Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - Blue Zones, Birth Certificates, Oh My!

Surprisingly, search didn't come up with a thread title on Blue Zones, so I needed to add this one. It is too good to miss. Last week I picked up a copy of the Blue Zone Solution at a thrift store, knowing in general about "blue zones", but not having read the details before. You can imagine my surprise a few days ago (timing is everything, only a few chapters into book, not exactly riveting prose) when the following study was published, and now Mark Sisson provides his take on it.

Quote:

Good morning, everybody.
Blue Zones, what about the Blue Zones?

I'm talking about certain spots in the Mediterranean like Sardinia and Ikaria, and in Okinawa, which produce the most per-capita supercentenarians—the oldest of the old, the longest lived of the longest lived—in the world. They get lauded for their diet and lifestyle, and used as examples for what we should all be doing. They're often used to argue against Primal and keto diets because they're neither keto nor Primal.

But then there's this paper, which recently came out:

"Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans."

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1

It looked at "new predictors" of supercentenarian status in various regions around the world, including the United States and the aforementioned Blue Zones. What'd they find?

Red wine consumption didn't predict supercentenarianism.
Legume consumption didn't predict it.
The presence of hills didn't predict it.
It turns out that a strong predictor of super-longevity is the absence of detailed birth records.
In the United States, whenever a state introduced birth certificates, supercentenarianism miraculously dropped by 69-82%. A full 82% of all supercentenarians on record in the U.S. were "born" before birth certificates were used. Only 18% have birth certificates; only 18% of American supercentenarians can actually be verified. Oops.

In Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria, the strongest predictor for regions with high reported supercentenarianism was high crime, low income, and low life expectancy relative to the national average. Ninety-nine percent of male Italian centenarians smoke. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese centenarians are actually dead or missing. These aren't what you'd expect. Oops again.

The conclusion of the paper is that the primary causes of reported supercentenarianism in these countries are pension fraud and reporting error.
Everyone's always asking me about these regions. And as I've always admitted, they have a lot going for them.

Whole foods.
Strong sense of community.
Long tradition of daily movement like walking. Much of it through hilly regions.

But I just have to chuckle at this latest paper. Is Blue Zone research all for naught? No. It's not all fraud. But it's clear that these areas aren't magical, and that a closer look at the longevity data might be in order.

Thoughts on this? Let me know in the comment section of this week's WLL.
And enjoy your Sunday, everyone.
Best, Mark