What you’re getting yourself into
Why people aren’t living to 100 in the fabled blue zones because of sweet potatoes.
Picture this: you’re a journalist armed with a blue marker, a romanticised notion of longevity, and an agenda to prove that eating like a medieval peasant is the secret to living past 100. You hop on a plane to some remote villages where people claim to be ancient, mark them on your map, and suddenly you’ve created one of the most influential dietary myths of the 21st century. Congratulations, you’ve just invented the Blue Zones.
For two decades, the Blue Zones have been held up as paragons of plant-based living, the holy grail for vegans desperately seeking validation that humans can thrive without animal products. Five regions scattered across the globe, Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Nicoya in Costa Rica, Ikaria in Greece, and Loma Linda in California, where people supposedly live longer than anywhere else on Earth by subsisting on vegetables, legumes, and the occasional morsel of fish.
There’s just one rather spectacular problem with this narrative. It’s built on a foundation of fraudulent data, creative omissions, and what can only be described as wishful thinking verging on delusion.
The Great Pension Swindle
Enter Saul Justin Newman, a researcher at University College London who decided to do something revolutionary: actually check whether these supercentenarians were, you know, alive. What he discovered would be hilarious if it weren’t so damning.
In 2010, the Japanese government discovered that 82% of its centenarians, some 230,000 people, were either missing, dead, or never existed in the first place. They were just paperwork, collecting pensions long after shuffling off this mortal coil. The most spectacular case was Sogen Kato, thought to be Japan’s oldest man until his mummified remains were discovered in 2010. Turns out he’d been dead since 1978, but his family had been happily collecting three decades of pension payments. As Newman dryly noted, these people were “only alive on pension day.”
Greece fared even better in the fraud stakes. In 2012, the government announced that 72% of Greek centenarians claiming pensions, around 9,000 people, were already dead. When you’re running the numbers on longevity and nearly three-quarters of your oldest citizens are corpses, you might want to reconsider your methodology.
Newman’s research also revealed that in 2010, Puerto Rico announced it would replace all existing birth certificates due to concerns about widespread fraud and identity theft. In 1997, thirty thousand Italian citizens were discovered to be claiming pensions whilst dead. In 2008, 42% of Costa Rican 99+ year olds were revealed to have mis-stated their age in the 2000 census.
Newman’s research, which earned him an Ig Nobel Prize for making people “laugh, then think,” revealed that supercentenarian status is predicted not by vegetable intake or social connections, but by three far less romantic factors: high poverty, lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds. In other words, the secret to living to 110 is having terrible record-keeping and strong motivation to commit pension fraud. Romantic, isn’t it?
The state-specific introduction of birth certificates in the United States was associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. Funny how extreme longevity evaporates the moment you require proof of age. The designated Blue Zones of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rates, and short life expectancy relative to their national averages. Eurostat records dating back to 1990 place Ikaria at 109th out of 128 regions in Europe in terms of old-age life expectancy, and Sardinia at 51st. These are not exactly the hallmarks of a longevity paradise.
Okinawa: Where Pork Is King
Let’s start with Okinawa, the crown jewel of plant-based propaganda. According to the Blue Zones mythology, Okinawans subsist almost entirely on sweet potatoes, with less than 1% of their diet coming from meat, fish, and dairy. This narrative is so detached from reality that it would be funny if thousands of people hadn’t restructured their diets based on it.
Here’s what the Blue Zones devotees conveniently ignore: in 1945, the bloodiest battle of the Pacific took place in Okinawa, killing a third of the population and destroying food supplies. Without much else to eat, many Okinawans relied on sweet potatoes for a few years after the war while they recovered from widespread destruction and starvation. The sweet potato diet wasn’t some ancient wisdom passed down through generations. It was what people ate when everything else had been bombed to rubble.
The traditional Okinawan diet, the one that today’s elderly actually ate for most of their lives, looks rather different. As the Okinawan prefectural website states, and I quote: “Okinawan food begins and ends with pork.” Not sweet potatoes. Pork.
