Do you know there are regions on our planet where people live longer and healthier lives than average? There are five places in the world called the Blue Zones, where the healthiest, longest-living population lives — Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California.
People living in blue zones have an exceptionally long life beyond the age of 80 due to a combination of factors affecting their lifestyle. Factors such as physical activity, low stress, rich social interactions, a local whole-foods diet, and low disease incidence help in longevity. The geographically marked areas have been identified for having low rates of chronic disease, and the environmental influences like diet and lifestyle play a huge role in determining the lifespan. For instance, people living in Ikaria island in Greece eat a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, red wine and homegrown vegetables. The Ogliastra region of Sardinia has older men living in the mountainous regions and working on farms and drinking lots of red wine.
Okinawa has the world’s oldest women, who eat a lot of soy-based foods and practice tai chi, a meditative form of exercise. The Nicoyan diet in Costa Rica is based around beans and corn tortillas, and most people do physical jobs into old age and have a reason to live known as ‘plan de vida’ in Spanish which means ‘plan of life’. People residing in Loma Linda, California, are a religious group, strict vegetarians and live in tight-knit communities.
Researchers have sought to understand why people in so-called Blue Zones live to 100 at far greater rates than anywhere else. Saul Newman, a researcher at the University College London (UCL), however, dismisses the claim, stating there is nothing like this. “The Blue Zones are a by-product of bad data,” Newman said in a news report.
He also claims that rather than lifestyle factors such as diet or social connections, the longevity of people in five regions can be explained by pension fraud, clerical errors, and a lack of reliable birth and death records. His claims reported in news media quote examples of how governments have acknowledged serious flaws in their record-keeping related to births and deaths. In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82% of its citizens reported to be over 100 had already died. In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72% of its centenarians claiming pensions — some 9,000 people — were already dead. Puerto Rico’s government said in 2010 that it would replace all existing birth certificates due to concerns about widespread fraud and identity theft.
However, the regions remain documented as blue zones. In fact, there are artificially created ones too, for commercial gains. As the founder of Blue Zone and a National Geographic fellow, the places have been identified and explored by Dan Buettner and his team, who introduced the term ‘Blue Zones’ in 2005. He identified the lifestyle characteristics of people in these regions, which they call the ‘Power 9’, and found that people in these regions have a number of other characteristics in common, including: eating fewer calories, following the 80% rule, which means stopping eating when they feel 80% full, eating slowly, and the smallest meal in the late afternoon or early evening.
Based on 25 years of research and scientifically proven lessons of longevity, health and happiness from the longest-living communities in the world, Buettner’s research led to the creation of this project, which aims to improve community health by helping people adopt the Blue Zone lifestyle. Presently, there are more than 70 communities in the United States that are part of the Blue Zones Project. Participating communities have seen double-digit drops in obesity and smoking rates and significant savings in healthcare.