populations of centenarians, some critics now allege, is flawed. Can you turn a U.S. city into a blue zone if the zones don’t exist in the first place?In early June, I walked on the five-mile path that wraps around Fountain Lake in the center of Albert Lea. This was no ordinary sidewalk, but a “Blue Zones Walkway,” constructed as part of the city’s certification. Cathy Malakow-sky, the current head of Albert Lea’s Blue Zones Project, guided me through all the changes the town had made to transform itself. Malakowsky, who grew up in Iowa and moved to Albert Lea when she was a junior in high school, has an endearing Midwestern lilt to her voice. After going to college six miles away, she came back to marry her high school boyfriend and raise her children. She’s divorced now, but committed to Albert Lea. She began as a volunteer during the pilot project, and took over as the Blue Zones Project lead about two years ago.Later that day, Malakowsky gave me a tour of downtown. To obtain certification, cities must agree that at least 20 percent of residents; 25 percent of grocery stores, locally owned restaurants, and public schools; and 50 percent of the top 20 employers will adhere to a “healthy-living plan.” For workplaces, this can include offering healthier snack options, a break room with yoga mats, or suggested routes for employees to take walk breaks during the day. Cities also receive assessments from Blue Zones consultants for how to improve the built environment. Malakowsky pointed out new crosswalks and sidewalk extensions, along with stop signs that slow traffic. As part of the project, Albert Lea added flowerpots, benches, and trash cans that double as bike racks. “We have invested millions of dollars in sidewalks and trails to make walking easier,” Malakowsky said. At the end of the initiative’s first year, the Blue Zones Project announced that residents of Albert Lea had gained an average of 2.9 years of life expectancy. The project was deemed a success.As we got into Malakowsky’s car and drove to see more of Albert Lea’s trails, she told me about the Blue Zones Project’s True Vitality Test, which asks questions about diet, lifestyle, mental health, and social and work life. When she took it, the results said she would live until she was 88, but be healthy only until 80, unless she made changes to her diet. I noticed that the Blue Zones Project is replete with catchy—and trademarked—terminology. There’s the Life Radius, the Power 9, the 12 Pillars, and Vitality surveys, all borrowing lessons from the blue zones about how to eat, be active, and spend time in community.Jargon aside, there’s no doubt that the Blue Zones Project’s suggestions are generically good: Make your cities more walkable, improve your connections to your neighbors and family, and eat healthier foods. Naomi Imatome-Yun, the executive vice president of the company, told me it was “the largest public health project in the country.” And the blue zones tap into a powerful truth: that despite how much Americans spend on health care, our overall health is only minimally related to medical care—about 10 to 20 percent, according to research on the social determinants of health. This helps explain how the United States can spend an exorbitant amount of money on individual treatments while Americans remain so sick. Countless studies show, for instance, how income influences health outcomes. A 40-year-old man in the poorest 1 percent of the U.S. population will die, on average, 14.6 years sooner than a man in the top 1 percent. For women, the gap is about 10 years. A study done in Baltimore found a 20-year disparity between a man’s lifespan in a poor neighborhood and that of a man in a wealthy area.This idea has been in medicine’s shadow since at least the nineteenth century, when Rudolf Virchow, a German doctor considered to be one of the founders of “social medicine,” wrote a report on a typhus epidemic in Prussia from 1847 to 1848, saying that instead of medical intervention, it was social conditions that needed to improve in order to treat the disease. Virchow even became skeptical of germ theory, because he thought it would distract from the social factors that caused diseases. Poverty caused illness, not invisible pathology. Virchow helped establish Berlin’s sewer system, on the theory that sanitation systems are one of the most impactful health interventions.“From all evidence, the main determinant of your healthy life expectancy is the wealth of the family you’re born to, your occupation, and your level of education,” said Paul Crawshaw, a professor in public policy at England’s Teesside University, who has been working on place-based initiatives for decades. “The million-dollar question is can you really import that from one place to another?”The answer hits the participating towns in their pocketbooks. The Blue Zones Project is a for-profit company: It costs money to bring it into your town and get branded as a Blue Zones community. Private partners will sponsor the costs of the Blue Zones Project team, event planning, or advertising. Any larger changes made, often at Blue Zones Project’s recommendation, are funded by cities themselves. Once the sponsorship money goes away, so does the certification, which requires payment to be maintained each year.