Scientist reacts to Blue Zones | Netflix | Live to 100

you guys often ask me in the comments about  the blue zones, what do I think about them, are they reliable or not. but we've never actually  made a video about the blue zones. well, Netflix beat us to it, they have a show about the blue  zones.

darn it, Netflix. the blue zones are five regions scattered all over the world where they  have found a high concentration of centenarians, people who made it to 100 years old. the show  follows Dan Buettner, who first wrote about the blue zones on National Geographic and then later  published a best-selling book on the same topic.

so Dan serves as kind of our tour guide through  the five zones: Okinawa, an island in the south of Japan; Sardinia, off the coast of Italy; Loma  Linda, in California; Ikaria, one of the Greek Islands; and Nicoya, in Costa Rica. the show is  visually beautiful, it's beautifully shot, the images are absolutely gorgeous and I read the blue  zones book many years ago but actually seeing what these places look like is a completely different  experience. but the real stars of the show, without a doubt, are the centenarians.

we meet  a Japanese great grandmother who still sings and dances at the ripe young age of 101 and a Costa  Rican man who at the age of 100 looks half his age. these people aren't bedridden, they're still  living normal lives and doing their daily chores, and they have great personalities and sense of  humor. what's the best tea to drink on a daily basis?

wine. great tea. these are some of the most  naturally charming and endearing people you're ever going to see on film.

Dan Buettner also walks  us through his scientific process. in each region he looks for characteristics of their behavior  or their culture that he thinks may underly their extreme l longevity and then he triangulates over  the five regions to look for commonalities. in the end he distills Four Keys: move naturally.

in  all blue zones people stay physically active, often just through their manual work and moving  around over the course of the day. in Okinawa this means sitting on the floor and getting up dozens  of times a day, in Sardinia this means walking up and down steep hills. regardless of the specific  activity, they all find ways to move constantly.

Outlook. whether it's through their religion or  their culture, people in blue zones have a sense of purpose that keeps them going. they also find  time to relax and recharge, it's not 24/7 stress.

eat wisely. historically, the diet of the blue  zones was centered around natural products, rich in fiber containing foods with little or no Ultra  processed products. they also tend to not stuff themselves.

the okinawans even have a saying, Hara  Hachi bu, which comes from confucian teaching and translates to belly eight parts, basically eat  till you're 80% full and then stop. and finally, the fourth key is connect. the inhabitants of the  blue zones have rich social lives, they stay close to their family and friends, the elderly are not  sent off to retirement homes, they stay with the families, there's a strong sense of community and  partnership.

I think this process of looking for clues and then triangulating to find commonalities  is genius, and learning about these cultures is fascinating. I highly recommend watching the  show, it's very well done and very entertaining and informative. my main reservation is that  sometimes the conclusions are taken a little too far.

the observations from the blue zones are  really interesting clues, hints, but they don't amount to a demonstration. the blue zones are  a type of scientific evidence called ecological data. basically looking at different populations  in different parts of the world and trying to relate their characteristics or their behavior to  their state of health.

this type of evidence can provide really interesting clues that can then  be tested in tighter experiments like randomized trials and cohort studies, but we have to be  careful with ecological data because there are so many moving parts. comparing the villagers of  Okinawa to a typical New Yorker involves thousands of differences. cultural, environmental, genetic,  you name it.

so it's really difficult to isolate causes from this type of comparison. the four  Keys that Buettner proposes make a lot of sense, and there's a lot of scientific evidence behind  the health value of these things, but if we're playing devil's advocate, aren't there thousands  of other villages across the world where these same habits and characteristics are also found?  where people move around all day and work manually because they're farmers or shepherds or artisans,  where they eat simple diets that are not highly processed, with plants that they grew themselves  in their yard or they bought at the local market, and where they also have close family and social  ties and religion and all these bonds.

aren't these common characteristics of small, mainly  rural communities a generation or two ago, in the generation of our grandparents? and yet  most of these places are not blue zones, they're not teeming with centenarians. why not?

also,  aren't there a thousand other characteristics of the blue zones that didn't make it on that list  of four Keys? is there something special about the climate of these regions? Dan Buettner does  mention climate very briefly in the first episode so I imagine this is something he has considered,  but all blue zones are in areas with pretty good weather.

