By Julia Bergin – The New York Times –
Five years ago, Saul Newman published what he thought was groundbreaking research about “blue zones” — places like Okinawa in Japan and Sardinia in Italy, where many people reputedly lead astonishingly lengthy and healthy lives. These areas have long inspired envy, curiosity and dietary fads. And many scientists have tried to understand how some people can live well past 100 in good health.
Dr. Newman, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra at the time, did not discover a secret elixir for human longevity. His conclusion, in essence, was that blue zones do not exist. In many of these places, he found, shoddy record-keeping of vital statistics like births and deaths undermined previous research suggesting that people there lived unusually long lives.
