Dr Saul Newman has uncovered the ‘secret’ to living to 110

When Dr Saul Newman took to the stage to receive one of the world’s highest-profile science awards, he wore a suit patterned with Tetris bricks, had a party hat on his head, and carried three balloons.

The ceremony, held recently at MIT in Boston, was for the Ig Nobel Prize, honouring research achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

(The science behind the prize is no joke, however: in 2010, a scientist who had previously won an Ig Nobel for levitating a frog went on to win an actual Nobel.)

Newman, who completed his Bachelor of Science (Honours) and PhD at ANU, won his Ig Nobel Prize for research debunking data on the world’s oldest people, a project he started five years ago while working at the Biological Data Sciences Institute at ANU.

Investigating the popular idea of “Blue Zones” – regions of the world like Okinawa (Japan), Sardinia (Italy) and Ikaria (Greece), where residents reportedly live very long, healthy, happy lives – he found the demographic data underpinning these extreme aging hotspots simply didn’t add up.

The secrets to longevity touted in Blue Zone-inspired cookbooks and Netflix documentaries include following a plant-based diet, drinking a glass of wine daily, and developing a strong sense of purpose, among other “lifestyle habits”.

But Newman found something else.

“Blue Zones don’t exist,” he says. The data behind the concept, he says, is “hilariously flawed”. 

While people in these regions might say they are living to be 100 or even 110, there is simply no evidence for their age. Newman has tracked down 80 per cent of the people in the world who are over 110 years old, and “almost none” have a birth certificate.

Newman’s research was supported by a 2010 Japanese government review which found 82 per cent of people over 100 years old in Japan were actually already dead – including the country’s oldest man, whose corpse had been hidden by his daughter while she pocketed his pension for 30 years.

“And yet Okinawa is still one of these Blue Zones,” Newman says over Zoom, exasperated.

“There’s zero level of scepticism about these claims. The world’s current oldest man has got three birthdays” – the reason for Newman’s three balloons on stage – “and everyone just buys that it’s legitimate.”

The secret to long life, he says, isn’t a Blue Zone lifestyle; it’s poor record-keeping.

“Don’t have a birth certificate and don’t register your death,” and then you can simply be as old as you want.

Newman has shown that the areas of the world with the highest reported rates of extreme old age actually do all have something in common, and it’s not a strong sense of purpose. It’s high poverty. These areas also often have lower average lifespans compared to surrounding regions.

The irony of these places then being sold as a health and wellbeing paradise is not lost on Newman.

“I’ve had to turn it into comedy, because otherwise it’s just very, very deeply frustrating,” he says.

“I’m being asked a lot about the Mediterranean diet at the moment. The Mediterranean diet came about when someone went to southern Italy and noticed a lot of centenarians on the books. Why are they on the books in southern Italy where people have relatively short lives, and not in northern Italy, where people actually have relatively long lives?”

Is it the minestrone soup?

“No, it’s probably got a lot to do with bad record-keeping and the mafia. Because that’s where pension fraud happens. In 1997, there were 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients found to be dead in Italy. And, to bring out an old cliche, that’s the tip of the iceberg.”

But is it really that bad for people to eat minestrone soup and have a strong sense of purpose, even if it won’t make them live to be 110?

“Well, the Blue Zones guy has been telling people to drink wine every day. Every day! That’s a recipe for alcoholism, and he’s got no qualifications whatsoever.”

More important than whether the Blue Zone lifestyle prescriptions are good or bad for you, Newman says, is “the fact they’re just not true”.

“It’s cultural appropriation without any connection to reality. For example, when these Blue Zone studies were run, Greece was the third or fourth most overweight country in Europe, and so to come in and pretend that their diet should be emulated is absurd.”

He also points out that Okinawans eat the least vegetables and sweet potatoes of any region in Japan and have the highest body mass index, yet vegetables and sweet potatoes are promoted as a key component of the Okinawan Blue Zone diet.

“But you’re in one of these very hard-up regions that are being left behind by the national governments, you don’t want to puncture the myth,” Newman says.

“Because you’ve got people coming into local coffee shops spending money, doing the weekend visits, doing the yoga retreats or whatever. The part of this I am fine with is these poor regions are getting tourist money.”

He’s also quick to add that he has nothing against the super-centenarians – as people who are 110 or older are known – themselves.

“I think they’re the best part of this! They’re having a grand old time. What have you got to lose if you’re 96 and you can pretend you’re 119 and the whole world just goes along with it? What are they going to do – put you in jail?

“I was involved in a beautiful news story a while ago where someone went and interviewed one of these ladies in Sardinia, and she wouldn’t show her birth certificate, but she says, very prickly: ‘Of course, I’m over 100! I don’t lie about my age. But – other people do.’ So there’s a little wink, wink, nudge, nudge there.”

But Newman, who now works at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, is clearly frustrated that his research hasn’t stopped the circulation of misinformation around extreme aging. He’s now writing a book called Morbid: An iconoclastic debunking of aging science.

“It’s essentially about bogus aging research and some of the flexible attempts at the truth,” he says.

“There is just a very, very rich deposit of bullshit. Some of the incredible tales that people accept at face value are remarkable.

“I had a guy contact me from India yesterday who wanted to know if his Swami was really 128. It’s like, no, mate. India only hit 50 percent birth registration in 2013.”

Newman knows he’s being cast as a ‘well, actually’ guy, the party-pooper ruining a good story. If the Ig Nobel Prize can improve people’s receptiveness to his message, even if it’s through comedy, he’ll take it.

After stepping onto the stage in a “big, fancy hall” at MIT, wearing his Tetris suit, Newman delivered his acceptance speech in verse form:

“The secrets fell over,

Like a lover in clover,

When I checked the government books.

The Blue Zones are poor,

The records no more,

The 100-year-olds are all crooks.

The secret, it seems

To live out your dreams

And make sure you keep living not dying

Is to move where

Birth certificates are rare

Teach your kids pension fraud and start lying.”

It’s a pretty good summary of years of research, and a necessarily catchy rebuttal to people promoting ‘that one weird trick’ to living to be 110.

“If someone’s selling you something to get the power of longevity, ignore them,” he concludes.

We already know what to do to increase our chances of a long, healthy life, anyway: “Don’t smoke or do drugs. Don’t drink. Do some exercise. That’s all you need to do. Maybe see your GP once a year.”

“There’s no other secret. I think everyone knows that deep down. The blueberry is not going to save you.”

This article first appeared at ANU College of Science.