“I think any new intervention that’s trying to scale and is touted as promising should put it to the test,” said Atheendar Venkataramani, a health economist, internal medicine physician, and associate professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who runs clinical trials on place-based initiatives. “If you’re spending money on this, you’re not spending money on something else.”After the reported success of Albert Lea’s Blue Zones Project in 2011, Terry Branstad, Iowa’s governor at the time, enlisted the company to make Iowa the healthiest state in the country. In January 2012, a competition was announced among cities in Iowa to become the next Blue Zones demonstration sites. After visiting Albert Lea, I took a five-day road trip through the communities that had participated in the program, to see what, if any, effects still lingered.I was surprised to learn that, unlike Albert Lea, which was certified in 2016 and still maintains the credential, Mason City, Marion, Muscatine, and Iowa City, all former blue zones, are no longer. Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield had invested $25 million to pay for the Blue Zones certification. Once the money ran out, the Iowa cities couldn’t justify the cost, several government officials told me when I visited.The loss of certification didn’t mean that people gave up on bettering their communities. In Waterloo, Iowa, I visited All-In, a grocery store that opened in 2023. Sherman Wise, its co-owner, helped run the town’s Blue Zones Project. After the blue zones came and left Waterloo, the area around All-In was still a food desert—until Wise’s business became the first Black-owned independent grocery store in Waterloo. Wise wanted the store to be more than just a place to buy produce. It hosted an after-school program that taught children about cooking and healthy eating, and a class taught by a financial literacy coach. It collaborated with the Iowa Department of Corrections on life skills programs. Wise said that if the Blue Zones Project left a legacy, it was in the policies passed in order to reach certification. For example, schools changed their rules about the kinds of treats kids can bring in for their birthdays. Though the certification expired, those rules remain.Sue Beach, Waterloo’s other Blue Zones Project lead, said that she was very aware of the time limit. For a while, the initiative was kept alive by unpaid volunteers. “They wanted us to pay to continue to have the blue zone certification, but we really couldn’t do that,” she explained. In Marion, City Council member Sara Mentzer, the former lead for Marion’s Blue Zones Project, told me something similar. “The licensing was more than could be sustained,” she said. Mentzer now runs a different health initiative called Be Well Marion, which consists of programs supporting healthy eating, activity, and community involvement that are not dissimilar from the Blue Zones Project.In Mason City, officials told me that the city had recently spent $18 million developing a huge bike park and mountain biking trails. The town, home to two Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and the inspiration for The Music Man, didn’t need the Blue Zones Project to direct residents to do this; it’s what they wanted. Before leaving, I walked through an outsider-art sculpture park called Rancho Deluxe, which displayed a graffitied Blue Zones sign from the campaign hanging upside down.Brevard, North Carolina, launched a Blue Zones Project, but the city didn’t maintain the certification. A local reporter, Dan Dewitt, wrote that the City Council clashed with the company because it had been “pushing these initiatives for years” while “the real work was done by city staffers and consultants.” Nevertheless, the city still had to pay for the Blue Zones Project. In Phoenix, several community groups published a letter saying they didn’t want or need the Blue Zones Project, since it would take funding away from preexisting initiatives. “Projects like these often overshadow and push out cultural solutions that are already in place,” members wrote.The letter expressed a legitimate worry: that there might not be enough resources to fund the Blue Zones Project and similar projects already in the works. In August, the All-In grocery closed—first temporarily, then permanently. Other local stores had also recently shut down, The Gazette, a newspaper in Cedar Rapids, reported, and many people were now resorting to dollar stores to buy food.The blue zones have been used as a marketing tool for real estate development. One such development, a $600 million luxury tower in Miami, has a medical facility offering plastic surgery that is adorned with the Blue Zones brand.The Blue Zones Project describes itself as funded through private-public partnerships, but, as I learned in Iowa and Albert Lea, infrastructure changes are paid for by city funds, and governments have to approve any changes to policy. The fee pays for the advice from the Blue Zones Project, but also the branding. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that the blue zones were being used as a “marketing tool” for a real estate development in Ave Maria, a town in Florida. One such development, a $600 million luxury tower in Miami, has a medical facility offering plastic surgery that also is adorned with the Blue Zones brand. A website that tracks realty trends reported that blue zone communities “are experiencing high demand, prompting numerous real estate companies to seek opportunities within them.”Despite asking city officials and the Blue Zones Project directly, over and over, how much the certification costs, I was never told a straight figure. “The costs vary widely depending on population size, length of the project, sectors we will be working in,” Imatome-Yun said in an email. Because of the nature of the private-public partnerships, it’s not information that’s accessible through freedom of information requests. “I’m not supposed to talk about our financial agreement with Blue Zones,” Malakowsky said when I asked her.This September, the Annals of Improbable