Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know. Our episode on blue zones, which is not well, we'll explain it. It's not immediately apparent what we're talking about. You have to kind of know the ins and outs. And I think that's kind of what we're going to do here, is explain the ins and outs of blue zones. No why I said all that?
Yeah, Well, I mean I'll just go until people right off the bat that a blue zone is supposedly an area on planet Earth where people they have an extraordinary amount or higher than average amount rather of people that live to be one hundred years old.
Well, there you go. Now you know the ins and outs of blue zones everybody.
But the story behind blue zones is what's super interesting. I think it started well, we're going to jump back to the seventies at one point, but it started out basically in two thousand and four when there was a paper that came out they said, hey, there's a large number of centenarians, people that live to be one hundred at least in a small area in the mountains of Sardinia, Italy, and the author of the papers shaded it blue on
a map called it a blue zone. And then in two thousand and five it really picked up steam because there was a national geographic reporter named Dan Butner who wrote an article called the Secrets of Long Life in which he talked about Sardinia and his own finding of Okinawa, Japan and Loma Linda, California, his two more blue zones, and was like, Hey, what's going on here? We got to figure this out because people there are living longer.
Yeah, And the whole premise was, Hey, don't you want to live longer? Let's find out what these people's secrets are, because clearly, if there's a bunch of them clustered together, that means they're all doing something similarly. So let's get to the bottom of this everybody.
Yeah.
And the way that he put it, what if I said, you could add up to ten years of your life. A long healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits.
Yeah. I mean I think everyone agrees with that generally.
Sure, But one of the reasons why it does seem like there's a set of habits that you can engage in, from the Mediterranean lifestyle or the Mediterranean diet to getting out there and walking every day. A large part of that is based on how popular the concept of blue
Zones became. And you can thank Dan Buttener I believe his last name was Butner, like he just blew the whole thing up and is I don't want to say single handedly, because there are definitely people working behind the scenes, but he's the one who made it, who introduced it to popular.
Culture, Yeah, for sure. And sort of off the jump here, I want to talk one second about a side article I read in Times recently, because one of the things that you're going to hear talk about or us talk about him talking about, is one of the things you can do to live longer, supposedly is tight social networks. I just read a New York Times article last week about superagers, and it's not necessarily people that live to
be one hundred. That's what blue Zones is talking about, but it's just people that live into their eighties and nineties without getting dementia. And it was a pretty robust study. They had a large cohort over like twenty five years, and they said some of them drink booze every day. Some of them there have been smokers. Some of them eat a lot of red meat. They said. The one single thing that they found in common with all of
them was social relationships. Active social relationships with people outside of your house and going out and seeing people. They said they tend to be extroverts, so people that go out and socialize with other people was the one commonality between all of them.
That sucks. Oh no, I'm in big trouble man. We got to get you out, buddy, So I'm gonna have to update my wardrobe.
You're like eating fish and olive oil and walking every day.
Doing everything else.
I just don't want to talk to anyone, but yeah, and momo.
I'd put my hand up by my face when I walk past somebody when I'm out walking every day.
I thought it was really interesting because you know, most of us in our gen X category are dealing with aging parents, and I feel like everyone I know is going through it in some capacity. So I'm just reading a lot about that stuff lately.
Oh that's nice of you. Yeah, prepping yourself.
Prepping myself, so I don't do this to Ruby.
Nice, you know nice. So yeah, tight social network site is a big one as far as the blue zones are concerned, and I guess that's the only one that really matters. But they have other stuff too, like you need to have a sense of purpose. Anecdotally, I know that makes sense because a lot of people I don't know if a lot's the right term, but there are definitely people who die very shortly after retiring. Yeah, and in the United States, your job in a lot of
cases is your identity and your purpose in life. People are like family forget that accounting is my purpose in life, and then once they retire, they don't have any numbers to crunch and they keel over dead. So that I mean, anecdotally, it definitely makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, for sure. But this nat Geo article that Butner wrote went viral. Buttner was basically like, Hey, this is it for me. He did a Ted talk and has developed quite a robust cottage industry around blue zones. He's
written in a lot of books. He's written blue Zone cookbooks, There's been a blue Zone Netflix series, there are blue Zone branded like he copyrighted the term blue zone or trademarked it rather, and there are skincare products and iced teas, and there's hot sauces, and you can do a Blue Zone retreat or pay monthly for a Blue Zone app. There's a lot of stuff that he's selling.