I looked this up, four of the five blue  zones fall almost exactly on the same latitude, 30 to 40° north of the equator. only the Costa  Rican Blue zone is closer to the Equator. why isn't there a blue zone in Siberia or in the  Sahara?

maybe this is just a complete coincidence, or maybe there is something to the right  weather that is important, not too hot, not too cold. all blue zones are in coastal  regions. three of the five are islands.

so is there something special about the water or the  air? what about their genetics? aren't genes really important for extreme longevity, for  centenarian-ness?

scientists have identified genetic markers that explain, in some cases, up  to 85% of extreme longevity, and we've looked at genes that help people live longer on a previous  video. I'm not saying that genetics are the only factor that explains everything, I'm sure that  if you take these centenarians and you move them to a western City and you feed them junk, you're  probably going to make them unhealthier. in fact, the show mentions that some of these regions are  not blue zones anymore, they lost their status, the younger Generations no longer live like  their grandparents and, Okinawa for example, there's a lot of junk food around and obesity  has become very common and their longevity has decreased a lot, so I'm not saying genetics is  the only factor but isn't it a factor, a relevant Factor?

aren't there lots of people who live very  healthy lives and never make it to 100 or even close? there's a lot of romanticism around the  blue zones and around ecological data in general and this idea of going back to nature and going  back to the way things were in bygone times, and there is some truth to that, I get that, but we  have to take a second and not jump to conclusions, sometimes correlations point to causation,  sometimes they don't. and we find out by testing.

another question I have is whether looking at the  number of centenarians is the best metric in the first place. I know we all have this fascination  with the number 100, reaching 100 years old, it's very gripping. but centenarians are rare even  in blue zones.

in Sardinia for example, they've estimated that for every 10,000 people born, 50  reach the age of 100. so that's half of 1%. still really impressive compared to a lot of other areas  of the world but clearly centenarians are a small percentage of the population, they're outliers  even in these hotspots.

isn't average life expectancy of a population a more relevant metric  of health in general? currently the country with the highest life expectancy is Monaco. it used  to be Hong Kong but it was overtaken by a couple countries.

in Monaco life expectancy is 84 years  for men, 89 for women. this is almost identical to Okinawa in its peak, in the 1980s, which  was 84 for men and 90 for women. so Monaco is looking pretty darn good.

hey, maybe the secret to  longevity is casinos and Yachts. I'm half joking but the point is ecological data, although it's  fascinating, can sometimes be a little arbitrary. we tend to handpick characteristics that already  make sense to us.

centenarians in blue zones didn't have cell phones, didn't have laptops,  maybe that's the key to their longevity. I don't doubt for one second that moving around, eating  a healthy diet, maintaining healthy body weight, these things are crucial for health, and if the  show motivates people to live healthier lives, hey, absolute genius. but when we get super  specific, it's this exact thing they do in the blue zones and this exact food and this exact  activity that's the key to their longevity, that's really tricky.

for example, in one episode  Dan picks wine as one of the keys for longevity in Ikaria. but the scientific evidence if anything  points against this idea. could this be an example of seeing what we want to see?

another question  that has also been raised is the reliability of the birth records in the blue zones. are the ages  accurate? so that's another question mark out there.

now, the last episode of the show really  surprised me, in a good way. after taking us through the five blue zones, Dan Buettner sets out  to create a new Blue Zone. he gets together with the officials of a small town in Minnesota and  they improve their environment, they get them to walk more, eat cleaner, and they estimate their  health indices actually improve.

and it seems they're doing this in a number of cities, it's  called the Blue zones project. this is amazing and it deserves enormous respect. I'm sure Dan  Buettner could have just rested on his laurels, written books and given speeches, comfortable  life.

the fact that he actually rolled up his sleeves and went to work to improve the health of  a community, that's an incredible achievement. to me the main value of the show is it puts the  spotlight on the fundamentals of health. diet, physical activity, healthy relationships.

things  that people often consider boring advice but the show manages to make them look exciting and that's  an incredible contribution. centenarians aren't walking around stressed out over the latest  supplement pill or the hack from the podcast or the ice bath or some diet fad. they just  have healthy habits sustained for a lifetime.

maybe their secret is that there is no secret.  bottom line, ecological data like the blue zones, like the French paradox and so many other  examples, is fascinating to learn about, to gather ideas, but we should be careful not to  let ourselves be taken by this wave of romanticism and overstate it. also, and this is less about the  show and more of a general point, if we're going to look at ecological data we have to look at all  of it.

normally what we see is the vegan gurus wax poetic about the blue zones, even though  the blue zones are overwhelmingly not vegan, but that's another story, and then the keto gurus  only want to talk about the Masai and the Inuits, even though there's plenty of misunderstandings  there as well. but it becomes kind of this Rorschach test where we see what want to see. we  look at the data and we conclude things that we already believed.

so we got to look at all of it  and we got to remember their limitations. they're really interesting ideas to be tested. not more,  not less.

here's a look at the French paradox, another example of ecological data. and here's a  video about the science behind the Mediterranean diet. could that be a key to longevity? 

find out.