Blue Zones: Revisited

After visiting Blue Zones all over the world, today, we're visiting our home country, Australia. Not because Australia has been declared a secret seventh Blue Zone, but because, months after the first six episodes of this podcast dropped, an Australian researcher, Saul J. Newman, has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize... for debunking the Blue Zones phenomenon. In this bonus episode of Blue Zones: Rev...

Singapore is Live to 100 's evidence that a Blue Zones approach can work in a modern city-state. But just how well does Singapore meet the Blue Zones definition - and, after exploring six different 'Blue Zones', three of which do not contain higher-than-average concentrations of centenarians, one of which was based on faulty data, and one of which isn't even a geographical zone, wh...

Nicoya, Costa Rica is, according to Dan Buettner, home to the 'most extraordinary centenarians on the planet'. One which, for many years, he contends, went unnoticed because researchers couldn't believe the residents of 'such a poor country' could possibly live past 80, let alone 100. In this very special episode of Blue Zones: Revisited (recorded live in Costa Rica!) we questi...

Ikaria, Greece might not have gotten a big feature in the first edition of the Blue Zones book, but it certainly made a splash in the second edition - and the Live to 100 Netflix series. After all, who doesn't associate the beautiful blue Mediterranean sea and sky with a healthy lifestyle? In this fourth episode of Blue Zones: Revisited, we uncover where the idea that the Mediterranean diet is...

Loma Linda, California is the long-awaited American Blue Zone... or is it? Not only does it turn out to be not so 'blue' (we don't see a single centenarian), but it's not even really a 'zone' - at least in a geographical sense. In this third episode of Blue Zones: Revisited, we discover just how much the definition of a 'blue zone' had to be stretched in order to fi...

Sardinia isn't just a 'Blue Zone', an area with a higher concentration of centenarians than usual. It's better described as the beginning of the Blue Zones phenomenon. And it's also a place where you can buy a home for as little as one euro. In this second episode of Blue Zones: Revisited, we ask what happens to the people whose villages are designated as Blue Zones, consider w...

Okinawa is one of the world's 'Blue Zones', areas in which people live unusually long lives... or so we've heard. It's even been described as the 'land of the immortals'. In this first episode of Blue Zones: Revisited , we ask just how unusual Okinawa's population really is, consider whether purple sweet potatoes might be the secret to a long life, and take seriousl...