Research magazine gave Saul Newman, a demographer at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, an Ig Nobel Prize in Demography for a 2024 paper on errors in centenarian age records. The sardonic awards are for research that “makes people laugh, and then think.” Their intended humor notwithstanding, the awards are well-respected.When I talked to Newman, it was before he won the prize, and he sounded exasperated. He had previously shown that other research on extreme age could be explained by a mistake in rounding numbers, he told me. When the mistake was corrected, evidence of remarkably long lives vanished. The research he criticized hasn’t been corrected or retracted. In his paper on the blue zones, Newman demonstrated that the factors predicting high ages in regions around the world consist of a lack of birth certificates, high poverty levels, and fewer 90-year-olds. This implies, he said, that shoddy paperwork and pension fraud—for instance, people saying elderly relatives are still alive in order to collect their welfare checks—are better explanations for blue zones than anything else. The high poverty rates in the blue zones may provide the motivation for such fraud.In Italy, recorded supercentenarians are more likely if a province has higher unemployment rates. People who are born in the Sardinian provinces Ogliastra and Medio Campidano are the least likely and second-least likely to survive from birth to age 55, Newman wrote, and according to Eurostat the Sardinian province of Olbia-Tempio has the eighth-fewest individuals alive over the age of 90—“yet somehow also ranked as the best province for survival to ages 100, 105, and 110.”When Newman looked at data from Japan’s statistics bureau, he didn’t find evidence that people who lived in Okinawa were healthier than those in the rest of the country. In fact, the island has high levels of obesity and alcohol consumption compared to other prefectures in Japan. It has the lowest per capita intake of sweet potatoes, a food profiled in the Blue Zones Netflix show as particularly healthy, and high meat consumption. Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones argued that people in Okinawa had strong “ikigai,” or sense of purpose, but Newman pointed out that Okinawans have the fourth-highest suicide rate in Japan for those over 65. The Power 9—Buettner’s top lifestyle prescriptions, inspired by the blue zones— “are directly contradicted in every single case,” Newman wrote, “usually through population-representative surveys of hundreds of thousands of people, with levels of inaccuracy that border on farce.”Some of Buettner’s collaborators issued a response to Newman’s research, arguing that “the ages of individuals in the officially recognized blue zones have been thoroughly validated, and their exceptional longevity is well-documented” through sources like civil databases and church archives. In a letter published on its website, the Blue Zones Project said that it doesn’t claim that blue zones hold more supercentenarians, but simply that they are healthy places with high life expectancies. The poverty that Newman alluded to, the letter explained, aided people living in the zones to avoid modernization and the Western diet. In Okinawa, it’s young people who “eat and drink too much” and have unhealthy lifestyles, which skewed the overall data. The letter pointed out that Newman’s paper was not peer-reviewed and had not been published in a journal.Beyond dubious demographic statistics, the other question hanging over the blue zones is how stable they are. At the end of 2023, a paper in the journal Demographic Research suggested that the blue zone in Costa Rica wasn’t so blue anymore. Using a new nationwide survey of 550,000 adults alive between 1990 and 2020, it found that those born before 1930 were living longer than expected, but not those born after. “Hotspots of extreme longevity are probably transient,” the paper concluded.Unsurprisingly, given what he sees as flawed research, Newman is skeptical about designing public health programs based on the blue zones. “You have someone with no medical expertise, no scientific expertise, and they are telling large sections of the population what to do, and they very easily get it very wrong,” he said to me about Buettner and the Blue Zones Project. “It might be nice to go and sit around the pot with grandma and then tell tales of the old time, but that’s not science.”And yet, in the midst of a culture that’s so focused on expensive supplements and individual health, it can be refreshing to encounter an accessible longevity philosophy that’s dedicated to making daily life healthier for everyone. Not through grueling exercise, fasting, or powdered greens, but through walking, eating delicious foods, and being surrounded by friends and family until old age. Perhaps the true virtue of the blue zones lies in how easily they lend themselves to marketing. In 1952, the psychologist G.D. Wiebe posed the question, after seeing the rise of advertising, “Why can’t you sell brotherhood and rational thinking like you sell soap?” The Blue Zones Project sells one version of a healthy lifestyle, and it can motivate coordination around policies and inspire the community to buy in. Is that such a bad thing?For his part, Poulain feels uncomfortable with how blue zones were commercialized as the idea was popularized, and he did not sign the letter that Buettner’s other collaborators wrote. He pointed out that the research he’s done doesn’t get at why people in the blue zones live a long time—just that they do—but he disputed Newman’s claims, saying that he personally validated centenarians himself.Poulain and I talked four days before his