For about 10-15 years, “experts” have proclaimed areas of the world where people live to very old ages – and claim this is due to such things as the local diet. There’s an entire business devoted to the Blue Zone idea: Home – Live Better, Longer – Blue Zones
Except it appears it is mostly due to a combinatioin of fraud and bad record keeping.
- Researcher Discovers Massive Fraud Behind Blue Zones
- Are ‘blue zones’ a myth? Extreme aging is built on pension fraud and century-old lies, researcher claims | Fortune Europe
- Living to 100 is about bad record-keeping, not Blue Zones: researcher
What the Blue Zones have in common is a combination of pension fraud (collecting pensions for people who were actually deceased), and very poor record keeping in tracking populations.
When officials went to visit Kato on his birthday in 2010, they discovered mummified remains and learned he had likely died in 1978.
Kato was one of the 82% of Japanese centenarians, about 230,000 people, who were dead or missing.
Newman’s findings aren’t exclusive to Japan, either. Research from 2008 in Costa Rica found that, according to previous census data, 42% of the nation’s centenarians were dishonest about their age.
He also found 2012 data showing that 72% of Greece’s over-100-year-old population was either dead or not real.
From AI:
In recent years, Japan has faced significant discrepancies in its census data related to centenarians. Notably, in 2010, a government audit uncovered over 230,000 individuals listed as centenarians who were unaccounted for, many having died years or even decades earlier without their deaths being officially reported.
As of September 2025, Japan’s centenarian population is reported at a record 99,763, with ongoing concerns about accurate record-keeping persisting from previous years. While the number of centenarians has been increasing, irregularities in data show a history of families not reporting deaths, sometimes to continue receiving pension benefits.
The audit sparked a national conversation on the reliability of public records and the socio-cultural factors contributing to this phenomenon, ultimately revealing a gap in familial and community connectivity regarding elderly care.
Yet an award-winning journalist has made a business out of promoting the Blue Zones myth: Home – Live Better, Longer – Blue Zones
Based on fraud and bad recordkeeping, this has turned into nutrition recommendations:
- Food Guidelines – Blue Zones
- Blue Zones Diet: Lessons from the Longest-Lived Populations | e Medical Hub
Blue Zonestm have been widely promoted by plant-based activist and “journalist” Dan Buettner, who has trade marked the name, and who has a BA in Spanish and literature.
Their claims of plant-based diets leading to long lives are promoted without evidence: Blue zone – Wikipedia
In fact, plant-based eating leads to pension fraud and poor record keeping! Hah hah.
