Blue Zones: Ten Regions on the List. One Has Never Been Studied.

The pitch is irresistible. Five or so places on earth where people routinely reach a hundred, and if you eat what they eat and live how they live, so might you.

In 2025 a team ran a systematic review of everything published about them. [1] They found ten regions that have been called Blue Zones. Here is how those ten actually stand up.

Start at the bottom

“No studies have been conducted in Loma Linda.” [1]

That is a direct quote. A region that has been cited as a Blue Zone for the better part of two decades has, on a systematic search of the scientific literature up to February 2025, nothing published examining it as one.

And one line above it: Rugao has fewer centenarians than you would otherwise expect. [1] It is on the list regardless.

Neither of those is a small clerical matter. They are two of the ten places the entire concept is built on.

Three of them, though, are real

This is where a lazier article would declare the whole thing a hoax, and we are not going to, because the review does not support that either.

Ogliastra in Sardinia, Okinawa, and Nicoya in Costa Rica show genuinely higher longevity than their national averages. [1] Ikaria and Cilento show high life expectancy. A Dutch municipality has more exceptionally long-lived residents than its neighbours. Those are real findings from real data.

So the honest summary is not “Blue Zones are fake”. It is that a label covering ten places has been applied on the strength of three.

The argument about whether anyone is as old as they say

There is a live scientific dispute here, and it is worth understanding rather than picking a side in.

The challenge goes like this: exceptional-age records tend to cluster where birth registration was poor and where there is an incentive to keep a dead relative’s pension arriving. The best-known version of that argument remains a preprint — it has not been through peer review — though it did win an Ig Nobel prize in 2024, which is an award for research that makes you laugh and then think.

We are not going to build a verdict on an unpublished manuscript. What we can do is read the published rebuttal, which is more interesting anyway.

The defenders concede the hard part

In 2025, two researchers — one of them associated with the original Sardinian work — published a defence of Blue Zones demography in The Gerontologist. [2] Their conclusion is unambiguous: the regions have been extensively validated by cross-checking multiple independent documentary sources, and the age data are “valid and reliable”.

Read the sentence they use to get there, though:

“As discovered a century and a half ago, most self-reported claims of exceptional longevity are false.” [2]

That is the defence talking. Both sides of this argument agree that when somebody says they are 110, the base rate says they are probably not. The disagreement is only about whether the checking done in these specific places was good enough to catch it.

Which is a much narrower question than the one the concept is usually sold on, and it is not settled.

The leap nobody is defending

Here is the part that gets least attention, and it matters most to you.

Suppose the ages are all correct. Suppose Ogliastra, Okinawa and Nicoya really do produce more centenarians. That still does not tell you why.

The review lists the factors associated with longevity in these regions: diet, physical activity, climate, genetic factors and geographical isolation. [1]

Read that list again. Three of the five are things you cannot adopt. You cannot move your genes. You cannot take up a Mediterranean climate. You certainly cannot arrange to have been born somewhere mountainous enough that nobody married in from outside for three hundred years.

The two you can copy — diet and activity — are listed alongside three you cannot, with no ranking between them. Turning that into a programme means quietly deleting the inconvenient three, and nothing in the literature justifies the deletion.

The verdict

Preliminary. Three of the ten regions are well characterised, one has never been studied, one has fewer centenarians than average, and whether the recorded ages are trustworthy is the subject of an active argument in the journals right now.

That is not a hoax and it is not a blueprint. It is an interesting observation about a handful of places, wrapped in a much larger claim that the evidence does not carry.

None of which makes beans, walking and seeing your friends a bad idea. It just means the reason to do them is not that a hundred-year-old in Sardinia does.

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