From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey.
It's Wednesday, December eighteenth. A and Z allegedly slapped dead customers with account fees, an error that's landed the bank in the corporate regulators sites. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission is gearing up for legal action. A record number of businesses have plunged into insolvency since the last election. Now construction industry bosses a warning it could put the
government's home building ambitions in jeopardy. Those stories alive right now at the Australian dot com dot It's a pretty captivating idea. Blue zones, pockets of the planet where residents possess a unique ability to live to one hundred. It's a Netflix show and a series of diet books movement, all about how we eat, live and move. But now an Australian expert is casting doubt and the scientific community is paying attention.
It probably sounds too good to be true, but it's true.
Our next time, Dan Bucher says he's found the recipe for how to reach it happy and healthy one hundred years. If we can find the optimal lifestyle of longevity.
We can come up with a de facto formula for longevity.
Places around the world where people seem to defy the limits of age, and this.
Is what they eat.
If he's been anywhere near Netflix lately, you'll have noticed the very alluring idea of places on planet Earth where people leave to one hundred. What if we could reverse engineer longevity.
I've spent the last twenty years trying to do just that.
But what if it was all a bit of a beat up. Stephen lann is the Australian Social Affairs editor.
So the blue zone idea was created in about two thousand and four. It was a journalist called Dan Buetner, and he went and explored areas of the world where there was a high proportion of people living to one hundred and he wanted to get behind what the commonalities were in those areas.
And these secrets could help every one of us to get every good year we.
Can get out of this body of ours.
That is the promise of blue zones.
There's Okinawa in Japan, There's part of Costa Rica, one of the Greek islands in the Aegean, Sardinia, among others, and he looked for commonalities in those areas to see what their secret was for a long life, and it came up with a sort of a series of common factors, which were things like constant incidental exercise, So if you were living a lifestyle where you were always in the garden or tending fields, et cetera, that was important, plant
based diet, limited amount of alcohol but not no alcohol. And importantly, continuing social connection so you are close to both family and also a broader social connection.
So no taking the lift up to my second floor office.
Then no, I don't think you can sit around on your backside for ten hours a day and then go to the gym half an hour and think that's going to be the secret to getting to one hundred.
So sounds pretty good, sounds like fairly straightforward things that we could all be doing.
So why are we then not all living to one hundred.
Well, genetics does come into it, and people don't do the things that he's suggesting, And the ideas behind blue zones are certainly relevant, and you see them in all the health information all of the time. It basically boils down to moderate intensity exercise of a certain duration most days a decent diet, limiting your alcohol, and maintaining connections. They're pretty common themes that run through a lot of
the health information that we have at the moment. The Blue Zone story by Dan spawned the Netflix series, a range of diet books and exercise books. So it's been a fair bit of mileage on the blue zone theory in the last twenty years.
And is it real?
Well, I've spoken to an Australian academic who is in Oxford. His name is Soul Newman, and he's looked carefully at this, including going back to all of the areas where these centenarians were from and just exploring the data behind it, and he came up with some pretty interesting findings, basically finding that the majority of people who claim to have lived to one hundred in these places are either missing or dead, and there's a range of reasons why the
data is flawed. So he's kind of debunking the foundation of blue zones. He doesn't say that the message behind blue zones are wrong, but the foundation of where blue zones are is based on pretty dodgy data, according to Soul Newman.
So taking probably the most famous one, Okinawa, the island in Japan.
You spend a lot of time in Japan.
There is a very healthy diet, and we do see a lot of old people from Japan. So is it not true that people in Okinawa are generally living to one hundred Well.
My interest was piqued in this story because I've been to Okinawa and my memory of it. The Okinawan diet was that it was spam from the US military forces in the forties was one of the foundations of their diet. So I was trying to work out how that was a big thing. Yes, they used a lot of pickled vegetables as well, but none of that kind of translated through.
