Why not simply use median life expectancy, which is more robust to fraud and outliers, instead of "number of centenarians"?
because that's generally not enough to separate lifestyle from genetics and environment.
Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
51–60 of 66 posts
Re: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you misunderstand. You think blue zones are "thoroughly debunked". And it might be even true that blue zones aren't real. But I am not seeing any evidence that the general public is aware of this. And thus we need more of the articles "asking" this question so that more people are aware of the issues on it. FYI, the article you linked basically tells the same story as the topical article. Are you too lazy to…
A) I can't read the article because it's paywalled. B) Regardless of what story it tells, the article is an opinion piece by a journalist and a cardiologist, not authorities on the topic, and has a misleading title: that "answering [the] question [of whether Blue Zones are real]" is harder than ever. It's not.
You didn't miss anything. There aren't any new facts in the article. It treats the original blue zone researchers very generously, waves its hands about drawing conclusions on whether the original blue zone research was due to pension fraud or not, and generally blathers on for dozens of paragraphs talking about various things tangentially related like that some blue zone areas no longer have many centenarians or various bullshit marketing claims using blue zone language by Buettner, etc, etc.
Re: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on how you think the limited resources to perform research should best be allocated, and whether scientists should become more like doctors or lawyers so far as centralization of credentialing and professional gatekeeping goes. Doctors and lawyers have boards that can actually revoke your ability to practice for falling outside accepted standards. Science deliberately doesn't. Is that good or bad?
My point is that the scientific establishment is already basically like those boards that can limit your ability to do research unless you have a license. The "license" is a PhD (from a reputable institution) and publications in a select list of high profile journals. I'm very curious why you'd think otherwise.
> The "license" is a PhD (from a reputable institution)
Maybe I'm biased as someone who has attained a PhD, but a PhD or master's is definitively not a license. It's almost necessary to have an advanced degree to be taken seriously, but that's not for reasons of normativity, but rather basic competence and a signal of investment. Your degree will not be revoked for the same reasons a doctor's or lawyer's license may be revoked (Francesca Gino lost her tenure, but not her degree). And IMO, your alma mater matters only as a proxy for your academic network; few in the academic world care if you went to MIT per se, but for the connections you made there.
I don't think there's an argument that the scientific establishment rejects many high-value contributions from uncredentialed/undercredentialed individuals.
> publications in a select list of high profile journals
Yeah, this is a serious issue. Although I don't know what it has to do with the question of whether the body of scientists proper should deliberate to establish consensus and distribute resources and prestige. If anything, Elsevier et al. have demonstrated that it can't be worse than letting the free market insert itself so insidiously.
Re: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
#54From the article: "clerical errors, natural disasters, and pension fraud were better explanations for the proportion of centenarians “discovered” in these discrete regions of the world." That was discovered in Japan around 2010.[1] The Tokyo municipality sent out people to visit everyone over 100 to find out what they were doing right. What they found was that about 80% of them were unaccounted for, but collecting be…
To be clear, your quote is not a claim the article makes. That sentence in the article is paraphrasing Saul Newman's claims. The article itself explicitly disavows the claim, treating Poulain and Buettner generously and giving them paragraphs upon paragraphs to respond (Newman got two paragraphs; Poulain and Buettner get twenty). The article's actual position, like the headline, is that "twenty-five years after the first blue zones were identified, it’s impossible to say whether they were ever real or not."
(I happen to agree with Newman and probably you -- it seems like there is a very clear answer to whether blue zones were ever real or not.)
Re: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
#55A 2024 Ig Nobel was awarded to work debunking Blue Zones. IMO the whole concept is one of those Occam’s razors that proves especially sharp. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-wor...
I can't tell if it's a feature or a flaw of academia that some topics can so be thoroughly proven/disproven, and yet so many researchers continue to devote their careers to it. Should more effort be given to enforcing existing knowledge and consensus, or is preserving intellectual freedom more important? Granted, I understand Blue Zone stuff is mostly due to marketing incentives...
It seems like Buettner in particular had a bunch of for-profit business ventures tied up in blue zone marketing bullshit, so that is a sort of non-academic motivation to keep the music going.
Re: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
#56Blue zones have been utterly, thoroughly debunked. There’s no reason to still ask this question in 2026 unless a new/unusual population or lifestyle is emerging.
Blue zones do exist for sure. That's where you can park your car for 2 hours and have to place a blue card underneath your windshield that tells the time you left it there.
Re: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell if you think academia is "enforcing existing knowledge and consensus" or "preserving intellectual freedom"... My personal take is that academia is doing very well on the former, and not much on the latter.
It depends on how you think the limited resources to perform research should best be allocated, and whether scientists should become more like doctors or lawyers so far as centralization of credentialing and professional gatekeeping goes. Doctors and lawyers have boards that can actually revoke your ability to practice for falling outside accepted standards. Science deliberately doesn't. Is that good or bad?
They should be allocated towards intellectual freedom biased towards randomness.
Existing knowledge is preserved implicitly and be the public, and well-trodden ideas are furthered by industry. Academia is the best place for experiments, which are necessary to avoid stagnation, because there’s only so much obvious (low-hanging) research which isn’t experimental.
Related: “Can random experimental choice lead to better theories?”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26339137261421577
Re: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
#58Blue zones have been utterly, thoroughly debunked. There’s no reason to still ask this question in 2026 unless a new/unusual population or lifestyle is emerging.
Tell me you didn't read TFA without telling me. And in fact, TFA is pretty sympathetic to your position, but not as absolutely certain as you are.
I didn’t read TFA because it’s paywalled. The question asked by the headline is fair, but the next sentence is too credulous and is actually false. There’s a reason this was published as “opinion”.
Re: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
#59For people like me first time hearing aout blue zones:
"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."
TLDR areas where people live longer
Re: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
#60From the article: "clerical errors, natural disasters, and pension fraud were better explanations for the proportion of centenarians “discovered” in these discrete regions of the world." That was discovered in Japan around 2010.[1] The Tokyo municipality sent out people to visit everyone over 100 to find out what they were doing right. What they found was that about 80% of them were unaccounted for, but collecting be…
Another suspected issue is dodging the draft during WW2 by pretending to be too old. In rural areas with shoddy record keeping you can get away with pretending to be your dead uncle.