Okinawans eat about 100 grams of meat per day, compared to 70 in Japan and just over 20 in China, and at least an equal amount of fish, for a total of about 200 grams per day. They cook their food in lard, not vegetable oil. They consume every part of the pig, including organs, ears, and feet. Okinawa, with only 1.1% of the total Japanese population, is responsible for over 90% of the total luncheon meat consumption in Japan. Yes, you read that correctly. These supposed plant-based paragons eat more SPAM than anyone else in Japan, roughly one can per person per week. Their favourite dish? SPAM and eggs. A double whammy for the vegan narrative.
Try finding vegetarian dishes in Okinawa today and you’ll discover what visitors already know: pork dominates every menu. The claim that these islanders survive on 1% fish despite living on a small island surrounded by ocean should have been the first red flag. Islands don’t produce plant-based centenarians. They produce people who eat what’s available: seafood and whatever animals they can raise.
The myth that Blue Zones are degrading because of Western diets is completely backwards. Okinawa’s current population is actually catching up to the rest of Japan in terms of health. The historical data goes back to 1975, and every single year that an over-75-year-old has been measured in longevity studies, they’ve had the worst body mass index in Japan. The “degradation” narrative is fiction designed to explain away inconvenient facts.
Sardinia: The Land Of Shepherds
Sardinia fares slightly better in the honesty department, but only slightly. The Blue Zones crowd loves to emphasise the whole-grain bread, garden vegetables, and beans, while treating meat as an occasional indulgence reserved for Sundays and special occasions.
This is, to put it mildly, creative accounting.
Sardinian shepherds, the very population at the heart of the Blue Zone, spend their lives tending sheep and pigs. What do you think they’re eating? Spoiler alert: it’s not primarily vegetables. The traditional Sardinian diet mainly consisted of cereals, legumes, potatoes, dairy products, and meat, primarily sheep and pork. In the mountains, meat consumption was higher than in the plains.
Sardinians consume daily amounts of pecorino cheese, a fermented sheep’s milk product high in omega-3 fatty acids, along with other cheeses like casu axedu and ricotta. They drink goat’s milk. They eat cured meats. The idea that these shepherds are subsisting on beans and bread while surrounded by animals they raise for a living requires a spectacular suspension of disbelief.
Sardinians eat a lot of cured meats in addition to aged cheeses, a pattern common across Italian diets. The list of “missing” foods from Blue Zones literature includes honey, mirto, bottarga, pork, shellfish, game meats, and pasta. These foods are just as central to the Sardinian diet as the vegetables and grains, but they don’t fit the plant-based narrative, so they’re conveniently left out of the conversation.
Here’s a thought: maybe the shepherds eating pecorino cheese and cured pork while walking five miles a day in the mountains are healthier than office workers eating seed oils and sitting in traffic. But that wouldn’t sell cookbooks about sweet potatoes, would it?
Ikaria: They Kinda Forgot About Lent
Ikaria, the Greek island where people supposedly “forget to die,” presents perhaps the most egregious methodological failure in Blue Zones research. Not through malice, but through a spectacular oversight: Greek Orthodox Christians fast from meat, dairy, eggs, and fish for approximately half the year.
Let’s do some basic maths. The Greek Orthodox fasting calendar includes Great Lent (48 days), Christmas Fast (40 days), Apostles’ Fast (up to 30 days), Dormition Fast (15 days), plus every Wednesday and Friday year-round. Add it up: roughly 180-200 days annually without animal products. During fasting periods, they eat primarily plants with occasional shellfish and fish.
Now imagine conducting dietary surveys on an island where 90% of residents believe in God and 81% participate in religious events. Depending on when you show up with your food frequency questionnaires, you could easily capture data during or immediately following a major fasting period, particularly the lengthy Great Lent dominating early spring.
The plant-based pattern you document isn’t how these people eat year-round. It’s how they eat when the Church calendar demands it. The rest of the year? They’re consuming the goat meat, fish, goat’s milk and cheese that actually feature in Greek cuisine.
Here’s the kicker: a 2021 study of Ikarians aged 90 and over found that 54.9% did NOT practice Greek Orthodox fasting. More than half weren’t following these dietary restrictions at all, suggesting longevity has nothing to do with avoiding animal products.