Yeah, for sure. He basically blew it up into a lifestyle brand.
Yeah, which is one reason some people have come along and criticized it and said, wait a minute, is this like real science and real research or is this just creating a brand and making money. I mean, not with maybe nefarious intent or anything, but like, let's look at the science. And a big person that you're going to hear come up a lot in this is a guy named Saul Justin Newman, and in twenty nineteen he put out a statement basically that said, hey, I think this is all just bad data.
Yeah. He wrote a paper on it essentially.
That yeah, like bad record keeping on ages.
Yeah. And this is not new. The idea of superagers or centenarians, especially once clustered together, has been long controversial. Anytime somebody's come along and been like, hey, we found a bunch of people that are living to their hundreds. Let's look at what they're doing. So the rest of us can do that too. But back in nineteen seventy three,
there was a guy named Alexander Leif. He was a physician, and he got kind of caught up in this whole thing, just trying to figure it out, and he wrote an article for National Geographic, just like Dan Butner did in two thousand and four, but this is in nineteen seventy three, and he went to different parts of the world and where there were anecdotally, I guess, a bunch of centenarians living and he investigated it and he found, yes, there are some groups of people around the world who have
some sort of secret to aging late in life because there's a bunch of hundred plus year olds who live in these usually isolated areas.
Yeah, but he himself, in credit to Alexander leaf, he was like, you know what this all like? Even this was after the article was published. He didn't just like sit back and collect his million dollars and say, hell, I guess that's that. He was like, wait a minute, this like some of this stuff is nagging at me
and doesn't seem to make much sense. So he kind of went back on his own research even and started looking through these records basically, and he in one case, he saw a death certificate of a man who was allegedly one hundred and sixty eight years old, and he was like, that's pushing it, I feel.
Like for sure.
And in another area he met a villager who claimed to be one hundred and twenty two. He went back a year later and the guy said he was one hundred and thirty four, So he was like, all right.
Five years later, in nineteen seventy eight, he partnered with a couple of other scientists to sort of get down to the bottom of it all and dug through records in these places and found a lot of like discrepancies where people were off by decades on their actual age, and they reckon that, like, I think they're doing this
because it brings them a lot of prestige. Instead of being like eighty something years old, they say they're one hundred and five, and all of a sudden, they're like the village elder, you.
Know, right exactly, but a fraudulent village elder. So essentially what happened was an outsider, a Westerner got tripped up into what is probably some a custom in the area. It's like that people just kind of inflate their ages
and the like. People like Alexander Leaf are obsessed with finding out exactly how that happens and not stopping to be like, I don't know if this is actually real, but yeah, hats off to Alexander Leaf for going back on his own findings and admitting, like, now, this is probably not right because they concluded without a doubt that
the Ecuadorians in this village of bil Cabamba were fraudulent. Yeah, and he's like, I'm sure that also applies to the other places too, So everybody just forget the article I wrote.
Yeah, I mean that's a again, hats off, because that's to put your own name out there as like, hey, I got it wrong, Like I don't know if I would have done it.
You don't think So we do that all the time.
Oh well that's a good point.
Yeah, we correct ourselves.
So we're going to introduce you to a couple of more people that factor in pretty heavily here. In nineteen ninety nine, there was an Italian researcher named Giovanni Pisses never heard that last name. He presented a paper at a demography conference, and then there was a why Is that funny? Is it? Demography conferences?
Yeah?
Party central?
Yeah. I can imagine somebody going what segment of the population here is ready to party?
Yeah? Or I wonder if they just stand around at break and look out on the street and they're like, how many people you think are over there on that sidewink?
People are smoking Marlboro lights.
So in that audience though, where Giovanni Pess was presenting a paper, there was a guy named another demographer, obviously named Michael pournin French guy, and he had recalled this fiasco in the early seventies, and he was like, wait a minute, he's talking about Sardinia, Italy that you know, originally the area where Butner wrote the article. Turns out Butner wrote the article about this research on Sardinia that Giovanni Pest had done.
