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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

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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

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Speaker 1: Commission is gearing up for legal action. A record number

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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

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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

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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

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Speaker 1: in depth health reporting right now at the Australian dot

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Speaker 1: com dot a you slash health