UCL demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans wins Ig Nobel prize

The Annals of Improbable Research at MIT awarded Dr Saul Justin Newman the first-ever Ig Nobel award in Demography in a ceremony on 12 September 2024. The Ig Nobel awards have been handed out annually since 1991, to scientific research that “makes people laugh, and then think”. 

Dr Newman received the award for research that revealed fundamental flaws in extreme old-age demographic research, by demonstrating that data patterns are likely to be dominated by errors and finding that supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud (paper pre-print, not yet peer-reviewed). 

These results build on a long history of scepticism. Dr Newman has previously disproved a 2016 study published in Nature on extreme-age research that accidentally rounded off a substantial amount of its data to zero. His peer-reviewed paper demonstrated that if corrected, this error eliminated the core findings claiming that human lifespan had a defined limit. Then, Dr Newman also countered a 2018 paper which made the opposite claim and, in the process, demonstrated a theoretical result predicting that patterns in old-age data are likely to be dominated by errors. 

In investigating this theory, Dr Newman demonstrated fundamental and comedic mismatches between longevity claims and observed patterns. In the process, Dr Newman revealed that the well-publicised “Blue Zones” claims for the secrets of longevity are infallibly flawed. 

Dr Newman showed that the highest rates of achieving extreme old age are predicted by high poverty, the lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds. Poverty and pressure to commit pension fraud were shown to be excellent indicators of reaching ages 100+ in a way that is ‘the opposite of rational expectations’.  

In addition, Dr Newman revealed numerous flaws in the supposedly validated cases of the world’s oldest people, including the world’s oldest man, who was shown to have not one but three birthdays.  

Finally, Dr Newman debunked the popular idea of ‘Blue Zones’ as regions of exceptional longevity and healthy lifestyles. Many, if not most of the centenarians in the ‘Blue Zone’ have turned out to be alive in the government records but were deceased in reality. Using extensive government data and surveys, Dr Newman showed that most of the dietary and lifestyle claims behind the so-called ‘Blue Zone’ regions of high longevity are not supported by any independent data.  

For example, despite vegetables and sweet potatoes being promoted as key components of the Okinawan ‘Blue Zone’ diets, according to the Japanese government, Okinawans eat the least vegetables and sweet potatoes in Japan and have the highest body mass index. 

This forms one of a series of papers debunking old-age records including forthcoming work on the United Nations late-life data in which extreme longevity appears to be concentrated in Monaco, Malawi, Kenya, Western Sahara, Puerto Rico, and other regions. 

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Image

Dr Newman (left) at the 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony.

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