Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder than ever

When French geneticist Jean-Francois Deleuze first launched the AGENOMICS study in 2022, he hoped to identify genetic patterns among 1,200 French citizens who’d lived more than 100 years and to compare those to centenarians hailing from one of the world-famous “blue zones.”

Then he started having doubts.

“Some recent articles questioning the very concept of blue zones have given me pause,” he wrote in an email last year. “What’s your take?”

It’s not our first time getting that question. If you write books — as we both did — about extreme longevity, people will ask you about blue zones. The term, now engrained in Western culture, originally referred to 14 isolated villages on the Italian island of Sardinia where, 25 years ago, researchers identified exceptional numbers of long-living humans whose health they attributed to active habits and simple foods.

In a wellness space increasingly crowded with billionaire-backed senolytics, hyperbaric chambers, antiaging drips, and stem cell infusions, blue zones are starting to look like the unpretentious OGs of the longevity movement.

But they’ve strayed far and wide from their humble roots. Skepticism over their foundational science, plummeting numbers of healthy seniors in the original regions, and a burgeoning business in blue zones products is making it more difficult to answer the question: Are blue zones real?

Belgian demographer Michel Poulain and Italian physician Giovanni Pes coined the term “blue zone” in the early 2000s to refer to the converging ink dots on the map they were using to validate longevity claims in Ogliastra, Italy. They published the results of the AKEA study in 2004. A year later, journalist Dan Buettner, who had joined their project, published a National Geographic cover story chronicling the “long life secrets” of elderly residents in Ogliastra, as well as Okinawa, Japan, and — controversially — Loma Linda, Calif. Shortly thereafter, Buettner trademarked the term “blue zone” to protect it, he insists, from misuse.

Over the years, Buettner, more so than the original scientists, has become synonymous with blue zones.

He’s written nine best-selling blue zone books that have surpassed $1.2 million in sales and led “expeditions” to endorse new blue zones in Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula and Ikaria, Greece. He founded Blue Zones LLC, which consults with and certifies blue zone cities in the U.S., as well as offering cooking courses and retreats. In 2023, Buettner hosted the popular Netflix documentary “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones.”

Buettner spoke to us from his rural Wisconsin lake home last summer, where he was drafting his latest book describing a new category of blue zone. Blue zone citizens “are not pursuing health; it ensues,” he explained. “In other words, their surroundings are set up in a way that their micro decisions on a day-to-day basis … are mindless and they are measurably better, day to day, month to month, over decades.”

For almost 20 years, the blue zones went unchallenged. That changed in 2019, when Australian biologist Saul Newman published a preprint paper online arguing that clerical errors, natural disasters, and pension fraud were better explanations for the proportion of centenarians “discovered” in these discrete regions of the world. Newman’s paper, which he updated in 2020 and again four years later, won him an Ig Nobel Prize, although it still has not been formally published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Newman blames the hive-mind homogeny of longevity researchers angered to see their age-validation methods challenged. He says his paper has undergone nine rounds of review at BMJ Public Health — most scientific papers typically weather one to three.

“Despite answering all critiques in roughly 65 pages of detail, they have spent the past four months refusing to either accept the paper or send it for further review, or to answer any questions,” Newman wrote in an email last year. “I believe this is reflective of the lack of integrity or answers in aging science more generally, and I hold out no hope that I will ever receive anything from my career than hate and excuses.”

Both Poulain and Buettner are prickly about Newman’s scathing critiques.

Poulain, speaking over Zoom, took pains to explain the validation work he did to certify the first blue zone, and the rigorous work he’s done in the ensuing decades, visiting a whopping 95 countries on the hunt for new longevity hotspots.

Buettner, likewise, calls Newman “the only critic I know of.” He points out that fact checkers at the National Geographic “really hold my feet to the fire of making sure what [I] say is underpinned by evidence or research.”

But complicating this spat is the fact that subsequent scientific papers show several original blue zones are no longer home to long-living humans. Demographer Luis Rosero-Bixby of the University of Costa Rica helped Buettner declare Nicoya a blue zone back in 2007; in 2023, he published a new paper in Demographic Research showing that people born on the peninsula after 1930 are not experiencing the same longevity as those born prior.