Yes, So if it's very easy to just assume that Dan Butner came along and either piggybacked on Pess and Poulaine's research or kind of invited himself into their little party, he was actually already looking into this, Like I think as far back as ninety nine he had set up a project to investigate how Okinawan's who are widely reputed for living into their hundreds, and we should say healthy, not like decrepit old balls of yarn, like healthy people
who still move around and do stuff on a daily basis. How they were doing that so long before Pez and Poulain put their stuff together, I guess about the same time. But independently, Buttner was doing his own thing too, So he didn't just come along and steal their their idea or their research.
Yeah, for sure. And as you'll see, they worked together for quite a while after this too. But so Pooland remembered the thing from the seventies and he was like, all right, I'm gonna go to Sardinia myself and sort of dig into this. So he did that, started started cross checking birth records and marriage records and anything he could get from archives, you know, in the town or from the church or whatever. And they are the ones they put x's when they clustered, they shaded it blue.
And they're the ones Polan and Pass in two thousand that coined the term blue zone, even though I guess Butner trademarked it. So I don't know. I'm not sure what happened there.
I couldn't find anything about Polan or Pezz's reaction to him trademarking that.
I wonder if it was he did.
But so, yeah, it's like all the exes. Whenever they confirmed somebody, they started to cluster so much that it just became a blue region. And so so now Dan Buttner had a name for this idea, this concept that he'd been working on for years, and he yeah, he took it and ran with it and turned it into
that lifestyle brand. Pez and Poulaine Essentially we're like, Okay, that's fine, We're going to stay academic here and try to keep studying this, and Bututner would kind of come in and out of their research over the next couple decades.
Yeah. And the key thing as far as the original three places in Buttner's article, like you mentioned, he had already studied Okinawa, he picked up on what Pulin and Pez were doing with sardinia. But Loma Linda, California is in there, and everyone was like, what the heck is
Loma Linda got going on? And just last year Buttner told The New York Times that Lobolina was apparently included because the editor at nat GEO said, we got to get an American blue zone in there, like this needs to be I know, it needs to be like applicable to our readers here. So a lot of critics, of course, are going to come out and say, like, that's that just kind of that's not science.
No, you don't like editors don't dictate scientific methods or results, right, So yeah, that's a big criticism. But and I think also like I haven't seen anything that says Poulaine or Pez are irritated by or just like Buttener or anything
like that. But just looking at the whole thing thing from the outside, Butner just keeps attracting just you know, contradiction or naysayer after naysayer, and Plan and Pesz are like, dude, we're doing like real science over here, Like stop giving our work a bad name because you're out there selling Low Melinda because your editor told you to put it into the original article.
Or selling hot sauce.
Yeah, selling hot sauce is another great one. But so in I guess his defense, Buttner said, well, actually, Low Melenda, statistically speaking, people there tend to live anywhere between I think four to ten years more than the average California resident. And there's actually a really good reason for that. There's a huge cluster of Seventh Day Adventists there, and you'll remember from our Kellogg Live episode on the Kellogg Brothers, the Seventh Day Adventists kind of inspired them than their
health food movement. They don't tend to smoke or drink or eat meat, and so he was like, that's great, We're going to include them in there. So it's not like he just threw a dart like the Bay City Rollers and picked whatever city that it landed on, like there was a reason why. And it turned out to be a pretty good business move because five years ago, in twenty twenty, Adventist Health, which is a essentially the hospital arm of the Seventh Day Adventists, they bought the
Blue Zone trademarks and all of the brand. They now own it the Adventists.
Very interesting, all right, I'm going to ponder that. Let's take a break and we'll come back and talk more about Blue Zones.
So Chuck, like I said, Butener and Pess and Puline all started working together in the early two thousands, and Buttener was funded by National Geographic. He was a fellow for them, I think even before he wrote the article for National Geographic but they started funding expeditions to look for more blue zones, and in the mid two thousands the aughts, I guess they identified two more, one in Costa Rica on the Nikoya Peninsula and another one in Akaria, Greece,
which is between Greece and Turkey. It's the island between Greece and Turkey. It looks absolutely amazingly beautiful. But they added them too. There they because they went and studied the centenarians and said, yep, this qualifies as a blue zone.
