The Blue Zones: What Still Holds Up After the Controversy
Hi, it’s Diana from We Get Better with Age, and this is another book in my series on the ones I’ve actually read and genuinely enjoyed.
My parents turned eighty this year. When I visit, my father still walks down to buy the bread — not for his health, he’d wave you off if you called it exercise, but because that’s simply how the bread gets to the table. My mother has a handful of women she has spoken to nearly every day for forty years. When one of them goes quiet for a morning, the others know by lunch.
For most of my life I filed those two things under “just how they are.” Then I read a book that spent three hundred pages arguing that habits exactly like those — the walk, the phone calls — might be doing more for my parents than anything in the bathroom cabinet.
The book is The Blue Zones, by Dan Buettner. And I want to tell you about it honestly, which means telling you two things that sound like they don’t belong in the same letter: why I loved it, and why last year I nearly stopped recommending it. Both are true. Stay with me — the honest version turns out to be more useful than the tidy one.
The Idea That Made It Famous
Buettner is a National Geographic explorer, and in 2005 he wrote a cover story that became one of the magazine’s best-selling issues ever: a hunt for the places on earth where people don’t just live long, but stay well while they do it — the pockets where reaching a hundred is almost ordinary.
He didn’t invent the term. Two researchers, a Belgian demographer and an Italian physician, had been validating the ages of centenarians in Sardinia and kept circling the same cluster of mountain villages on their map — in blue ink- until they simply called the area inside “the blue zone.” Buettner took the name and went looking for others.
He landed on five. Sardinia, in Italy, where a knot of highland villages produces old men at roughly twice the national rate. Okinawa, in Japan, long famous for the age its women reached. The Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. Ikaria, a Greek island, is wonderfully nicknamed “the place where people forget to die.” And — the one that surprised me most — Loma Linda, California, a community of Seventh-day Adventists living measurably longer than the Americans in the next town over.
What made the book a phenomenon wasn’t a supplement or a scan. It was the opposite. These were regular people, doing regular, unremarkable things, apparently outliving the rest of us without trying. That’s a promise almost impossible not to lean toward.
The Power 9
Buettner boiled the five places down to nine habits they shared — what he called the Power 9. I’ll give them to you plainly, because the list itself is the argument:
Move naturally — movement built into the day, gardening and walking and stairs, not a gym membership.
Purpose — a reason to get up. The Okinawans call it ikigai, the Nicoyans plan de vida.
Downshift — a daily habit for shedding stress. A nap, a prayer, a happy hour.
The 80% rule — the Okinawan hara hachi bu: stop eating when you’re about eighty percent full.
Plant slant — mostly plants. Beans, greens, whole grains. Meat as the exception, not the center.
Wine at five — a glass or two, usually with friends or food.
Belong — a faith or a community that meets regularly.
Loved ones first — keeping family close, aging parents and grandchildren in the same orbit.
The right tribe — the Okinawan moai, a small circle of friends committed to each other for life.
Read that list again and notice what’s missing. There’s almost nothing medical on it. No screening schedule, no wonder drug, no numbers to hit. It’s how you eat, how you move, and — over and over — who you’re with. The full Power 9, in Buettner’s own words, is here.
I found that oddly comforting the first time I read it. And then, a year ago, I read something that complicated all of it.
The Part I Have To Be Honest About
In 2024, a demographer named Saul Justin Newman won an Ig Nobel Prize for a piece of research that took a hard look at the blue-zone data itself — the very counts of hundred-year-olds the whole idea rests on.
What he found is uncomfortable. Across the world, the strongest predictors of a region reporting lots of centenarians weren’t clean air or strong friendships. They were poverty, missing birth certificates, and having fewer documented ninety-year-olds than you’d expect — the exact fingerprints of sloppy paperwork and pension fraud, where a death goes unregistered so the checks keep coming. He pointed out, dryly, that Okinawans actually eat some of the fewest vegetables in Japan and carry some of the highest body weight, and that a large share of Greece’s registered centenarians were, on inspection, likely already dead.
I won’t pretend that landed gently. I had recommended this book. My first honest reaction was a small, deflating oh — the feeling of a good story losing its shine.
So I made myself do the slower thing, which is to separate what the critique actually breaks from what it leaves standing. Those turn out to be two very different sizes.
What Survives
Here’s the distinction that put the book back on my shelf.
Newman’s work shakes the record book — the claim that these specific regions have provably more hundred-year-olds than anywhere else. Where the paperwork is thin and the pensions are tempting, the ages themselves stop being trustworthy. Fair. I’ll grant all of it.
But the habits don’t depend on that record book at all. Each of the big ones has been tested on its own, in large studies run nowhere near a Greek island — and that evidence didn’t move an inch when the centenarian counts wobbled.
Take the friendships. A review of 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people found that strong social ties were linked to a 50% higher chance of survival over the years studied — an effect on par with quitting smoking, and larger than the effect of obesity. My mother’s forty years of phone calls aren’t folklore. They’re one of the most studied health behaviors we have.
Take purpose. A study following nearly 7,000 adults over fifty found that those with the weakest sense of purpose had roughly two and a half times the death rate of those with the strongest, over the same stretch of years. A reason to get up in the morning is not a poster slogan. It’s measurable. (I wrote a whole letter once on why purpose keeps showing up in the longevity research, if you want to sit with that one longer.)
And take the plants. Loma Linda, the one blue zone on solid demographic ground, has been studied for decades by its own university — and in a cohort of around ninety-six thousand people, the vegetarians had about 12% lower overall mortality, and the ones who added a little fish, about 18% lower. That’s not a village legend. That’s fifty years of careful record-keeping in California.
So here’s where I landed, and it’s the whole reason I still hand people this book. The map may be smudged. The directions are still good.
What I Actually Took From It
Which brings me back to my father and his bread.
Strip away the exotic geography — the shepherds, the islands, the wine at five — and what’s left is almost boringly ordinary. Move because your life asks you to, not because a machine tells you to. Eat mostly plants and stop before you’re stuffed. Keep a few people close enough that they’d notice your absence. Have a reason to open your eyes in the morning.
None of that requires a passport, a genetic test, or a village in the Aegean. It requires a Tuesday. My parents didn’t move to Sardinia. They just never stopped walking to the shops, and never let their friendships go cold, and those two things alone put them in the company of the healthiest research we have.
That’s what I love about this book, even now, controversy and all. It quietly takes longevity out of the hands of clinics and biohackers and puts it back into the texture of an ordinary day — the walk, the meal, the phone call, the reason to get up. Things you already have access to. Things you may already be doing without giving yourself any credit for them.
You don’t need to be from a special place to live like this. You need permission to believe the small, unglamorous habits count — and the research is standing right behind you, saying they do.
The good news was never that some people won a longevity lottery in a village you’ll never visit. It’s that the things that seem to matter most are the things already within reach of your own kitchen and your own front door.
Set the table. Call your friend. Take the long way to the bread.
The Tuesday letters will always be free. The paid edition is where I go deeper — the monthly themes, the step-by-step work, the research pulled apart properly. You can learn more about it here, no pressure either way.
(If you liked this one, I did a similar honest read of Outlive, by Peter Attia — a very different book about the same question, and one with its own blind spots: it leans hard on intensive testing and protocols that not everyone can, or needs to, chase.)
Yes. Move daily. Check in with your posse. Eat more plants. Have a purpose.