Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
You’ve probably heard of the Blue Zones: a handful of locations around the globe where people supposedly live to be 100 at astonishingly high rates. That evocative notion has inspired best-selling books, at least one Netflix documentary series, and no small number of diet plans.
But how certain can we be that Blue Zones really exist? My guest today has spent years digging into that question, and let’s just say he’s not convinced.
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Saul Justin Newman is a senior research fellow at University College London and the University of Oxford. His new book, Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science, takes a skeptical, irreverent look at the booming business of lengthening human lifespans and finds the data wanting.
Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.
Saul Newman: It’s my pleasure.
Feltman: So why don’t we start with how you first got interested in studying longevity?
Newman: Well, it was almost by accident. I’ve compared it to all sorts of things. I think the most fun was: Imagine the janitor fell into the dungeon at the castle and, you know, had to fight the dragon with a mop and bucket, right? It’s just—I didn’t mean to get involved. But a friend had sent me this paper in Nature, and I’d had an interest in it. I’d written this doctoral thesis on the evolution of how long you live. And he sent me this paper, and it was awful. I mean, completely awful.
They had decided that there was this limit to human life, right? 115, 125 years. And their logic was essentially, well, human improvements in lifespan have stopped getting better at old ages. But the way they’d discovered this was to accidentally round off all the data at these old ages to zero and publish that in the best journal in the world. And I couldn’t let it go because it was such a terrible paper. And, you know, it’s now eight years later, and I’m still trying to get it retracted.
And so I became interested, you know, if the standards of evidence are this low, what is the answer? You know, is there this limit to human life? Is there not? And from there, I just kept getting more and more interested. It was like being an air crash investigator. It’s macabre. Something has gone drastically wrong. But I also just, I really wanna know: What has happened? You know, what is the answer here? And here I am, almost a decade later, still tugging at threads.
Feltman: Well, and for listeners who don’t spend a lot of time looking at the statistics section of papers in Nature, could you unpack for us a little bit about what it seemed had gone wrong in that study? And then why, if so, there’s been so much pushback to you raising those concerns?
Newman: Well, the things that had gone wrong ran to maybe a dozen pages. But the two key ones were first, that they’d picked the wrong column in a spreadsheet, and that column had got rounded down to zero, right? And it was like, how much longer do I expect to live at age 100? There’s two columns, one that says the real value, one that’s rounded off, and they’d used the rounded-off data.
The second thing they’d done, which is even more, sort of, high-school-failure-at-maths kind of logic, was that they had said the maximum age that humans had reached had gone up and then down. But the sample size they’d used had also gone up and then down, right? They’d started including countries in the study, then they’d started taking them away. And if you corrected for that, like, within each country, the maximum human lifespan was going up.
And I think the reaction was really interesting because one part of the reaction was to just pretend it never happened, and the other was an opposing team who effectively said, “Oh, no, no, no, there’s no limit to human lifespan. We’re gonna publish in Science.” And what they’d done is they had rounded up all the 105-year-old records in Italy and said, “Well, we’re gonna fit our model, and we’re gonna show that instead of reaching a limit that you can’t survive past, there’s this other situation, a situation called a late-life mortality plateau.”
And what that really is is a situation where effectively you’re playing Russian roulette every few months in terms of survival, right? There’s no limit to how long you can get a run of luck, but your odds of dying every year are about 50 percent. Now, this was published in Science, and it was more extraordinary because the model they fit treated midlife as age 65 to 80. Now, that’s not midlife, and if you change that assumption at all in any direction and use the same data, the same models, they didn’t get a result. The result ran away. So out of 861 possible inputs, theirs was the only result that gave you a significant outcome and the only thing that gave you a science paper.
So that’s, you know, that’s either research fraud or an extraordinary, extraordinary coincidence, right? And I think we can figure out which one, because if it was a coincidence, they would’ve retracted the paper.
Feltman: Mm. So tell us a little bit about your new book. You know, like you said, it’s been almost a decade, thinking about this, digging into it. So how has your thinking on it evolved?