I was just laughing because I was wonder if the NAT Geo editor was like, I kind of want to retire near Sedona. See if you can find me some olds there.
Is right, I heard there's lay lines there.
I'm trying to sell the wife. More recently than that, they've added more blue zones. Besides the area of Costa Rica and Akaria, Greece, Singapore was added in twenty twenty three. That's in the book Blue Zones Secrets for a Living Longer Colon.
Nothing to add here.
Martinique in twenty twenty three that was added as well. This was not Butner. Apparently Poohlin is the one that put that Caribbean Island, which is a department of France. He put that one on the list because there were twice as many centenarians per capita in mainland France. And so they're saying like they're basically finding these things that happen and saying like, hey, that's a blue zone. We're gonna call it that because we made up that name.
Yeah, but according to Poohland's very strict definition, there has to be a higher than normal or usual percentage of centenarians people who are over age one hundred, yeah, and that they typically are healthy actor yeah, yeah, they're still living life, right, That is the true definition of a blue zone. I get the impression. Butner is including with low Melinda got a little fast and loose with the definition, and that that's probably a point of contention.
Well, they came up with, each of them independently came up of their own list basically of things to do to live longer. Bututener has his. They're called the Power Nine, which is trademarked, and Pounland calls his the Seven Principles. I didn't see if that was trademarked. I don't here, Yeah, I don't think so either. Here they are one is moved naturally, and that is basically like you're not going to the gym every day and quote unquote working out.
You're just you're moving through the world. You might be herding goats in this village every day, or working in the garden all day long, or just walking back and forth to the village to do your daily trading. They found that if you just move naturally through the world as you age, instead of just sitting on the couch, then you're going to live longer.
Yeah, if you have the same daily routine as Balki Bartakamus, you are probably going to live into your hundreds.
Good one.
Also, eating meat in very small proportions or not at all, seems to be correlated with living a long life among blues owners. Yeah, usually essentially plant based diets, some fish, depending on where you live.
Yeah.
And then Okinawan's are very famous for something called Harahachi boo, which is the eighty percent rule where you eat until you feel about eighty percent full and then you stop, which is extremely clever because you get fuller and fuller after you start to feel full, so that that rounds up to the full hundred percent of fullness. Almost every time you taught me that, and it really works. So it's really difficult to stop eating when you're eighty percent full,
when you're eating processed Western food, it's nearly impossible. But if you can pull it off, you're like, wow, this actually works.
You should probably slow down to a bit that helps. That's what they say, because all of a sudden, if you're like me, you're like, oh, oh god, I'm in one hundred and five percent.
Right, let's try to stop. But also if you slow down and really like you can sense the food that you're eating more, you can enjoy it more mindful too. So I mean, say, for sure.
Since a purpose we talked about, it's called different things in different parts of the world, be coustor Weekns call it pura vida mm hmm. It's basically like, you know, do things that give you joy and like that you want to get out of bed and do.
Like accounting, right, sure, if that's your thing, But yeah, I mean it could be like a hobby, It can be anything like just having a reason that you're alive.
Is that's your purpose? I think that's you got to have that, man, And I just hate to think that anybody doesn't feel like they have a purpose in life, especially like I get it, you go through like chunks of life, like say your early twenties where you're like, oh my god, everybody else is more successful than me, and my life is off the rails already and I'm
only twenty years old. Everybody goes through that, so I can see like going through phases where you are lacking purpose or maybe direction is another way to put it. But like later in life, to just feel like you've never had a purpose in life. I can't bear to think that people feel like that that anybody out there does.
Yeah, for sure, stress reduction is another reducing stress. I don't know why that's funny, but you know, taking trips with your family, hanging out with your friends is kind of what I was talking about earlier with the social interaction, right, and also get a lot of sleep.
Yeah, that's very important too. There was there's one that Buttener lists that that Poulane doesn't. It's a religious faith. Apparently they interviewed two hundred and sixty three centenarians together, and all except five of them belonged to some sort of church or religion or faith based community.
Yeah.
