The secret to a long life? Fraud and shoddy record keeping, says one researcher

CATHY WURZER: For decades, scientists have wondered why some people live longer and with less disease than the rest of us, to 100 years old and beyond. But research out of the UK appears to conclude that the so-called blue zones of longevity don't really exist, and many instances of extra long lives can be chalked up to inadequate birth and death records.

Saul Newman is behind this research. He's a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London Center for Longitudinal Studies. Earlier this month, he won an Ig Nobel award from MIT. These are honoring scientific achievements that, quote, first make people laugh, then make people think.

And Saul Newman is on the line. Thank you for taking the time.

SAUL NEWMAN: My pleasure. And it's great to join you.

CATHY WURZER: That appeared to have been an entertaining award ceremony, by the way. It's designed to be. I understand.

SAUL NEWMAN: Yeah, it was absolutely a riot. I mean, you get an auditorium full of people who've dressed up in the most colorful imaginable way. So, it's really, really a good time.

CATHY WURZER: I see you've been at this for a while. There's always some kind of spark for any research. What led you to look into these population studies?

SAUL NEWMAN: I got into this through a long process of debunking. There was a paper in Nature, which is kind of the-- I guess it's the equivalent of a journalist publishing in The New York Times. And this study was essentially deeply flawed. They had accidentally rounded off most of their data to zero and published results that just didn't make sense.

And so I debunked this, and then I debunked a follow-up paper in another high-level scientific journal called Science. And that prompted me to think, I had developed a theoretical result that suggested most of the old people, extremely old people in the world were errors. And I thought, OK, well, I'll test this and see what happens. And so that's how I've discovered that most centenarians in the blue zones were actually missing or dead when the study was conducted.

CATHY WURZER: As you know, the individuals who've done the studies of the blue zones, these are teams of researchers and demographers and scientists. They visited each region to validate age. Have you had a chance to travel to these regions yourself and do the research?

SAUL NEWMAN: I've been to the regions and I've tracked down more than 80% of the people aged over 110 on Earth. And I think what's important to really talk about here is that those researchers have not published their raw data, and I have. So I have analyzed government records, and repeatedly these people turn out to have been errors in in documentary records.

For example, Costa Rica, 42% of the centenarians in Costa Rica turned out to be lying about their age after the study was conducted. And once you corrected those errors, they went from world leading to, quote, near the bottom of the pack, in terms of late life expectancy. And so the question I have for those researchers is how do you explain that, for example, 82% of Japanese centenarians were missing or dead in your sample? And this wasn't discovered by demographers. This was discovered by the government of Japan.

CATHY WURZER: I'm wondering, your work, though, has not been peer reviewed, has yet to be evaluated by experts, hasn't been published in any scientific journal. Might that point to substantial skepticism in the scientific community around your theories? It might-- doesn't that give you pause and perhaps make you wonder whether you're wrong?

SAUL NEWMAN: I mean, I think the simple response to that is that they can publish why I'm wrong. There's no barrier. Twitter exists. There are platforms for this, dozens of platforms.

And given that they haven't responded with an answer in five years, I think it's highly problematic. I've been sending this to journals, and it will sit on the desk of a journal editor's desk for 8 or 9 months and get returned without review. Now we're at the point where a panel of six Nobel laureates has given me an award for the paper, and we still don't have an answer about what exactly I'm supposed to have done wrong.

And that would be very simple. I've had 1 or 2 very minor errors pointed out with the paper, and I've fixed them immediately. So I think, to bounce that question back, why does it need to be peer reviewed for these people to tell us what's wrong with this study? Because I've been waiting for five years.

CATHY WURZER: Do you think in a sense you're being blackballed by the scientific community?

SAUL NEWMAN: Quite clearly. I mean, I currently have this under peer review, and normally peer review is like a scientific jury and you have a fixed number of jurors. And usually you have 2 or 3 jurors. Four is exceptional and five is unheard of, and I had 11, more than 11, on the last round of review.

So why is that necessary? Because if I was wrong, one would be enough. And I am not some guy from out in the boonies. I'm a researcher in the University of Oxford and University College London working in this field. So where are the answers?

CATHY WURZER: As you know, the research around blue zones, the books, the articles have all been rigorously fact checked by National Geographic. What does that say to you?

SAUL NEWMAN: I think that's a joke, because National Geographic have previously published what they called in 1975 longevity zones. They claimed that these were regions in the world where people lived to a remarkable ages, and they've all been debunked. The first was in the Hunza Valley of Pakistan.

Now, that, I hate to break it to you, is not a picture of health. And another was in Soviet Georgia. Again, did not stand up to scrutiny. So National Geographic have form here because none of their previous longevity zones held up, and none of these hold up either.

And I'm not just saying that. I'm basically telling them data that is coming directly from the governments of these regions. So to give you an example, the government of Europe has a system for measuring old age survival through Eurostat. They measure Sardinia. They measure the region containing Ikaria. These are the two of the blue zones, and they've never been remotely near the top of late life survival, not even close.

CATHY WURZER: So are you saying that-- so all the research that has been done then is tenuous at best, what does that mean for other population studies, perhaps?

SAUL NEWMAN: I think the demographic community needs to take a very hard look at themselves because some of this is hilariously misplaced, even the most basic claims. So there's a sweet potato on the front cover of the blue zones documentary, and they say people in Okinawa eat lots of purple sweet potato. Japan runs one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world that goes back to 1975. And every year, Okinawa eats the least sweet potato in Japan.

So the question is, why has nobody pushed back on this before? Because that is very obvious. And nobody has seemingly even read these studies. And there are some of the largest in the world.

CATHY WURZER: I see. I believe, though, the Okinawans studied, of course, the older Okinawans actually do have a pretty healthy diet that may include those--

SAUL NEWMAN: No.

CATHY WURZER: --sorts of foods versus the young Okinawans, who don't have a--

SAUL NEWMAN: No.

CATHY WURZER: --great diet at all.

SAUL NEWMAN: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That is completely false. I mean, these data go back to 1975.

And they measure people aged over 75. And every single year that an over 75-year-old has been measured in this study, they have had the worst body mass index in Japan. There's this myth that the blue zones are degrading because of the Western diets. No, they're catching up to the rest of Japan in terms of health.

And again, you don't have to believe me. You can ask the Japanese government. So I don't know where they're getting this data because they haven't told anybody.

CATHY WURZER: What are you working on next, if I may ask?

SAUL NEWMAN: I'm producing some theoretical studies on the roles that errors play in late life mortality statistics and things like your pension. So your pension is based on projections of how long people are going to live in the future, and those projections rely on this data. They rely on extreme old age data because the assumption being that things will get better in the future. And so I really want to unravel the impact that these bad data are having on those projections of how much you today have to pay into your pension.

CATHY WURZER: All right. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

SAUL NEWMAN: You're welcome. Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: Saul Newman is a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London Center for Longitudinal Studies. By the way, the blue zones have a quite lengthy conversation about Mr. Newman's research, and they've debunked much of what he has written. You might want to check that out by going to the blue zones website. We can probably connect to that via nprnews.org.