In 2024, the Ig Nobel Prize for demography went to Saul Justin Newman, for showing that many of the people famous for living the longest lives came from places with poor birth and death records. It is a joke prize with a serious point. When claims of extreme old age in American records were checked, 65% of people said to be 110 or 111 turned out not to be that old. By 115 the figure was 98%. Past 120, every single claim failed. Poor paperwork, it turns out, is the most powerful anti-ageing treatment ever found.
That matters, because the most famous longevity advice in the world rests on a handful of places where people are said to live unusually long: the Blue Zones. Some of those places hold up when the records are checked. Some do not. And the lessons usually drawn from them, eat plants, drink a glass of red, live in a sunny village, are not quite what the evidence shows.
So here is what we can learn from the world's longest-lived people, starting with which of the Blue Zones are real.
Where the Blue Zones came from
The idea began in Sardinia. A 1999 survey found 13 centenarians for every 100,000 people on the island. A follow-up in 2004 found them concentrated in the mountain villages of the province of Nuoro, where locally born men seemed to live longer than men elsewhere on the island. The team marked the long-lived villages on a map with a blue pen. That is the whole origin of the name. Movements have been named after less.
From 2005, the list grew to take in Okinawa in Japan, the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, the Greek island of Ikaria, and later Loma Linda in California. In 2025, the four founding places, Sardinia, Okinawa, Ikaria and Nicoya, were checked again against civil birth and death records, church archives and family trees, to rule out the false ages that sink so many longevity claims. The long lives stood up. In Sardinia, the count that started it all was of people born between 1880 and 1900 who went on to reach 100, and the mountain villages produced them unusually often. Martinique has since been added as a fifth place.
Nicoya's advantage is a strange one. A 60-year-old man there had seven times a Japanese man's chance of reaching 100, and about two more years to live, while Nicoya's women had no edge at all. Men who moved away lost it, and most of it came from fewer deaths from heart and circulation disease. Their food was plain: rice, beans and animal protein.
Even there, the picture moves. Okinawa's life expectancy fell substantially in the 21st century. Okinawans born before the Second World War produced many centenarians, and those born after 1945 show no such longevity at all. In Nicoya the people born after 1930 do not live exceptionally long compared with the rest of Costa Rica. Long life in a place can fade within a generation.
The places that do not hold
The old version of this article included three more places: the Hunza Valley in Pakistan, Abkhazia in the Caucasus and Vilcabamba in Ecuador. All three are famous, and all three belong to a type of claim the age-checkers have a name for: the "Shangri-La" myth, a remote valley where people supposedly live to impossible ages.
The 2010 review that sorted false age claims into eleven types lists it beside the "Village Elder" myth, "Nationalist Pride" and plain administrative error. Its authors found that political, national and religious motives had led reporters, and even experts, to accept extreme age claims at face value. The records, when they exist, tell a different story.
The Caucasus had its own star. Shirali Muslimov, a shepherd from a mountain village in Azerbaijan near the Iranian border, claimed to be 168 when he died in 1973, and a Soviet film studio had made a documentary about him in 1966.
Even a country with good paperwork can lose track. In 2010, officials in Tokyo went looking for Sogen Kato, listed as the city's oldest man at 111, and found that he had died about thirty years earlier. The search that followed found that police did not know whether 234,354 people listed as over 100 were still alive, and one of Kato's relatives was convicted of fraud over the pension paid in his name. In a sense, the pension outlived him by thirty years.
Newman, the Ig Nobel winner, goes further. In a paper he first posted in 2019, he found that when American states brought in birth certificates, the number of people recorded as 110 or older fell by 69% to 82%. Of the people over 110 whose ages had been checked most thoroughly, only 18% had a birth certificate at all, and their birthdays fell suspiciously often on dates divisible by five. Sardinia, Okinawa and Ikaria, he found, had lower incomes, lower literacy, more crime and shorter lives than their national averages. His conclusion is that fraud and error produce a large share of the record ages.
The demographers behind the Blue Zones point back to their cross-checking, which is more than most record ages ever get. It is built to catch fraud, honest mistakes, poor memory and switched identities, above all between siblings who shared a name. Even so, they call Okinawa a matter of debate: its family registers were largely destroyed in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 and rebuilt afterwards by the American authorities.
So are the Blue Zones real? Partly. The idea it started with, a few villages where people born more than a century ago reached 100 unusually often, holds up better than the brand built on it. The lessons worth taking come from those places, and they too deserve a closer look.