Surprisingly, most of them were flying spaghetti Monster followers, So you might want to look into that for longevity too.
Family first is another tenant. You know, live close to your family, care for your old get together with your family one. So you know, we're both kind of screwed. Sure, what else, strong social circles That sort of ties into the other things we were talking about. But yeah, you got to have those strong social ties. What about taking shots, like taking a shot at your friend or taking a shot of whiskey.
Taking a shot of booze, doing shots.
Well, I mean, you know, they they used to say that a couple of drinks a day, a couple of glasses of wine, like in Sardinia, Italy is you know the kind of thing they do. They have wine with food even during the daytime. They've now kind of gone back and said no amount of the World Health Organization at least saying no amount of alcohol is good for your health. So that was that was a disappointing finding.
Yeah, that was another one that Pooh that Pooh Lane leaves off of his seven principles.
He's French.
Yeah, that's really saying something because they love the wine. I know they like the wine. Yeah, So you mentioned Saul Justin Newman, who is the leading critic, I guess of all of this. He says like, yeah, Buttener has turned this into a lifestyle brand and that smacks of all sorts of you know, questionable stuff as far as science goes. He goes even further than that. He says the entire thing is based on a faulty premise and
that there are no blue zones. There are no clusters of centenarians who live in areas and live a longer life because of these lifestyle decisions and choices and things that they do. It just doesn't exist. That essentially the people who study this have been misled by their own data and that's what is producing what seems like these blue zones.
Yeah, and just in case you're wondering, he's a senior research fellow at the Center for Longitudinal Studies at the University of College of London, and he kind of starts
out by saying, like, hey, we noticed one thing. State issued birth certificates are really important, and eighty two percent of the super centenarians, and those are people over one hundred were born before they started doing this widely basically, so if we really had the real birth certificates of these people, that number of people living beyond one hundred drops way way down, Like essentially everyone's lying about their age.
Yeah, or miss mistaken about their age, but yeah, a lot of people apparently lie about their age also, Chuck. One of the other things that he pointed out is that if you study areas, especially in developed countries like Italy, England, and France. I think he specifically looked at in areas with the biggest clusters of super centenarians, right, so, yeah,
I guess that's one hundred and one on. Yeah, So those areas also tend to be more poverty stricken, the people have people living there make lower incomes, they have lower literacy rates, higher crime rates, very tellingly fewer ninety year olds, which is a big statistical anomaly because it
suggests that people are just jumping into their hundreds. Who wants to be like, I'm ninety two when you could be like I'm one hundred and two, right, Yeah, And that they also have very paradoxically lower than average life expectancies. So if you put all that together, like you're like, how is anybody living into their hundreds in these areas, let alone hold clusters of people living into their hundreds don't make sense. I think Saul Newman's quote feels hinky.
Right, I think so. What he concluded was that in play, in these places that might have high poverty, you're more likely to find what's called pension fraud. So it's family members saying, no, you know, Grandpa Chuck is still alive in the back room, keep those pension checks rolling in, and that's the thing. In twenty ten, there were more than two hundred and thirty thousand Japanese centenarians who were discovered to be either made up, dead or missing.
Yeah. I think Greece also started investigating their centenarians and ended up finding two hundred thousand people who no longer were alive. So that's definitely part of it. Another statistical anomaly that he points out that is very suggestive of this whole thing being wrong is that if you look at the birthdays for super centenarians, their birthdays aren't statistically random. They seem to be clustered around the first of the month.
There's a much higher, I think of one hundred and fifty percent higher chance that a centenarian's birthday is on the first of the month than on the last of the month, which makes zero sense statistically speaking.
It's like when I fill out any like tell us your age thing, I just go January.
First, exactly, So do I we have the same birthday, same fake birthday.
That's right. Here's another one is that And this is sort of part of the basis of his whole thing is just that, like, these records are often wrong. They're very, very common in the United States, and this was in nineteen sixty. Sixty Six percent of non white females had multiple official ages in the year nineteen sixty and their ages vary depending on what, like what record you were looking at, whether it was like the DMV or a
marriage certificate or birth certificate. And thirty percent of these variations were off by more than a decade.
