Mini Mikkipedia - would you live longer in a blue zone?

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Creators & Guests

Host

Mikki Williden

What is Mikkipedia?

Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!

Transcribed using AI transcription, errors may occur: contact Mikki for clarification

00:08
Hey everyone, Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia. And today I wanna chat about the Blue Zones. And not to throw shade on the research that has been undertaken over the last 20 years, looking at geographical parts of the world and associating longer lived lives with healthy practices, but something has...

00:34
caught my attention this week which I thought would be super interesting to chat about. Firstly, of course, for those of you unfamiliar with the blue zones, which would be hard to do given the amount of attention this has received, for good reason, over the last 20 years, they are regions around the world where people live significantly longer and healthier lives than their global average. These are areas that have been identified.

00:59
by Dan Buttner and his team in collaboration with National Geographic. And Dan in his work identified five main blue zones, each with distinct lifestyle practices that appeared to contribute to the longevity of their populations. And I just want to go through some of the breakdown of these five regions and then also discuss information that I saw this week that does sort of...

01:27
does cast a question mark over the longevity aspect of this. So the first one is Okinawa in Japan, and these are the southern islands of Japan. And the key practices identified that contributed to the longevity included a diet rich in vegetables, soy-based products, tofu and miso, and sweet potatoes, an overall low calorie intake, and practice of

01:54
Harajachi-bu, which means eating until 80% full, a strong sense of purpose or ikigai, deep social connections, particularly in support groups, and regular physical activity, often through gardening and daily movement. All amazing things to implement as part of your everyday life. And what I will say with that low calorie intake, there is definitely preclinical research showing that when you restrict the calories,

02:22
of rodents and hamsters, they generally live 30% longer. And in humans, there has been calorie restriction research. Obviously, it's not easy to assess longevity in a human clinical trial. You'd have to clearly follow people through from infancy through to death, but there was the Minnesota starvation experiment, which was a landmark study.

02:47
looked at the effects of calorie restriction on the human body and the researchers including Ansel Keys, he was part of this, you might recognise his name as being part of the cholesterol research in the 50s and 60s. Anyway they put them on an extremely low calorie diet for a period of six months to see how it would impact on their physical and mental health. And what they found that they were the participants went slightly mad and were incredibly miserable and extremely skinny.

03:17
Calorie restriction has long been associated with increasing lifespan in at least animal models. I think I went on a tangent there. Let me get back to the blue zones. Sardinia in Italy, beautiful place, apparently I've not been, an island in the Mediterranean. And their key diet practices is a diet rich in whole grains, vegetables, legumes, a moderate amount of wine, strong family ties and support structures, shepherding and farming, promoting regular physical activity.

03:44
respect for the elderly and intergenerational socialization, limited meat consumption mostly from sheep and goats. And then you've got a kāria in Greece located in the island of the Aegean Sea. And again a Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, olive oil, herbs and legumes, a low intake of processed foods and sugars, regular consumption of herbal teas with anti-inflammatory properties.

04:09
Naps and a relaxed approach to time contributing to low stress levels. Oh, that would be nice. And a strong sense of community and social engagement. So certainly you're probably picking up some key similarities in these groups. Nakoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. A diet centered on maize, beans, and squash with fruits and portions, small portions of meat. Hard water with high calcium and magnesium content. Strong sense of purpose or plan de vida. Nice.

04:39
strong family bonds and close knit communities, and regular physical activity through manual labor and walking. And then you've also got Loma Linda in California, USA. This is in Southern California. The majority of the population in this area are seventh day Adventists, so they definitely promote a plant-based diet with a high consumption of nuts, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and processed foods. They have a weekly day of rest or Sabbath focusing on family, faith, and community.

05:09
and they have regular exercise and an emphasis on preventative healthcare. So across these five different regions, we've got the common characteristics of a plant-based diet, most of the daily calories from plants, particularly beans and whole grains and vegetables with meat consumed sparingly. We've got regular physical activity. So you've got movement as integrated into daily life through walking, farming, gardening or manual labor.

05:35
We've got strong social connections, strong family ties, social networks and community support. We've got low stress levels, practices such as meditation, prayer, naps and a relaxed approach to life definitely reduces stress. And a sense of purpose. Individuals in blue zones have a strong sense of purpose or meaning in life, which is linked to better mental and physical health. And it's thought that these combined practices contribute to lower rates of chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

06:04
and a higher likelihood of living beyond 90 or even 100 years of age. And I don't think anyone is arguing that these things likely for a healthy population contribute to that overall extension of health. Of course I have questions around how healthy it is to limit such a nutrient dense food such as meat, if I'm honest, but I think you know that. And in fact other people have also picked up small things of

06:32
part of these regions which sort of go against what we understand as health. Like I was reading an article the other day when I was looking at this and they were saying that the Okinawians in fact have quite a heavy intake of alcohol, yet this doesn't really explain why so many people might live to sort of 90, 100 and beyond. And I think this is the key critique actually and the thing that caught my attention this week. It isn't that these practices aren't conducive to a long and happy life.

07:01
Regularly physically active, strong social connections, low stress levels, amazing. A sense of purpose who doesn't want that in life. However, there is a scientist, Saul Justin Newman, and he is based in Australia. And he was started to get interested in this concept of the blue zones. And when he debunked a couple of papers in Nature and Science about extreme aging, this was back in 2010s.

