Okinawa, Sardinia, Ikaria, the Nicoya Peninsula: these names keep appearing in longevity reports, presented as living laboratories for healthy aging. But a researcher from University College London has just delivered a serious kick to this postcard panorama. His research shows that the “supercentenarians” tended to come from regions where health was poor, poverty levels were high, and civil registries were not properly kept. Longevity records do not concentrate where people live best, but where civil status records have gone off track.
Saul Justin Newman is not a provocateur passing through. This researcher at University College London describes the data available about the planet’s oldest individuals as simply bogus to a truly shocking degree, he told AFP after scrutinizing data on centenarians and “supercentenarians” in the United States, Italy, England, France, and Japan. His formula, which has gone viral, sums up the matter: the real secret to extreme longevity seems to be settling where birth certificates are scarce and teaching one’s children to cheat to obtain a pension. A line of black humor that earned him, in September 2024, the first Ig Nobel Prize in demography ever awarded.
Key takeaways
- Why do supercentenarians disappear when documents are checked?
- How 82% of Japanese centenarians suddenly changed status
- This secret that blue zones have been hiding for years
A lack of documents, and records that explode
The hard-hitting figure appears in the United States. Nearly zero percent of American supercentenarians possessed a birth certificate, and worse still, 10% already had a death certificate in the records, evidence that the administration itself was scrambled. Of the five hundred people counted as over 110 in the United States, seven only had a properly issued birth certificate, according to the researcher’s own calculations. A drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the phenomenon.
Japan offers an even more vertiginous case study. The government launched a study that revealed that 82% of centenarians counted in Japan, i.e., 230,000 people, were actually missing or dead. The rule of living “long” on paper was then reduced to a single sentence: do not declare a death. Greece is not exempt from the finding: according to a synthesis cited by several media outlets, in 2012 the country found that 72% of its official centenarians had in reality already breathed their last, a signal deemed revealing of pension fraud. The same logic applied in Costa Rica, where a significant share of those aged 99 and over recorded in the 2000 census had, according to later verifications, misdeclared their age.
Newman also combed the records of the three blue zones most cited in the media, with a result that runs counter to the postcard image of the Mediterranean village where one lives to a hundred in the open air. The designated “blue zones” of Sardinia, Okinawa and Ikaria correspond to regions with low income, low literacy, high crime rates, and life expectancy shorter than their national average. A resident quoted by the researcher even mentions the high crime and suicide rates in Sardinia, widespread smoking in Ikaria, and poor dietary habits in Okinawa, the very opposite of the Mediterranean diet celebrated in the documentaries.
Okinawa, the example that sums it all
The Okinawa case embodies the methodological problem the researcher denounces. In Okinawa, most birth records were destroyed during World War II, and the American occupation authorities subsequently recreated those documents, according to residents’ memories. A birth certificate reconstructed from memory, decades after the fact, obviously counts for little in front of a court or a geneticist. Newman sums up the situation with a blunt sentence: “It is very unreliable.” And he adds a nuance that changes the reading of official dossiers: in most cases the birth certificates of those presumed centenarians do not exist or pertain to other people, and in other situations, death certificates would be inaccurate or nonexistent.
A scientific community far from unanimous
The response from blue zone proponents did not take long. Researchers defending the “blue zones” rejected Newman’s work, calling it “irresponsible both ethically and academically,” and demographers claimed to have “meticulously verified” the ages of the “supercentenarians” using historical documents and records dating back to the 1800s. Newman does not retreat and flips the argument against his critics: “If you start from a faulty birth certificate, copied onto other certificates, you obtain dossiers that are perfectly coherent… and perfectly wrong.” A well-filled file is thus not necessarily a true file; it can simply be a well-copied error.
The debate remains lively, including on the very solidity of his work. Demographer Michel Poulain, of the Catholic University of Leuven, who himself coined the term “blue zone” with epidemiologist Giovanni Pes, notes that Newman has been trying to publish his study for four years, without success until recently. A paper battle that has lasted nearly a decade, between a researcher chasing administrative flaws and a community defending field data.
Faced with this tangle of paperwork, one avenue gradually emerges as a neutral arbiter: biology rather than administration. It will require biological measures to free itself from the risk of fraud, civil-status errors, or person substitution; the most promising method is DNA methylation, an “epigenetic clock” that cannot be misled by a falsified birth certificate. Steve Horvath, the inventor of this molecular clock, has described Newman’s analysis as rigorous, while noting that some blue zones could still prove authentic once tested with this tool. The final verdict may not come from a dusty civil registry, but from a saliva sample.
Sources: brut.media | ici.radio-canada.ca | 20min.ch