Newman: Well, when you look at this field, you can either get angry, or you could do what I’ve done, which is make a sort of self-effacing comedy book about how pointless it all is. Because you get this long parade, this carnival parade of ideas, and none of them ever work in aging science. Like, there’s never been a single thing that’s worked in aging science, and yet you’re spending billions of dollars. You know, one of these researchers, just one of them, had sunk something like $8 billion worth of [other] people’s money into nothing. He turned it into house extensions, effectively. And so, you know, my thinking has evolved to be more cynical.
But, I’ve come at this from a very interesting perspective because my job when I started getting interested in longevity involved manipulating organisms’ lifespans. I was predicting flowering time, right? In plants. And in plants, we have a excellent understanding of how to change how long something lives. It’s trivial, right? We’ve been doing it for century and a half at least. And yet those systems don’t look anything like the supposed longevity cures we’re being pitched. They have absolutely nothing to do with, you know, someone selling me pills on YouTube. And that contrast was remarkable to me because it enabled me to pull apart many of these core ideas that people in aging science have been pitching.
You know, one of them was this idea of telomeres, the idea that this little clock on the end of your chromosomes that gets shorter and shorter as you age is what makes you get older, effectively, is what makes you age. And this is an incredibly popular idea.
And it’s junk, because the core idea of the telomere hypothesis is that if clockwork shortening of these things on the end of your chromosomes causes aging, well, why not just make the clock longer or wind it up? And the answer is, well, it prevents cancer growth. You know, the original idea was that telomeres get shorter and shorter and shorter, and when they get short enough, cancers stop growing. It completely halts cancer growth, and that’s the benefit. So you get this tug-of-war between cancer on one side and aging on the other, and somewhere in the middle you end up with a bit of aging and a bit of cancer.
But the core problem hiding in the open is that cancer doesn’t stop growing, right? And yet everyone ages. So you have this thing that happens to every single one of us always, and the mechanism that’s supposed to be holding it in balance has been observed nowhere, any—like, by nobody. Cancers, like, they don’t spontaneously cease growing. So one of the questions raised is: How did you have this idea in the public with tens of thousands of scientific papers for decades when it is so ridiculous that the idea that this occurs?
And, you know, I kept running across problems like this again and again and again. One of the most popular was pulling apart Blue Zones, but this was sort of, it’s almost an afterthought in the process of pulling down these, sort of, charlatan-driven narratives of aging research.
Feltman: Well, and since this is one that I think will be most familiar to listeners, I would love to hear a little bit about the Blue Zone thing. You know: How did we become so obsessed with Blue Zones, and what did you find when you started poking around at them?
Newman: Well, initially I just was interested in a theoretical process. But the Blue Zones was fascinating because it’s hugely popular, and the idea is that somewhere far away, there’s this exotic place where people live past 100 at an extraordinary rate.
Now, first of all, the data behind that either doesn’t make sense or is in terrible shape. So in Okinawa, for example, it turned out that if an American plane had bombed the place during World War II, especially destroying, like, the town hall with all the birth records, that’s where you got the 100-year-olds. And this very simple reason was that the American GIs working in a different calendar, different language, had replaced the birth certificates. And of course they made errors.
And the other reason is this remarkable problem that in Japan you have the head of the household register a death. Now, if the household gets hit by a firebomb and everyone dies, who registers the death? Nobody. So you had this remarkable case in 2010 where 236,000 people, roughly 82 percent of the 100-year-olds in the country, turned out to have been long dead, and nobody had noticed, especially not the Blue Zones demographers, despite the fact they’d been studying the place since 1976.
The data actually got worse from there because Loma Linda, you know, I pressured the discoverer of the Loma Linda Blue Zone—the only American Blue Zone. “Where is your data?” And he admitted, “Well, I got asked by my editor to find an American Blue Zone, so I found one.” On the drive between his house in LA and Las Vegas, there’s a turn, and beneath the eight-lane freeway, is Loma Linda, which apparently has a fountain of youth. And that’s it. That’s the evidence.