Yeah, And he also drilled down a little more and he said some of these lifestyle claims in diet claims, they're not supported by data. In fact, the Okinawan cohort are they were basically said to have this amazing diet where that's probably a big part of what was helping them live longer. He said, no, if you've asked the government of Japan, people in Okinawa eat the least amount of vegetables of Japanese people as a whole, and they have the highest body mass index. So explain that, Poulane.
All right, maybe we should take our second break. See Pooline response to your call out. Okay, yeah, he might give us a ring and we'll be back right after this to finish up on blue zones. All right, so we're back. When we last left you, Newman had sort of launched a I don't know about an attack, but put out a paper that countered a lot of these
claims about blue zones being a thing. It's a big splash in the media, and so Blues owners got together and they said, all right, we're going to write a letter back to you defending our work like we will not this will not stand.
Yeah, and we should say Newman doesn't seem to think that Poolene is some hack or liar.
Yeah, for sure, Poline.
Is a well respected demographer instead. I think what Newman is saying is there are errors in the records that Poulaine is using, right, and once it's in there, when another record gets made from the original record, it gets it just spreads like a virus essentially, And so he's basically saying Polaine is using these this faulty, these faulty records without realizing it, and so that an error introduced into your data would be totally undetectable in that So
he's not attacking Pouline specifically, yeah, saying like this the data itself is wrong from the get go.
Yeah, which kind of even negates some of the rebuttal, because some of the points of the rebuttal were like, Hey, we know that there are errors in fraud, but we go through a pretty rigorous verification process and we think it's statistically sound. Like in Sardinia, you know Italy, that
was one of the first Blue zones named. They said, you know, we have civil databases dating back to eighteen sixty six, we have church archives, We've got these handwritten records, and we have done full genealogies of entire villages and cross check this stuff. So again, you know, Poulin is trying to do the right thing. But Newman would probably go back and say, yeah, but those original records from eighteen sixty six weren't right.
Yeah, But then Pooline would counter, yes, I'm not just using one record. I crossed verify, so he Yeah, interviews the centenarians first and their families. That's where he gets the original age. And then he goes back and tries to find any support that he can for that, and he actually came up with a rating system of how like how quality of verification is. I think there's a
starring system. There's also like a A plus plus plus or something system where like the highest quality of verification is the centenarian saying their age, and you've got all these other documents that say the exact same thing, and that there, you know, a church record is not necessarily going to be based on you know, a birth certificate or an army registration or something like that. So that's
pretty independent. And then he takes it even further and says, you want to do the same thing for the family members, for their parents, for their siblings, and make sure that along the way somebody with a similar name didn't get mixed up, and that that's how their age got older and older and older. He's doing like legit methodology, So it is kind of tough to just kind of dismiss that particular thing, the techniques he has for verifying ages.
Yeah, for sure. Another rebuttal was that hey, Newman a lot of the fraud and errors that you're citing weren't even in blue zones. You're just saying that that happened, you know. I mean, if it's happening elsewhere, it's probably happening in blue zones as well. Would be my counter to that, but you know that was what they came back with.
Well. Also in his paper, he does investigate actual blue zones like the Nakoya Peninsula and Costa Rica. Apparently, Costa Rica found out in two thousand and eight that forty two percent of its population age ninety nine or older misstated their age in the two thousand census, and that when they went back and did the math to actually adjust it to reality, the blue zone in Nikoya shrunk by ninety percent. So he did demonstrate that, yes, these some of these blue zones are just absolutely wrong.
Yeah, he got a little personal, it feels like, at the end because they said, and also, you're not a demographer, and your paper wasn't peer reviewed or it wasn't published in a peer review journal that is.
And everyone says, your breath stings.
Right, and your user are a nitwit.
Right. Although he was working at the Center for Longitudinal Studies by definition, he was a professional studier of studies and going back and recreating studies to find out how valid they were. So he might not have been a demographer, but he was definitely qualified to evaluate the quality of a study for sure.