Similarly, Poulain, with demographer Anne Herm of the University of Tallin, Estonia, published an analysis in the Journal of Internal Medicine in 2024 showing that Okinawans born before and after World War II show stark differences in lifespan. Changing nutrition and lifestyle might explain the stark decline in life expectancy but, they admit, destruction of family registries during World War II may also have led to age inflation when records were reconstructed.

Poulain, Pes, and Buettner are among the authors on an as-yet unpublished paper, led by renowned longevity author Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois, tracking the demise of the original blue zones. And, in mid-April, the American Federation for Aging Research released a press release announcing that the world’s leading blue zones researchers had reached a consensus on a “formal definition” for blue zones going forward.

“I would say, all blue zones are waning right now, although we found a couple that are waxing or ascending,” Buettner said. Reluctant to reveal where these waxing zones might be, Buettner would only say that they demonstrate it’s possible to “manufacture health.” Singapore, for example — showcased in Buettner’s Netflix documentary — is hailed as a new longevity hotspot: proof that healthy life expectancy can be “engineered.”

Poulain, by contrast, said he’s not entirely persuaded that all the foundational blue zones are gone and is no longer hunting for new ones, but that he has signed onto Olshanksy’s paper to make “peace” with his erstwhile blue zone colleagues, after more than a decade of scientific discord.

Poulain, who has an entirely separate blue zone website offering his own — somewhat different — formula for healthy aging, has never acknowledged Loma Linda as a blue zone, noting that Buettner himself has said he only included it to satisfy National Geographic’s request that a U.S. site be included—something that infuriates Newman, too. And Poulain finds the idea of a Singapore blue zone laughable, saying that even the Singapore minister of health disagrees with the designation. Poulain has instead added the island of Martinique, France, to his website, a designation Buettner said “we don’t agree with.” Asked why Buettner disputes the Martinique blue zone, Poulain laughed: “Because he doesn’t find it.”

Whether or not the original blue zones are disappearing, said Buettner, doesn’t change the fact that, at a fixed point in time, the data from these specific longevity hot spots offer enduring lessons. “The associations and the insights they offer us, I think, are timeless,” Buettner said.

They’ve also proved endlessly profitable. You can purchase blue zone foods, facials, vacations, sleep coaching, and health checks. When Delta recently announced a new flight from New York to Sardinia, the airline marketed the news as the first nonstop flight to a blue zone. Indeed, more than the bickering over whether true blue zones ever existed or are now on the demise, the money being made in their name is the greatest disservice to the science.

The company Buettner originally founded with his trademark has become big business.

A Blue Zones LLC website boasts having helped more than 70 North American communities — in all, says Buettner, more than 700 cities have sought advice, yielding “great successes” in Fort Worth, Texas; Naples, Fla.; Tempe and Phoenix, Ariz.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Riverside, Calif., where projects using “micro-nudges” have produced “double-digit drops in obesity, smoking, and body mass index, among other health and well-being improvements,” he said.

But Poulain said his relationship with Buettner soured more than 10 years ago, after he was invited to visit a Blue Zones LLC project in Naples, Fla. What was clear, he said, was that the neighborhoods that needed help the most would never be able to afford an initial consultation, let alone the $100,000 per year to maintain official Blue Zone LLC designation. A five-year contract with Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Iowa covering 10 cities, for example, cost an estimated $25 million. “It was clear that progressively, [blue zones] were turning to business,” Poulain said. Tellingly, many U.S. cities first designated as blue zones in the U.S. are no longer certified, likely because the money spent on retaining official certification could be better spent on infrastructure in the cities themselves.

In 2020, Buettner sold Blue Zones LLC to Adventist Health for a reported $78 million. He defends the work as “quite expensive,” typically supporting a full-time team of about 20 people who work with municipalities to enhance physical activity by closing streets to traffic, adding sidewalks and bike lanes, promoting consumption of healthy foods, helping smokers quit, improving air quality, facilitating opportunities for socializing and community building, and more.

In 2021, Adventist Health used the blue zones brand to market a $600 million Miami luxury tower that, in addition to boasting a “blue zones center” combining longevity medicine and advanced diagnostics, featured on-site cosmetic and plastic surgery. Buettner was quick to clarify that he wasn’t involved in that project and objected to this use of the trademark. “Eventually,” he said, “we got them to stop using the brand … and there was no harm done.”