07:30
In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly didn't stack up. He tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world, the other 20% are from countries that you can't meaningfully analyse, and of those, almost none had a birth certificate. In the US there were over 500 of these people, 7 of those people had a birth certificate, and even worse, only about 10% of them had a death certificate.

07:58
And he mentioned that, you know, the epitome of this is the blue zones, those zones that I was just talking about, which are regions where people supposedly reach the age of 100 at a remarkable rate. And for almost 20 years, as I said, they've been marketed to the public. And there are tons of paraphernalia around this. And there's obviously there's the Netflix documentary, which I watched a bit of quite interesting, just made me want to go and visit these areas, particularly Sardinia.

08:25
tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet and so on. And as I said Okinawa in Japan is one of those zones. He discovered a Japanese government review in 2010 which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. And the secret it appears to living to 110 was don't register your death. The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world dating back to 1975.

08:55
From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They've eaten the least vegetables and they've been extremely heavy drinkers. So that is so different from what we understand Okinawians to sort of live their lives, if you listen to the Blue Zones. And actually the same goes for all other Blue Zones that Professor Newman identified. Eurostat keeps track of life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian Blue Zone, and Ocaria in Greece.

09:24
When the agency first started keeping records in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest old age life expectancy in Europe out of the 128 regions, and Ocaria was 109th. So it certainly isn't up there with regards to life expectancy if you look at the records that Eurostat keep. And he also mentioned that it's amazing the cognitive dissonance kept going.

09:50
With the Greeks, by his estimates, at least 72% of the centenarians were dead, missing, or essentially, pension fraud cases. So isn't that interesting? What Professor Newman says is that there are a number of reasons for the faulty data. And in Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war.

10:16
And that's for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn't confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn't speak their language, works on a different calendar, and screws up their age. According to the Greek minister that hands out pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 living,

10:45
quote, in quotation marks, pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997. Regions where people most often reach 100 to 110 years old are the ones where there's most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105 year olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It's closely followed by downtown Manchester.

11:14
Liverpool and Hull. Yet these people have the lowest frequency of 90 year olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person. So most likely to be committing pension fraud. The oldest man in the world, John Tyneswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool. The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point. And one of the arguments against Professor Newman's findings is that, well,

11:44
People don't really lose count of their age. And he says that actually you'd be amazed looking at the UK Biobank data, which is one of the biggest databases currently that is used in research. And I've spoken to a few people now on the podcast that utilize this data. Even people in midlife routinely don't remember how old they are or how old they were when they had their children. And he says there are similar stats from the US. When I read that, I have to say I did laugh because

12:12
I literally spent a year thinking I was 43 when I was in fact 42. So I can see how that happens. The question of what does this mean for human longevity? And I don't think it means that all of the practices that are discovered in areas like the blue zones are now null and void. Because certainly as I said, low stress, a diet that has lower calories across the board and you are more active across a day and you've got really strong social connections, these are actually all really good things.

12:42
The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that actually we just don't know. The clear way out of this is to involve physicists to develop a measure of human age that doesn't depend on documents. We can then use that to build metrics that helps us measure human ages more quantitatively. Longevity data are used for projections of future lifespans and those are used to set everyone's pension rate. So you're talking about trillions of dollars of pension money.

13:11
If the data is junk, then so are these projections. It also means we're allocating the wrong amounts of money to plan hospitals to take care of old people in the future. So Professor Newman argues that our insurance premiums are based on this stuff. And also true human longevity is very likely tied to wealth. Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well. And Professor Newman has just put a pre-print out analyzing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality

13:40
and the places consistently reaching 100 at the highest rates according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara doesn't have a government, and Puerto Rico where birth certificates were cancelled completely as a legal document in 2010 because they were so full of pension fraud. So Professor Newman thinks that the data is just rotten from the inside out. So isn't that interesting? You know a lot of the time people look at the Blue Zone data as a

14:09
justification for certain diet practices, such as a low meat intake. Whilst, and to be honest again, I think this is where meat gets thrown under the bus a bit because the reason these people aren't living long is I don't think it's to do with their meat intake. If anything, it would be due to do with the physical activity and the social support and low stress levels. But we can almost, even that feels like a moot sort of topic because

14:37
We don't even know how old these people are. So that is what I meant when I went on social media this week and said, oh, this is an interesting debunk of the Blue Zones. It's not necessarily debunking their practices, but it is absolutely calling into question, how old are these people really? Like, are they really over 100, living to 110? Certainly not from Professor Newman's research. So I'll link the conversation, which is an article

15:07
the article that piqued my interest this week in the show notes and I'd be keen to hear your thoughts as well. So hit me up I'm on threads, Twitter and Instagram @mikkiwilliden. I'm on Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com and you'll notice that Mondays Matter is now registering for a Monday 30th of September start. There is no good time to

15:34
start a diet. If you are sort of sitting on the fence wondering if this is now the time to make changes to the way that you eat, the only better time to make changes was probably last week, right? There'll never be a good time in the future, so why not do it now? Get in good psychological shape about your food intake, about how you feel about yourself, and about your diet for the coming season. All right, team, you have the best week. See you later.