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Anyone who wants to age healthily has been looking for years at the so-called “blue zones”: areas where the population often lives to be a hundred or more. Thanks to the Mediterranean diet with lots of fish, sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil, regular wine and a relaxed attitude to life, health problems such as cardiovascular disease, obesity, cancer and diabetes are less common on islands like Sardinia, Okinawa and Ikaria. At least that’s the story. But is it also true?
No, according to an inventory by an Oxford scholar. Take Sardinia. According to the figures, people there live to very old age, but these figures are incorrect, as can be inferred from statistical analysis. The age structure on the island suggests a very strange nod to the eras before reliable birth certificates were introduced.
In short, there is fraud. Italy appears to have a disproportionate number of elderly people living in areas where unemployment is high and incomes are low. The elderly are usually only surviving on paper: so that others can collect their pension money.
Things go wrong in Okinawa in a similar way. For example, in 2010, Japan’s Ministry of Justice discovered that there were no known addresses available for 234,354 centenarians. Of these Japanese, 77,118 were over 120, and 884 were over 150. In the search for these missing seniors, sometimes horrific discoveries have been made. For example, an 111-year-old man was found mummified in his bed. He had been there for three decades. His 81-year-old daughter was collecting his pension every month.
Same story in Ikaria: in 2012, it was discovered that three-quarters (!) of Greek centenarians had given the wrong age or had died long ago.
The conclusion seems inevitable: the blue zones, where people age significantly thanks to a certain diet and daily exercise, do not exist. “Eating healthily and exercising will make you live longer, but the chance of living to 105 in a healthy way is small,” concludes nutritionist Martin Katan.
