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Calling bull on Blue Zones · The Front

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey.
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  Speaker 1: It's Wednesday, December eighteenth. A and Z allegedly slapped dead
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: customers with account fees, an error that's landed the bank
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  Speaker 1: in the corporate regulators sites. The Australian Securities and Investments
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Commission is gearing up for legal action. A record number
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: of businesses have plunged into insolvency since the last election.
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  Speaker 1: Now construction industry bosses are warning it could put the
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  Speaker 1: government's home building ambitions in jeopardy. Those stories alive right
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  Speaker 1: now at the Australian dot com dot. It's a pretty
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  Speaker 1: captivating idea Blue zones, pockets of the planet where residents
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  Speaker 1: possess a unique ability to live to one hundred. It's
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  Speaker 1: a Netflix show and a series of diet books, a
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  Speaker 1: movement all about how we eat, live and move. But
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  Speaker 1: now an Australian expert is casting doubt and the scientific
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  Speaker 1: community is paying attention. It probably sounds too good to
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  Speaker 1: be true, but it's true.
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  Speaker 2: Our next time, Dan Bucher says he's found the recipe
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  Speaker 2: for how to reach it happy and healthy one hundred years.
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  Speaker 3: If we can find the optimal lifestyle of longevity.
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  Speaker 1: We can come up with a de facto formula for longevity.
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  Speaker 2: Places around the world where people seem to defy the
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  Speaker 2: limits of age, and this is.
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  Speaker 3: What they eat.
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  Speaker 1: If he's been anywhere near Netflix lately, you'll have noticed
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  Speaker 1: the very alluring idea of places on planet Earth where
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  Speaker 1: people leave to one hundred. What if we could reverse
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  Speaker 1: engineer longevity.
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  Speaker 2: I spent the last twenty years trying to do just that.
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  Speaker 1: But what if it was all a bit of a
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  Speaker 1: beat up. Stephen Mann is the Australian Social Affairs editor.
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  Speaker 3: So the blue zone idea was created in about two
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  Speaker 3: thousand and four. It was a journalist called Dan Buetner,
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  Speaker 3: and he went and explored areas of the world where
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  Speaker 3: there was a high proportion of people living to one
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  Speaker 3: hundred and he wanted to get behind what the commonalities
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  Speaker 3: were in those areas.
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  Speaker 4: And these secrets could help every one of us to
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  Speaker 4: get every good year we can get.
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  Speaker 1: Out of this body of ours. That is the promise
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  Speaker 1: of blue zones.
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  Speaker 3: There's Okinawa in Japan, There's part of Costa Rica, one
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  Speaker 3: of the Greek islands in the Aegean, Sardinia, among others,
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  Speaker 3: and he looked for commonalities in those areas to see
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  Speaker 3: what their secret was for a long life, and he
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  Speaker 3: came up with a sort of a series of common factors,
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  Speaker 3: which were things like constant incidental exercise, So if you
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  Speaker 3: were living a lifestyle where you were always in the
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  Speaker 3: garden or tending fields, et cetera, that was important, plant
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  Speaker 3: based diet, limited amount of alcohol but not no alcohol.
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  Speaker 3: And importantly, continuing social connection so you are close to
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  Speaker 3: both family and also a broader social connection.
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  Speaker 1: So no taking the lift up to my second floor
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  Speaker 1: for then, No.
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  Speaker 3: I don't think you can sit around on your backside
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  Speaker 3: for ten hours a day and then go to the
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  Speaker 3: gym for half an hour and think that's going to
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  Speaker 3: be the secret to getting to one hundred.
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  Speaker 1: So sounds pretty good, sounds like fairly straightforward things that
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  Speaker 1: we could all be doing. So why are we then
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  Speaker 1: not all living to one hundred.
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  Speaker 3: Well, genetics does come into it, and people don't do
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  Speaker 3: the things that he's suggesting, And the ideas behind blue
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  Speaker 3: zones are certainly relevant, and you see them in all
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  Speaker 3: the health information all of the time. It basically boils
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  Speaker 3: down to moderate intensity exercise of a certain duration most
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  Speaker 3: days a decent diet, limiting your alcohol, and maintaining connections.