seventy-seventh birthday. He incorporates blue zone principles into his own life, he explained: He prioritizes eating fruits and vegetables, rides his bike as much as he can, and says hello to others while out hiking. After we spoke, he emailed me a photo of himself, with a shock of white hair and a fluffy white beard, laughing and embracing a centenarian in Galicia, Spain, where he is in the process of certifying a new blue zone.Poulain and Buettner don’t speak any more. Poulain criticized Buettner for profiting off trademarks, and his company for not funding research into the factors that lead to longevity in the blue zones, all while pursuing commercial projects such as the Blue Zones–branded frozen meals that can be found in Whole Foods. Poulain worries that he may never discover what makes the original blue zones such healthy places to live—indeed, that the success of the brand is a danger to the blue zones themselves. “I had a researcher just today who in Ikaria cannot access centenarians because there were so many tourists arriving,” he said. “All because this is the island where you forget to die.”Is the Blue Zones Project a genuinely innovative program, or a trendy—and expensive—marketing ploy inspired by sound principles but uncertain data? The answer relies a lot on whether it works. In 2023, Dan Dewitt, the reporter from Brevard, compared statistics on Freeborn County—where Albert Lea is—from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute’s rankings of counties’ public health to analysis from the Blue Zones Project itself. The institute showed that Freeborn County had improved its statewide health ranking between 2011 and 2018, but in 2022, that improvement slowed down. The rate of smoking increased, and that year the county had a 35 percent obesity rate—higher than the state’s, and higher than in 2011. The number of physically inactive adults was around 27 percent. In 2023, Freeborn County was rated 51 out of 87 counties in Minnesota.It also seems possible that any positive change the Blue Zones Project touts might have happened without the company’s involvement. The company considers the Beach Cities of California—Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, and Redondo Beach—to be among its success stories; in these communities, it says, the program reduced smoking and childhood obesity, and constructed miles of bike and walking paths along the beaches. But if the towns had the money to participate in the program, Venkataramani said, they might have had the resources to achieve those same outcomes on their own.Most damningly, the evidence that the Blue Zones Project uses to illustrate its effectiveness is weak. The company assesses its communities through surveying from Gallup, the polling organization. In 2007, Gallup entered a partnership with Healthways, a health services company, to measure well-being at a national scale. When Healthways partnered with Blue Zones in 2009, it gave Gallup the job of evaluating Blue Zones Project communities. But the life expectancy improvement measurements from the Blue Zones Project come from the Blue Zones team, not from Gallup, said Dan Witters, a Gallup consultant and analyst. Witters confirmed that its surveys are not longitudinal samples, meaning compared over time, but rather successive random samples. Gallup evaluates people on 20 evidence-based metrics to see whether a community is improving compared to itself, and how that improvement compares to national surveys. There are no official control cities, though Gallup will compare a Blue Zones Project community to another city on which it has wellness data. Gallup isn’t, however, able to check whether those cities also have wellness programs of their own. The Build Healthy Places Network, an organization that keeps track of similar initiatives ongoing around the country, and what measurable impact they have, doesn’t list the Blue Zones Project in its database.“The question is, what are they telling us that a public health expert wouldn’t know?” Newman said. “Do I need someone to tell me that exercise is good for me? What benefit are these very expensive programs actually conveying?”As it stands, the Blue Zones Project’s approach to evaluation doesn’t pass the smell test for Venkataramani, the doctor and health economist. “The least valid design to make a causal inference is one where you’re kind of comparing yourself to yourself, but not anyone else,” he said, “using some sort of bespoke tool that may or may not be validated.” The Blue Zones Project’s Imatome-Yun didn’t respond to a request for comment on the company’s evaluation methods.Based on Gallup’s surveys, Witters argued, well-being does improve after blue zones are established, but he offered an interesting caveat: People with already high levels of well-being are more likely to know about the initiative, and those who both know about it and participate are those who show the biggest improvements. Crawshaw has seen this before, and it raises a troubling possibility. “A lot of health promotion initiatives that are not carefully designed to avoid this problem,” agreed Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, “end up benefiting an advantaged population and creating an even bigger gap in health outcomes than existed to begin with.”Later in June, I moderated a panel at the Aspen Ideas: Health conference, where, as it happened, Dan Buettner was also speaking. After his conversation with Dean Ornish, a lifestyle medicine researcher, a crowd of people surrounded Buettner for 25 minutes before he broke off to sit with me on a bench on the Aspen Institute’s grounds. “We’re very Hippocratic in our approach,” Buettner told me. “None of our interventions