And, you know, it got worse and worse. The Greek one was amazing. There was recently an investigative report into the only 100-year-old named by the Blue Zones for Greece. Now, he was claimed to reach 102, and he was claimed to have survived lung cancer for 30 years. But if you looked at his private documents, his personal documents, he was in his 90s, and if you asked his personal doctor, he’d never had cancer.
Feltman: Wow.
Newman: And that was, published in the New York Times and a bunch of cancer patients loved it. And it was based on nothing.
Feltman: What do you think it is that makes this field so prone to this kind of, you know, sloppy work at best and, you know, potentially outright deception?
Newman: It’s very simple. No one wants to go to the gym, right? Nobody, nobody wants to do the hard stuff that’s like, “Well, how do I live a long time?” Like, go and ask a doctor who cares about you, “How do I live a long time?” They’ll say what I say. “Get some exercise, don’t drink, don’t smoke, and if you’re in doubt, like, come and talk to the doctor again.” Now, none of that can be sold. Like, there’s no YouTube profit to be made out of that. So if you wanna avoid all that stuff, then someone will sell you a magic pill.
And even more, sort of, troublesome is, if you do all this stuff, if you’re a weekend warrior, and you run the marathon, you’re an even better sales target because you’re easy to convince that there’s something else you have to do, right? It’s very easy to convince these people that you’ve got to go further than the marathon. It’s simply not the case, but it leads to this extraordinary set of sales pitches. And we’re seeing this come out in really toxic ways because billionaires are very susceptible to this. And, when the stakes are that high, when there is, you know, some of these people selling longevity cures are making tens of millions of dollars, then they will go to any length to sell it. Any length. You know, you’ve got clinics in Saudi Arabia, clinics in Honduras. They go there explicitly because there are no laws, in governing whether or not you get any after-clinical care, whether or not you die. It’s really remarkable.
But I think the best example of this was when I looked at the people who are supposed to be the world’s oldest people, and I love them because they’re all cheeky scamps, right? Like, there’s no way they’re this old, you just have enough bravery to pretend. America’s oldest man, Charlie Smith, he was amazing. Charlie Smith is essentially just some guy who was working in a field picking fruit, and his boss says, “Charlie, you gotta get some ID.” So he goes to the Social Security Administration, they tell him he’s 113, and then they immediately lose the file. So Charlie is now, as far as anyone is concerned, he’s 113. so he goes to meet the president. They take him to the Apollo launch. They put him in the New York Times. They’re like, “This man is incredible.” It’s like he’s completely making it up, and nobody cares. Everyone loves the guy, and I love the guy. Like, he’s fantastic because it’s clear he’s probably about 68, but he’s just going with it. [Laughs].
We’re so desperate to believe that this happens that we’ve got, like, the chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking guy in the White House. He has no business being there, but he’s wonderful. And it happens, again and again. It’s really funny.
Feltman: So what do you think longevity research would look like if we actually did it?
Newman: Well, we do actually do it, and it’s called medicine. That’s what medicine is, right? People are saying, “Oh, well, what if we tried to make people live longer and have healthier lives?” Like, you think no one’s thought of this before? You think this is a revolutionary, like, new idea? It’s what medicine is. [Laughs].
And so you just get this torrent of nonsense about, “Oh, well, what if we extended [lifespan]?” We already have been doing this for thousands of years in a way that, you know, has rules and results. So I think if you cleaned up longevity research, what you would do is you would close the National Institute [on] Aging, and you would take every single dollar, probably double it, and put it into actual fundamental research that works. That’s all you would do.
And everyone who was in the NIA that knew what they were doing would just change their job title. And everyone who was a charlatan could go down the road and sell mattresses or whatever is plan B.
Feltman: [Laughs]. Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat with us. This has been great.
Newman: It’s been a real pleasure.
Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. Tune in on Friday to hear about folks who are seeking sobriety from social media.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Allison Rodgers and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Marielle Issa and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!