What Okinawa ate
Okinawa is the poster island for the plant-based story, and the figures from around 1950 do show a diet low in meat: about 3 grams a day, against 11 for the rest of Japan. That is the honest part, and it is worth stating plainly.
The rest of the picture gets left out. Okinawans at the time ate fewer calories than other Japanese, 1,785 a day against 2,068. They ate 3 grams of sugar a day against 8. They ate less than half the rice, 154 grams against 328, and a fraction of the wheat, barley and other grain. When they did eat pork, nothing was wasted: pig's feet, ears and stomach were everyday food. Nose to tail, long before it had a name. This was the diet of the years after the war, on an island that had little.
Then it changed. From the 1960s, rice and bread replaced the sweet potato, fat rose from about 6% of calories to 27%, and Okinawa's men slid down Japan's life-expectancy table. In 2002 they fell from 4th of the 47 prefectures to 26th, a drop the island took as a shock. What changed was not only the vegetables. In came sugar, refined grain, and more food of every kind.
The explanations offered over the years for Okinawa's long lives run from genes and a mild climate to less salt and more animal protein. Nobody has settled which, if any, did it.
What Sardinia ate
The Sardinian villages tell a different food story. Until recently, the long-lived mountain area lived mostly by rearing livestock, and ate relatively more food from animals than the rest of the island. The modern diet reached the lowlands from the mid-1950s and the mountains later, held back by a shepherding economy that worked. The traditional diet there is still built on cereal foods and dairy.
The blood tests hold a surprise too. Among 168 people past 90 in the Sardinian Blue Zone, followed from 2018 to 2024, those with LDL cholesterol of 130 mg/dL or more lived about 3.8 more years on average, against 2.8 for those below it. It is a finding in people who had already reached 90, and it sits badly with the idea that a long life needs low cholesterol. The Body Raises Cholesterol When Something Needs Fixing. Here Is What That Something Is. has the wider pattern: in 68,094 people over 60, followed in 30 groups, higher LDL went with a longer life in the groups holding 92% of them, and made no difference in the rest.
The Adventists
Loma Linda was never measured like the others. By the account of the demographers who drew the first map, it went into the Blue Zones marketing after editors asked for an example in the United States, and its longevity cannot be measured with the same method.
It earned its place through one group, the Seventh-day Adventists. Your Genes Aren't Your Destiny, linked below, has the 34,192 Adventists in California who were followed for twelve years. Their church advocates a vegetarian diet and discourages alcohol and tobacco. At 30, Adventist men could expect to live 7.3 years longer than other white Californians, and women 4.4 years longer. Within the group, the best and worst combinations of diet, exercise, weight and smoking were up to ten years apart.
No tobacco and no alcohol would lengthen any life, vegetarian or not. And it is worth knowing who tells the Blue Zones story now. The company built around it, Blue Zones LLC, was formed in 2008 and bought in 2020 by Adventist Health, a health system tied to the same church that advocates the vegetarian diet.
What the real places share
One thing to keep in mind first. Counting the centenarians is demography. Explaining them is guesswork, because nobody has tested what made these people live long. A 2024 report in the journal Science argued that no evidence ties a community's lifestyle to its longevity, and noted the business the idea had built: books, diets, a multimillion-dollar company and a Netflix series. "Eat plants and drink red wine" is an interpretation laid over those lives.
Okinawa ate little meat and Sardinia's shepherds ate more from their animals than their neighbours did, so strip out the myths and the marketing, and what the long-lived places have in common is not a food group. It is a way of living, and each habit below stands on its own evidence.
Movement built into the day
In the long-lived villages, movement came with the work: walking, carrying, digging, climbing. Nobody had to schedule it. Sardinia's own figures are mixed on food and clear on this. Across the island's 377 municipalities, most diet measures from the early 1900s did not separate the long-lived area from the rest. What did were shepherding, the average steepness of the land and the daily distance walked to work.
That everyday movement counts for more than it looks. The Lazy Person's Guide to Effortless Health Boosts has the women followed for six years. In them, two hours a day of standing or walking around at home went with a 9% lower risk of obesity and a 12% lower risk of diabetes, while two extra hours of television went with a 23% higher risk of obesity. A plain shows how much of your day you spend on your feet, with no app and no charger.
Fitness counts for even more. Key Factors That Speed Up Aging (And How to Slow Them Down) has the treadmill test: among 122,007 adults followed for about eight years, the least fit were five times as likely to die as the fittest, a risk as large as smoking, diabetes or heart disease, or larger.