would hurt anybody.” He added that a lot of the recommendations of the Blue Zones Project have been arrived at through trial and error. When I mentioned I had gone to Iowa, he shook his head, and said that, while he saluted the state’s efforts, the company had not been funded there for long enough to make the initiatives stick.I asked him about the importance of other social determinants when it came to health, like education or income inequality, and he said he had just returned from Scandinavia, where he was researching his next book. There, “everybody has access to health care, there’s better education, there’s better distribution of income,” he said. “I’m all for that. Tell me how you’re gonna do that in America. Good luck.”Buettner is a captivating public speaker. On the one hand, he captures the paradoxical simplicity and mystery of what it means to be well. On the other, he reminds us of concrete, achievable steps we can take for our health, such as eating more beans. When a woman approached him for a selfie, saying her daughter was a fan, he told her to record a video, and shot a face-to-cam message. I remembered how, in Albert Lea, Buettner’s footprints and signature were pressed into the wet cement of the Blue Zones Walkway—like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.Instead of lamenting what we can’t do, Buettner wanted to focus on what can be done: “We can go into a city, and we can analyze it and can make it more walkable and bikeable.” The other lesson he said he’d learned from the Blue Zones Project is that he doesn’t get involved in “political squabbles.” Austin, Texas, for instance, isn’t a blue zone because the city wanted the initiative to focus on Black neighborhoods. “I said I can’t do that,” Buettner told me—not because he didn’t want to, but because he didn’t know how. “This is a populationwide intervention, or we’re not coming. We’re not favoring Blacks or gay people or rich people or poor people.”Because Buettner sold the company to Adventist Health, he said he couldn’t speak to its current practices. “I don’t know exactly how it’s being operated,” he said. “I’m told that they use my blueprint, but so much is in the execution.” He agreed that there’s pressure to default to personal lifestyle changes, such as exercise programs and Zumba and diets. “When I managed things, I tried to keep our budgets focused on permanent or semipermanent changes to the environment,” he said. He had made the company for-profit, he explained, because he believed it would be more impactful that way: “The moment anybody can access a brand for free, it gets slapped on junk food.”Buettner is very skilled at presenting the blue zones, and the brand, in an appealing way. In January 2012, Eric Carter, a Macalester College professor and health geographer, was teaching at Grinnell College when the Blue Zones Project arrived in Iowa. “Buettner had a real gift for taking epidemiological and demographic research and translating it into terms that people could use to maybe potentially make changes in their own lives,” Carter said to me in his office in St. Paul. “Maybe the blue zones aren’t meant to be the panacea for our public health problems. Maybe it is just something that’s just for the wellness space.”Whether for the “wellness space” or not, the impulse to look to older times or other places for better ways of living is reminiscent of a phenomenon described in a 1981 article in Nutrition Today by William Jarvis, a prominent nutritionist: the “myth of the healthy savage,” or the desire to romanticize remote parts of the world for their supposed longevity. The Hunza people, an indigenous community in the Himalayas, were touted as a bastion of health long before the blue zones. In a 1964 book called Hunza Health Secrets, the author, Renee Taylor, wrote that the people who lived in the region, which is in Pakistan, had “no cancer, no heart attacks, and practically no other disease to cut down men and women in the prime of life.” Men between 125 and 145 years old allegedly played volleyball. But the fantasy of the healthy savage usually turns out to be just that: a fantasy. For Hunza, incomplete birth and death rates and inaccurate measurements of disease explained the seeming lack of illness there. When a team of Japanese scientists went to Hunza in 1955, they found high rates of cancer and heart disease after examining 277 people. “We had to teach them how to cure disease, instead of learning how to be free from diseases,” the scientists concluded.Earlier this year, in May, I went to Sardinia for a weekend, taking a Ryanair flight from London. I drove inland, away from the touristy coastal hotels, to the Blue Zones area, a town called Seulo. Eventually, I passed a Blue Zones–branded sign informing me I was entering a “centenarians village.”Turning into Seulo, I felt the gravitational pull of a health intervention that was simpler. The myth of the blue zone isn’t a rejection of modernity per se, but of the material and social conditions of our time making us so sick, a promise to return to something more nurturing, something that exists underneath. Throughout Seulo, photos of elderly people hung on stone walls; the streets were empty. I saw hardly anyone, much less anyone older. I tried to eat lunch, but the only restaurant open was a delicatessen serving only sausage, and I don’t eat meat. In a café, my boyfriend ordered a coffee while I watched the other lone customer play a slot-machine game. As we drove out of town on a windy road, I ate a protein bar from my purse. We passed a sign, and I typed the words into Google Translate on my phone. “La Comunità più longeva al mondo”: the longest-lived community in the world.