Yeah. Absolutely. Dave helped us with this, and he found a New York Times article from twenty twenty four and this kind of, I think for me, kind of makes a lot of sense. It was from It was a quote from doctor nir Barzilai is I guess how you pronounce it. Sure, he's a director of the Institute for Aging Research at the album of Einstein College of Medicine. And he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, eat all these good foods, stay physical, supportive, friends and family. I think
we can all agree that you'll live longer. But his quote is, are the concepts of blue zones consistent with what we know about aging? Absolutely, But the blue zones themselves and the theories behind them have not necessarily been validated scientifically. It's not a study, it's an observation. It's an observation which is consistent with what we think we know about aging. And that's kind of where I landed.
Was like, just say that, say Hey, we've noticed this really interesting thing, and these are the commonalities for people that live longer in these areas, rather than trying to say, like, this is a blue zone and this is the data and the science behind it. You know.
Yeah, there have been plenty of studies on blue zones and blue zone inhabitants. There's a this kind of meta analysis that was published in twenty twenty two the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine by Magdaleni at All. I still don't know what at all means, but you know what it generally means by context.
Right, and others I think, sure, yeah, sure.
But it examined essentially each of those lifestyle you know, power nine or seven principles and the studies that support those. And there have been like really granular studies. They referenced some that studied elderly Akarians remember Akaria, Greece was one of the blue zones, studied their grip strength, studied their flow mediated dilation, which is a marker of the health of your endothelial cells, which make up the lining of
your blood vessels. Like, people have really studied this, and a lot of those studies have come back and been like, yes, these people have better than average grip strength. Their flow mediated dilation is off the charts. You've never seen anything like it. Everybody says it's just amazing, So there has there have been studies that support it. It's just like I think people people brush it off because it is
very easy to brush off. I kind of landed where you did where if you take it as a whole, Yeah, it does seem to be great, you know, great indicators, great ideas of how to live. But the science is being conducted. It's just not there where somebody's like, yes, definitively these are right, and these aren't right too.
Yeah, for sure. As far as Butner and Pulan, they both agree that they think that blue zones are disappearing like quickly and like there won't be any at a certain point, which is I thought people were living longer, so I was kind of curious about that. But they're finding fewer centenarians in Okinawa and other places, and they they say it's the widespread adoption of Western diet. Newman came back. I feel like every time they like, he's
got a Google alert set for these guys. Yeah. Newman came back and said, and I tend to agree with him here, He's like, that does it make any sense to me? He's like, are all these eighty year olds suddenly giving up a lifetime of healthy eating habits and going to McDonald's. Right, just doesn't make sense. So he goes back again to the record keeping and saying it was it was never that to begin.
With, right, He Yeah, it doesn't. It just doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't track. So if they do exist, though, one thing that Bautener and Pulane definitely agree on is uh and actually Newman too, is that they're they're not going to find anymore and the ones that do exist are going to shrink out to basically nothing. It's just different explanations of why that is. But you can kiss blue zones goodbye, basically.
Yeah. Well you found some interesting stuff on genetics too, because that's kind of the one thing we haven't talked about is diet, exercise, being around your family and all that stuff is great, but genetics like probably have to play a part, right.
Well, yeah, they found you would think so for sure, And they have found some stuff that says like, yes, this, the genes definitely do appear in certain populations more than others, like the Sardinians have a gene that makes them bitter super tasters I think, and it's related to a lower fat intake, like you avoid fats, so that's sensing.
I think it's associated with like living longer that specific gene.
Right, So that makes a lot of sense. Okay, that would definitely help you live longer. But then there's other contradictory evidence that is kind of confounding.
Yeah, I think people one hundred and ten years are older. Wow. In Okinawa they had a slightly increased likelihood of possessing a gene variant that makes them more like likely to develop Alzheimer's compared to I think it was in Greece, that part of Greece that had the gene that supposedly protected against Alzheimer's, and they found the opposite to be true in Okinawa.
Right, and yet they're both Blue Zone super centenarian.
Yeah, therea is.
Yeah. So yeah, but surely it does have to play some sort of role. And I think in that original paper, Pas and pooh Land speculated that inbreeding in that area of Sardinia was responsible for creating these essentially protective traits.
M There you have it.
Either way, the Sardinians were like, please, what are you doing?
Yeah, it's out of our business. Let me drink my lunch wine and peace.