Okinawa is actually one hundred and sixty one small islands, and in the northern part of the main island.
This is ground zero for world longevity.
But what soul Newman found when he looked at this was that he went to the records to discover and hopefully talked to some of these centenarians and discovered that around seventy percent of them weren't actually alive, and that because of the Second World War, many buildings were blown up, including all of the records, so there were no birth certificates to find and so there weren't actually the centenarians
proportion in Okinawa that was originally believed. And he then sort of having done that, then went to the other places, including this area in Greece and in Sardinia as well, where he said about seventy percent of the people who claimed to have made it to one hundred hadn't actually done so, and much of it was to do with welfare frauds, so families were basically keeping their dead relative alive so that they continued to claim welfare checks for
years and years after they had passed on. So in uncovering this, he was this year awarded the Ignobel Prize, which is a science prize awarded to work that has debunked other conventional science. So I think he might have a case to answer. I do think though that there is something to be said for the messaging behind blue zones, but the data that sort of originally led to its creation, he's fairly comprehensively debunked. I would say.
Lunny spoke to doctor Saul Newman via zoom.
So I have discovered that first of all, most centenarians in the blue zones, most one hundred year olds in the blue zones were missing or dead when the study was conducted. The findings are therefore based on bad data. On top of that, all of the lifestyle claims don't stack up when measured by independent data. So health from the blue zones was claimed to be good, and it was in fact poored before, during, and after they were established to an extraordinary degree.
Coming up, how the world's oldest people could be just not really that old. If you've spent much time in a nursing home, you might be wondering do I even want to live to one hundred? And when we see the most ancient human beings, they often don't look like they're enjoying it that much.
A birthday cake for the woman thought to be the longest living human being in the world.
Well, get this, a Japanese woman takes the cake as the world's oldest person of notification from the Guinness Book of World Records that the world's oldest man has died.
At the age of one hundred and twelve.
But what if they actually weren't that old anyway?
Soul Newman also looked at the number of people who had claimed to be the world's oldest person and even that he said there was a range of dodgy representations of people as being the old world's oldest person. There's been a number of people, but I think at two or three ago was someone from Venezuela who was a complete charlatan who started to claim a particular age as part of some sort of inheritance dispute and just stuck
to it. And because the president of Venezuela was getting a bad time about the international standing of Venezuela at the time, he latched onto this guy's claim that he was the world's oldest man and ran with it, and so did the world's media. With no one checking any data looking for a birth certificate, the fact that there was this claim was enough for people to continue to cite this Venezuelan as the world's oldest man.
We were both born in the twentieth century money, So I guess one of the factors that we have to deal with is we might live to one hundred, whether we want to or not, because all of our life expectancies have grown, haven't they.
Yeah.
I looked pretty carefully at this, because I was intrigued. I went back through the ABS data and looked at my birth year, which I'm not going to say on air, but the life expectancy at birth for me and for males born up to the year nineteen seventy was under seventy years old, around sixty eight point five sixty nine years of age, and for women it was in their
seventy three seventy four years old. If you're over fifty now, when you were born, you weren't expected to live much longer than seventy as a man and seventy five as a woman. Things have obviously changed, and those factors take into account infant mortality, in which we've obviously done really well with. So now Australia's life expectancy at birth is one of the highest in the world, around eighty five for women and eighty one and a half for men.
But I see that as a massive change in just sort of two generations, that we've gone from a life expectancy of under seventy for men to a life expectancy of over eighty and for women there's been a similar number of years of change. One of the great statistics that is collected by some of the data is healthy life years and health adjusted life years, and so at the moment Australians of both sexes tend to live about the last ten years of their life in poor quality health.
So if we're living healthier for longer, that's a good thing. But I guess the trick is to minimize that last period of your life when you're living in poor health.
Stephen lann is the Australian Social Affairs edit up. You can read that story, as well as all our teams in depth health reporting right now at the Australian dot com dot a you slash health