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  Speaker 3: They're pretty common themes that run through a lot of
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  Speaker 3: the health information that we have at the moment. The
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  Speaker 3: Blue Zone story by Dan spawned the Netflix series, a
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  Speaker 3: range of diet books and exercise books. So it's been
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  Speaker 3: a fair bit of mileage on the blue zone theory
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  Speaker 3: in the last twenty years.
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  Speaker 1: And is it real?
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  Speaker 3: Well, I've spoken to an Australian academic who is in Oxford.
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  Speaker 3: His name is Soul Newman, and he's looked carefully at this,
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  Speaker 3: including going back to all of the areas where these
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  Speaker 3: centenarians were from and just exploring the data behind it,
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  Speaker 3: and he came up with some pretty interesting findings, basically
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  Speaker 3: finding that the majority of people who claim to have
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  Speaker 3: lived to one hundred in these places are either missing
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  Speaker 3: or dead, and there's a range of reasons why the
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  Speaker 3: data is flawed. So he's kind of debunking the foundation
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  Speaker 3: of blue zones. He doesn't say that the message which
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  Speaker 3: behind blue zones are wrong, but the foundation of where
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  Speaker 3: blue zones are is based on pretty dodgy data, according
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  Speaker 3: to Soul Newman.
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  Speaker 1: So taking probably the most famous one, Okinawa, the island
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  Speaker 1: in Japan. You spend a lot of time in Japan.
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  Speaker 1: There is a very healthy diet, and we do see
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  Speaker 1: a lot of old people from Japan. So is it
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  Speaker 1: not true that people in Okinawa are generally living to
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  Speaker 1: one hundred.
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  Speaker 3: Well, my interest was piqued in this story because I've
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  Speaker 3: been to Okinawa and my memory of it. The Okinawan
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  Speaker 3: diet was that it was spam from the US military
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  Speaker 3: forces in the forties was one of the foundations of
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  Speaker 3: their diet. So I was trying to work out how
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  Speaker 3: that was a big thing. Yes, they use a lot
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  Speaker 3: of pickled vegetables as well, but none of that kind
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  Speaker 3: of translated through.
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  Speaker 1: Okinawa is actually one hundred and sixty one small islands,
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  Speaker 1: and in the northern part of the main island.
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  Speaker 2: This has ground zero for world longevity.
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  Speaker 3: But what sol Newman found when he looked at this
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  Speaker 3: was that he went to the records to discover and
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  Speaker 3: hopefully talked to some of these centenarians and discovered that
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  Speaker 3: around seventy percent of them weren't actually alive, and that
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  Speaker 3: because of the Second World War, many buildings were blown up,
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  Speaker 3: including all of the records, so there were no birth
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  Speaker 3: certificates to find, and so there weren't actually the centenarians
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  Speaker 3: proportion in Okinawa that was originally believed, and he then
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  Speaker 3: sort of having done that, then went to the other places,
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  Speaker 3: including this area in Greece and in Sardinia as well,
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  Speaker 3: where he said about seventy percent of the people who
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  Speaker 3: claimed to have made it to one hundred hadn't actually
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  Speaker 3: done so, and much of it was to do with
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  Speaker 3: welfare frauds, so families were basically keeping their dead relative
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  Speaker 3: alive so that they continued to claim welfare checks for
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  Speaker 3: years and years after they had passed on. So in
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  Speaker 3: uncovering this, he was this year awarded the Ignobel Prize,
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  Speaker 3: which is a science prize awarded to work that has
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  Speaker 3: debunked other conventional science. So I think he might have
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  Speaker 3: a case to answer. I do think though that there
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  Speaker 3: is something to be said for the messaging behind blue zones,
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  Speaker 3: but the data that sort of originally led to its creation,
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  Speaker 3: he's fairly comprehensively debunked.
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  Speaker 1: I would say, Lunny spoke to doctor Saul Newman via zoom.
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  Speaker 4: So I have discovered that first of all, most centenarians
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  Speaker 4: in the blue zones, most one hundred year olds in
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  Speaker 4: the Blue zones were missing or dead when the study
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  Speaker 4: was conducted. The findings are therefore based on bad data.