Well, supposedly, there are plenty of areas in the world to contact Buttener and pooh Land and are like, hey, make sure you put us down as a blue zone because it attracts a lot of like healthy lifestyle tourists.
Yeah, for sure. And again, I mean, I don't know why this bugs me a little bit more than usual. I think it's great that they put out like tips for living longer, but there's something about like when it's marketed and branded that kind of I don't know.
I get you for sure, you know what I mean. Yep, I'm with you, man. Although if you live the blue Zone lifestyle and your love and life to talk to you, Yeah, trademark evan to health. Since Chuck laughed a second ago, that's a traditional trigger for listener man, that's right.
This is about circular economy and us complaining about appliances not lasting long. Hey, guys have something to say about this. One thing that people should do is maintenance on the products that they buy.
Yeah, that's true.
The fact that Chuck hates washers and dryers is because a lot of times products break down due to a lack of maintaining and caring for these products. I'm a home improvement contractor and I can't tell you how many times I've moved appliances to see the total lack of care that these products go through. It's not just washers and dryers, but most things in your home that you buy. People fail to one read the instructions and two read how to care for the products. Yeah, I just thought
that's the way. That's a good point, though, a lot of things need to require you to clean maintain them so they do last longer. Take for example, the clothes washer. It has three different Our clothes washer has three different small filters that need to be cleaned out once a month. What cheez, And if you don't, eventually it'll break down the washer. My point being, if you take just a little time and save and read those manuals, you'll help them last longer. And you want to have to throw
away stuff that breaks and wears down. I love the episode, and I do one hundred percent agree that products are made to be thrown out in replace. I just wanted to add that as up to us as consumers to do our best to keep the products that we buy running the best that we can. That's my two bits. That is from Justin and Justin, you are so right, and I shamefully never ever maintain much of anything like that.
That's funny that Justin wrote that in because just yesterday I was cleaning the evaporator condenser quotes, I can't remember some coils in my fridge, okay, and look at you. Well, my fridge is not working very well. So I was really hoping that this was the problem. Bob Vila said it was probably going to be the problem. But in that same article that on Bob Vila's website, he says that you should do that. You should clean and dust your refrigerator's coils every three months.
Those are in the back of the fridge, right.
Yeah, or they're in the front bottom, but they make brushes. I got brushes for it and everything that make the whole thing easy. But I'm like I have this is the first time I've ever done anything like this, and I've had plenty of fridges, so it makes me wonder how much longer other fridges could have lasted.
You know, I'm sure that's true, but oh boy, I don't want to see what's under and behind my fridge at this point. It's scary.
Well, I'm going to go look for the filters in my washing machine that I never knew existed, because I kind of I get jazzed by that kind of thing. But at the same time, like me, after a while, you're like, I'm tired of doing this.
I changed my air filters and things. HVAC.
You mean. I looked at a house once and these two dudes owned it and I was like asking where the air handler was and the guy didn't know, and I was like, you know where you put the air filter. He's like, I don't think our system uses air filters. And I was like, dude, And we drove past the house the next day and there was an HVAC truck in the driveway, so I guess turned them onto the existence of their air filters.
That's great. Yeah, I actually do mind myself because it's not too hard. But yeah, yeah, fir sure, that's as far as I go, and I should go further, for sure.
Are you cleaning out your drain lines?
That's another big one, uh drain line for what.
For your HVAC the little the little white PVC line that's like running from your air handler where you put the air filter. Huh, there's a there's so this is. This drains the condensation from your air handler. And you should use about an eighth of a cup of just regularly simple green mix in with a gallon of water, get yourself a funnel, pour it in there, let it come out the bottom. You do that once a month during the hot months, and it will keep your drainline from getting clogged up with gunk.
Yeah. I'm shamefully lazy about anything like that. I'm so bad at maintenance.
I'll come over and show you. It'll be fine. We'll make an afternoon of maintaining stuff around your house. You buy you with subs.
Though, Yeah, I was about to say, I'll bring the subs, you bring the simple green, and we'll party.
All right, man, that sounds like a great idea. Well, thanks for this, Justin, you really just kicked off a new tradition for me and Chuck monthly, I would say. And if you want to be like Justin and kick off a new monthly tradition for me and Chuck, you can send us an email to send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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