And the final nail? Eurostat data from 1990 ranked Ikaria 109th out of 128 European regions for old-age life expectancy. Not exactly a longevity paradise.
The Ikaria story represents Blue Zones research at its most misleading: conduct dietary surveys without controlling for religious fasting periods, ignore when the research was conducted, emphasise plant foods while minimising animal products, and present the result as evidence for plant-based diets. This isn’t science. It’s confirmation bias in academic clothing.
The Inconvenient Economics of Eating Less Bread
Let’s address the elephant in the room: even if the Blue Zones data weren’t fraudulent, and even if the dietary descriptions weren’t misleading, attributing longevity exclusively to diet requires ignoring literally everything else about these populations.
The genuine Blue Zones, before modernisation, shared several characteristics that have nothing to do with eating legumes:
Natural movement. Sardinian shepherds walk five miles a day or more, which provides cardiovascular benefits and positive effects on muscle and bone metabolism. Okinawans historically engaged in regular physical activity as part of daily life, not as scheduled gym sessions. These people weren’t doing CrossFit. They were just moving constantly because survival required it.
Strong social connections. Sardinia’s strong family values ensure every member is cared for. People living in strong, healthy families suffer lower rates of depression, suicide, and stress. Multi-generational households, tight-knit communities, and integration of elders into daily life provide the kind of social support that’s utterly absent in modern Western societies. You can’t replicate this by eating more vegetables.
Purpose and belonging. These populations have clearly defined roles throughout life. Elders aren’t shuffled off to care homes to rot in front of televisions. They’re integral parts of families and communities. That sense of purpose, of being needed and valued, might just matter more than whether you’re eating 6% protein or 16% protein.
Low stress. Sardinian men gather in the street each afternoon to laugh with and at each other. Laughter reduces stress, which can lower cardiovascular disease risk. Contrast this with the average Western worker commuting 90 minutes each way, barely seeing their children, and mainlining cortisol while doom-scrolling news about impending apocalypse.
Genetic isolation. The M26 marker in Sardinia is linked to exceptional longevity, and due to geographic isolation, residents’ genes have remained mostly undiluted. This is not a minor point. When populations don’t mix for centuries, genetic factors can play enormous roles in longevity patterns. You can’t eat your way into different genetics.
Sunlight and vitamin D. These populations live in sunny climates and spend time outdoors. Vitamin D status alone could explain substantial health differences compared to populations living at northern latitudes and spending 23 hours per day indoors.
Attributing longevity to sweet potatoes while ignoring genetics, sunlight, movement, social connection, and purpose is like attributing a marathon victory to the runner’s choice of socks. Technically they’re wearing socks, but that’s not why they won.
Why The Plant-Based Propaganda Persists
If the evidence is this weak, if the data is this fraudulent, why does the Blue Zones narrative persist? Because it serves an agenda, and that agenda has nothing to do with longevity.
The plant-based movement desperately needs success stories. They need populations that thrive without animal products to prove that veganism isn’t just viable but optimal. The Blue Zones provide that narrative, even if it requires ignoring the SPAM consumption, the pork dishes, the pecorino cheese, and the daily fish intake.
There’s also the inconvenient fact that promoting a carnivore or animal-based diet for longevity doesn’t generate nearly as much revenue. You can’t patent telling people to eat meat. There are no supplement companies making billions off “traditional Sardinian animal foods.” But plant-based products? That’s a multi-billion pound industry with vested interests in promoting the idea that vegetables are sufficient and animal foods are dangerous.
The Blue Zones books, cookbooks, and Netflix documentaries aren’t about rigorous science. They’re about selling a lifestyle fantasy to people who want to believe there’s a simple dietary solution to mortality. Sweet potatoes and beans are morally comfortable. They don’t require killing animals. They align with environmental concerns, whether justified or not. They make people feel virtuous. The truth, that these populations ate substantial animal products, maintained strong family structures, moved constantly, and probably just had better genetics and record-keeping fraud, is far less marketable.
The Real Lessons From Longevity Populations
If we’re going to learn anything from populations that genuinely live longer and healthier than average, we should at least be honest about what they’re actually doing.
