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The secret to living past 100? There isn’t one. The vaunted “blue zones” of the world, in which residents routinely live past 100, are in fact merely rife with pension fraud and clerical errors, according to Nobel Prize-winning research.
Utterly obsessed with this UCL researcher who won an Ig Nobel for showing that “Blue Zones” where people supposedly live well past 100 at unusual rates are actually just full of clerical errors and people committing pension fraud https://t.co/wJZRvF3RVU
— Claire Zagorski, MSc, LP (@clairezagorski) September 19, 2024
Sardinian nonnas aren’t living to 110 as a result of the Mediterranean diet — it’s because their ne’er-do-well grandchildren are scamming the public benefits system for years after their deaths. Ditto, apparently, for Okinawa and Ikaria. Bewilderingly, the general populations of these supposed blue zones experience higher crime rates, lower literacy, and shorter life expectancy than their national average, a telltale sign that something is amiss with the blue-zone myth. Fewer than a fifth of “validated supercentenarians” even have a birth certificate in existing research. We’re going to need a new diet fad.
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