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  Speaker 4: On top of that, all of the lifestyle claims don't
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  Speaker 4: stack up when measured by independent data. So health from
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  Speaker 4: the blue zones was claimed to be good, and it
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  Speaker 4: was in fact poured before, during, and after they are
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  Speaker 4: established to an extraordinary degree.
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  Speaker 1: Coming up, how the world's oldest people could be just
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  Speaker 1: not really that old. If you've spent much time in
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: a nursing home, you might be wondering do I even
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  Speaker 1: want to live to one hundred? And when we see
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  Speaker 1: the most ancient human beings, they often don't look like
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  Speaker 1: they're enjoying it that much.
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  Speaker 4: A birthday cake for the woman thought to be the
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  Speaker 4: longest living human being in the world.
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  Speaker 1: Get this, a Japanese woman takes the cake as the
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  Speaker 1: world's oldest person.
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  Speaker 2: A notification from the Guinness Book of World Records that
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  Speaker 2: the world's oldest man has died at the age of
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  Speaker 2: one hundred and twelve.
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  Speaker 1: But what if they actually weren't that old anyway?
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  Speaker 3: Soul Newman also looked at the number of people who
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  Speaker 3: had claimed to be the world's oldest person and even that,
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  Speaker 3: he said, there was a range of dodgy representations of
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  Speaker 3: people as being the old world's oldest person. There's been
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  Speaker 3: a number of people, but I think at two or
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  Speaker 3: three ago was someone from Venezuela who was a complete
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  Speaker 3: charlatan who started to claim a particular age as part
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  Speaker 3: of some sort of inheritance dispute and just stuck to it.
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  Speaker 3: And because the president of Venezuela was getting a bad
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  Speaker 3: time about the international standing of Venezuela at the time,
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  Speaker 3: he latched onto this guy's claim that he was the
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  Speaker 3: world's oldest man and ran with it, and so did
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  Speaker 3: the world's media. With no one checking any data looking
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  Speaker 3: for a birth certificate, the fact that there was this
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  Speaker 3: claim was enough for people to continue to cite this
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  Speaker 3: Venezuelan as the world's oldest man.
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  Speaker 1: We were both born in the twentieth century money, So
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  Speaker 1: I guess one of the factors that we have to
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  Speaker 1: deal with is we might live to one hundred, whether
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  Speaker 1: we want to or not, because all of our life
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  Speaker 1: expectancies have grown, haven't they. Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: I looked pretty carefully at this because I was intrigued.
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  Speaker 3: I went back through the ABS data and looked at
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  Speaker 3: my birth year, which I'm not going to say on air,
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  Speaker 3: but the life expectancy at birth for me and for
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  Speaker 3: males born up to the year nineteen seventy was under
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  Speaker 3: seventy years old, around sixty eight point five sixty nine
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  Speaker 3: years of age, and for women it was in their
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  Speaker 3: seventy three seventy four years old. If you're over fifty now,
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  Speaker 3: when you were born, you weren't expected to live much
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  Speaker 3: longer than seventy as a man and seventy five as
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  Speaker 3: a woman. Things have obviously changed, and those factors take
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  Speaker 3: into account infant mortality, in which we've obviously done really
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  Speaker 3: well with. So now Australia's life expectancy at birth is
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  Speaker 3: one of the highest in the world, around eighty five
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  Speaker 3: for women and eighty one and a half for men.
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  Speaker 3: But I see that as a massive change in just
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  Speaker 3: sort of two generations, that we've gone from a life
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  Speaker 3: expectancy of under seventy for men to a life expectancy
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  Speaker 3: of over eighty and for women there's been a similar
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  Speaker 3: number of years of change. One of the great statistics
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  Speaker 3: that is collected by some of the data is healthy
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  Speaker 3: life years and health adjusted life years, and so at
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: the moment, Australians of both sexes tend to live about
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  Speaker 3: the last ten years of their life in poor quality health.
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  Speaker 3: So if we're living healthier for longer, that's a good thing.
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  Speaker 3: But I guess the trick is to minimize that last
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  Speaker 3: period of your life when you're living in poor health.
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  Speaker 1: Stephen lann Is The Australian Social Affairs edited up. You
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  Speaker 1: can read that story, as well as all our teams
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: in depth health reporting right now at the Australian dot
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: com dot a you slash health