First, they eat real food. Not processed garbage engineered in laboratories, not seed oils extracted through industrial solvents, not products with ingredient lists longer than biblical genealogies. They eat food that grows or moves, prepared simply, consumed in reasonable amounts. Whether that’s pork and fish in Okinawa or cheese and cured meats in Sardinia, it’s whole, traditional foods their ancestors would recognise.
Second, they move. Not in performative ways designed to generate Instagram content, but as a natural consequence of living. Walking, carrying, climbing, building, working. The difference between five miles of daily walking and sitting in an office chair for eight hours cannot be overstated.
Third, they maintain social connections and purpose throughout life. The psychological and physiological benefits of strong relationships, community integration, and feeling needed are profound. Isolation and lack of purpose are probably killing more people than dietary choices, but you can’t sell that in a cookbook.
Fourth, they live in environments with clean air, ample sunlight, and low stress. Not coincidentally, these are all factors that improve metabolic health, reduce inflammation, and support healthy ageing.
Fifth, and this matters enormously, they don’t overthink their diets. They’re not measuring macros, tracking ketone levels, worrying about insulin spikes, or agonising over whether grass-fed beef is superior to grain-fed. They’re just eating the food available in their environment, prepared traditionally, and getting on with life.
The obsessive focus on dietary composition, particularly the crusade to prove that plant-based eating is optimal, misses the forest for the trees. Or in this case, misses the lifestyle for the sweet potatoes.
The Fraud Continues
Blue Zones researchers have attempted to refute Newman’s findings, claiming they “meticulously validated” ages by checking historical records dating back to the 1800s. Newman’s response cuts to the heart of the problem: “If you start with a birth certificate that’s wrong, that gets copied to everything, and you get perfectly consistent, perfectly wrong records.”
The only way out of this mess, as Newman notes, is to physically measure people’s ages using biological markers like methylation clocks, not rely on documents that may have been fraudulent from the start. Until that happens, the Blue Zones remain what they’ve always been: a combination of pension fraud, poor record-keeping, and selective reporting designed to support predetermined conclusions about plant-based diets.
Despite Newman’s findings, Buettner and fellow researchers continue to claim the Blue Zones “have been fully validated by strict demographic criteria.” The cognitive dissonance is remarkable. When 82% of Japanese centenarians turn out to be dead or missing, and 72% of Greek centenarians are pension fraud cases, perhaps it’s time to admit the demographic validation wasn’t quite as strict as advertised.
What Actually Matters
If you genuinely want to learn from populations with better health outcomes, ignore the Blue Zones mythology. Look at what traditional populations actually ate before Western processed foods arrived. Spoiler: it included substantial amounts of animal products.
Focus on the fundamentals that actually matter: eliminate processed foods, eat whole foods your great-grandparents would recognise, move regularly, maintain strong social connections, find purpose, get sunlight, manage stress, and stop obsessing over whether you’re eating enough legumes.
The carnivore diet won’t magically grant you immortality. But at least it’s honest about what humans have actually thrived on throughout history: animal foods providing complete nutrition, prepared simply, consumed in amounts that satisfy rather than stuff.
The Blue Zones narrative persists because people want to believe in simple solutions. They want to believe that eating more plants and less meat is the key to longevity, because that aligns with their moral and environmental concerns. The reality, as usual, is more complex and less convenient.
Sometimes the most powerful lesson isn’t about what to eat. It’s about what to ignore. And right now, you should probably ignore anyone promoting longevity diets based on populations where most of the centenarians are either dead, fraudulent, or eating substantially more animal products than advertised.
The secret to living to 110 isn’t sweet potatoes. It’s moving to a place with terrible record-keeping, teaching your kids pension fraud, and having the good fortune to possess favourable genetics while maintaining strong family bonds and moving regularly throughout life. But that doesn’t make for compelling Netflix content, does it?
Perhaps we should stop searching for dietary shortcuts to immortality and accept that health is a complex interplay of genetics, environment, movement, social connection, purpose, and yes, nutrition. Real food, including generous amounts of animal products, combined with a lifestyle that humans actually evolved for. That’s the lesson from longevity populations.
Everything else is just marketing.
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