Lifestyle
The secret of ‘Blue Zones’ where people reach 100? Fake data, says academic
For a quarter-century, researchers and the general public have sought to understand why people in so-called “Blue Zones” live to 100 at far greater rates than anywhere else.
Saul Newman, a researcher at the University College London (UCL), believes he has the answer: actually, they don’t.
Despite being popularised in news articles, cookbooks and even a recent Netflix documentary series, the Blue Zones are really just a by-product of bad data, argues Newman, who has spent years debunking research about extremely elderly populations.
Rather than lifestyle factors such as diet or social connections, he says, the apparent longevity of people in five regions – Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California – can be explained by pension fraud, clerical errors, and a lack of reliable birth and death records.
Dan Buettner, the American author and explorer credited with coining the term Blue Zone, did not respond to a request for comment.
For his research into the claims around Blue Zones, Newman, a senior fellow at UCL’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies, analysed reams of demographic data, including United Nations mortality statistics for 236 jurisdictions gathered between 1970 and 2021.
The figures, he found, were simply not believable.
Some of the places reported to have the most centenarians included Kenya, Malawi, and the self-governing territory of Western Sahara, jurisdictions with overall life expectancies of just 64, 65, and 71, respectively.
Similar patterns cropped up in Western countries, with the London borough of Tower Hamlets, one of the most deprived areas in the UK, reported to have more people aged over 105 than anywhere else in the country.
“I tracked down 80 percent of the people in the world who are aged over 110 and found where they had been born, where they died, and analysed the population level patterns,” Newman told Al Jazeera.
“It was absolutely striking because the more old age poverty means you get more 110-year-olds.”
Newman believes that clerical errors – whether intentional or inadvertent – have been compounded over the decades, severely undermining the reliability of statistics related to old age.
Some governments have acknowledged serious flaws in their record-keeping related to births and deaths.
In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82 percent of its citizens reported to be over 100 had already died.
In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72 percent of its centenarians claiming pensions – some 9,000 people – were already dead.
Puerto Rico’s government said in 2010 that it would replace all existing birth certificates due to concerns about widespread fraud and identity theft.
More prosaic reasons can explain the apparent longevity of residents of jurisdictions such as Monaco, according to Newman, where low inheritance taxes are a draw for older Europeans, skewing the demographic data.
Still, the idea of Blue Zones has been hard to shift, even in the face of reliable data.
Japan’s Okinawa prefecture has often been lauded in the media for its diet and cultural practices.
Okinawans, however, have some of the worst health indicators in Japan, according to the Japanese government’s annual National Health and Nutrition Survey, which has been carried out since 1946.
While the traditional Okinawan diet is widely seen as healthy, a 2020 study found that the island prefecture today has a higher prevalence of obesity and higher rates of mortality among those aged 40–65 than mainland Japan.
Newman believes that the apparent longevity of Okinawans is the result of many deaths going unregistered.
“It’s almost like we are so determined that there is a secret to longevity that we’ll listen to anything – a secret to longevity that isn’t going to the gym, that isn’t giving up drinking,” Newman said.
“We want there to be some magic blueberries, and we want it so much that we can live in this sort of realm where cognitive dissonance is possible.”
Newman said that his research has not necessarily won him friends in academia, though he has been gratified with the support he has received from colleagues at UCL and Oxford, where he is a fellow at the Institute for Population Ageing.
He said that much of his work has received little notice from fellow academics and that a study he recently submitted for publication was subjected to nine peer reviews, instead of the usual two or three.
Newman did receive some notable recognition – and a legion of fans online – earlier this month, though, when he was awarded the first-ever Ig Nobel Prize in Demography for his work.
The Ig Nobel Prize was created in 1991 as a satirical award for unusual research “achievements that make people laugh, then think”.
The prizes are handed out by genuine Nobel Laureates at an annual ceremony in Boston.
“I’m very happy that it’s getting more attention, because I think, I think deep down, everyone also knows this smoothie is not going to save them,” Newman said.
“I think it’s the safety blanket that you cling onto, and so to have that overturned in a way that’s hopefully funny, I think that gets a lot of attention and people enjoy it.”
Despite drawing attention to the problem of pension fraud, Newman said he doesn’t fault people resorting to such measures.
“To be clear, I like that people are doing this because they’re being left behind by their governments in these places. They are not being given a sufficient pension. They’re not being given a sufficient retirement net,” he said.
“The fact that they are just saying, ‘Well, I’ll just keep collecting Barry’s pension from down the road.’ I think this is an indicator of the difficult pressures these people are under.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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