The Harsh Truth About Aging, linked below, has the strength that keeps those years good. In 139,691 adults in 17 countries, every 5 kilos (11 pounds) less in a hand squeeze went with a 16% higher risk of dying over four years, and grip predicted it better than blood pressure did. It also has the balance, and getting down to the floor and up again. Carrying your own shopping trains the grip for free, and a does the same on the sofa.
A reason to get up
Okinawans call it ikigai, a reason for being. It has been measured. Among 43,391 Japanese adults followed for seven years, those who said they had no ikigai were 1.5 times as likely to die over that time as those who had one.
A reason to get up can be grandchildren, a garden, a trade, a congregation, a dog. What it cannot be is nothing.
Eating less
The Japanese saying hara hachi bun me, followed in Okinawa, means eating until you are 80% full. Writers on Okinawa's centenarians see it as a form of calorie restriction, and the 1950 figures fit: Okinawans ate about 280 calories a day fewer than other Japanese. Stopping before you are full needs no particular diet to practise.
The idea has an old laboratory behind it. In the 1930s, at Cornell University, Clive McCay showed that cutting calories lengthened the lives of rats. In people, the evidence is thinner. Key Factors That Speed Up Aging, above, has the one long test: for two years, 220 healthy adults either cut their calories or ate as usual, and by one measure the cutters' pace of ageing slowed slightly, while by two others nothing changed.
Friends and family
In Okinawa, a moai, a close-knit group of friends, is counted among the reasons for the island's long lives. In the long-lived villages, the oldest get close support from their families and their community. Key Factors That Speed Up Aging, above, also has what that is worth: across 148 groups and 308,849 people, those with stronger relationships were 50% more likely to be alive at the next count.
Rest
The Greeks have measured the afternoon nap. Among 23,681 healthy Greek adults followed for about six years, napping regularly went with a 37% lower risk of dying of heart disease than not napping at all.
The Sleep-Immune Connection: What One Sleepless Night Does to Your Defences has what too little sleep costs: the 164 healthy adults whose sleep was tracked before they were given a cold virus on purpose: those sleeping under five hours a night were 4.5 times as likely to catch the cold as those sleeping more than seven.
The wine
The old version of this article recommended one or two glasses of wine a day, after the Sardinians and the Ikarians. The newest evidence does not back it. When 107 groups following 4,838,825 people were pooled, low or moderate daily drinking was not linked to a longer life, and the risk rose at higher amounts, sooner for women than for men.
How to Start Taking Care of Yourself Today: Why Your Body Can't Wait has what a month without it does: in 94 healthy people who drank about 32 units a week and stopped, insulin resistance fell by about a quarter and blood pressure by about 6%. Whatever kept the Sardinians going, the wine glass is the part the evidence does not support. It was always the part people most liked hearing.
Not smoking
The Adventist church asks its members not to smoke, and the numbers back it. From 1951, 34,439 British men were followed for fifty years. Those born between 1900 and 1930 who smoked cigarettes and kept going died about ten years younger than those who never smoked. Stopping paid at every age: at 60 it won back about three years, at 50 about six, at 40 about nine, and at 30 almost all of the loss.
Put the habits together and the number grows. Among 123,219 American adults followed for up to 34 years, women who reached 50 with five low-risk habits could expect about 14 more years of life than women with none, and men about 12 more. Three of the five were never smoking, a healthy weight, and at least half an hour a day of brisk activity. The other two were moderate drinking, which the newer evidence above does not back, and a high score on a diet index.
The life around the plate
The longest-lived people did not follow a programme. They moved because their days required it, had a reason to get up, ate less than they could have, ate little sugar, and lived among people who would notice if they did not come down for breakfast. The plant-based label stuck to them later, along with the wine glass and the sunshine, though Sardinia's shepherds lived off their animals.
None of it needs a village, or good paperwork. The habits with the hardest numbers behind them work wherever you live: staying off cigarettes, staying fit and keeping your grip. So do the people around you.
This week, spend an evening with the people you would want around you at 90.
Think your genes decide how long you live? Your Genes Aren't Your Destiny: How Much of Your Health Is Up to You — the Adventists' extra years, the Dutch Hunger Winter, and how much of your health is up to you.
Worried about getting old? The Harsh Truth About Aging: Decline or Longevity? — the grip, the chair test, and the strength that keeps the later years good.
Know someone who swears by the Blue Zones? Send them this, and the 168-year-old shepherd.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, or before a big change in exercise, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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