Are 'blue zones' real? A science and wellness industry clash | STAT

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OpinionFirst Opinion

Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder than ever

Skepticism, business imperatives, and changing demographics are muddying the clear-blue waters

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EZEQUIEL BECERRA/AFP via Getty Images

By Shelley Wood and Eric J. Topol<br>May 4, 2026

Wood is a medical journalist and author. Her most recent novel is “The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley.” Topol is a cardiologist, executive vice president, and professor, at Scripps Research.

When French geneticist Jean-Francois Deleuze first launched the AGENOMICS study in 2022, he hoped to identify genetic patterns among 1,200 French citizens who’d lived more than 100 years and to compare those to centenarians hailing from one of the world-famous “blue zones.”

Then he started having doubts.<br>Advertisement

“Some recent articles questioning the very concept of blue zones have given me pause,” he wrote in an email last year. “What’s your take?”

It’s not our first time getting that question. If you write books — as we both did — about extreme longevity, people will ask you about blue zones. The term, now engrained in Western culture, originally referred to 14 isolated villages on the Italian island of Sardinia where, 25 years ago, researchers identified exceptional numbers of long-living humans whose health they attributed to active habits and simple foods.

In a wellness space increasingly crowded with billionaire-backed senolytics, hyperbaric chambers, antiaging drips, and stem cell infusions, blue zones are starting to look like the unpretentious OGs of the longevity movement.<br>Advertisement

But they’ve strayed far and wide from their humble roots. Skepticism over their foundational science, plummeting numbers of healthy seniors in the original regions, and a burgeoning business in blue zones products is making it more difficult to answer the question: Are blue zones real?

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Belgian demographer Michel Poulain and Italian physician Giovanni Pes coined the term “blue zone” in the early 2000s to refer to the converging ink dots on the map they were using to validate longevity claims in Ogliastra, Italy. They published the results of the AKEA study in 2004. A year later, journalist Dan Buettner, who had joined their project, published a National Geographic cover story chronicling the “long life secrets” of elderly residents in Ogliastra, as well as Okinawa, Japan, and — controversially — Loma Linda, Calif. Shortly thereafter, Buettner trademarked the term “blue zone” to protect it, he insists, from misuse.

Over the years, Buettner, more so than the original scientists, has become synonymous with blue zones. He’s written nine best-selling blue zone books that have surpassed $1.2 million in sales and led “expeditions” to endorse new blue zones in Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula and Ikaria, Greece. He founded Blue Zones LLC, which consults with and certifies blue zone cities in the U.S., as well as offering cooking courses and retreats. In 2023, Buettner hosted the popular Netflix documentary “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones.”

Buettner spoke to us from his rural Wisconsin lake home last summer, where he was drafting his latest book describing a new category of blue zone. Blue zone citizens “are not pursuing health; it ensues,” he explained. “In other words, their surroundings are set up in a way that their micro decisions on a day-to-day basis … are mindless and they are measurably better, day to day, month to month, over decades.”

For almost 20 years, the blue zones went unchallenged. That changed in 2019, when Australian biologist Saul Newman published a preprint paper online arguing that clerical errors, natural disasters, and pension fraud were better explanations for the proportion...