Speaker 1: From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey.
Speaker 2: It's Wednesday, December eighteenth. A and Z allegedly slapped dead
Speaker 2: customers with account fees, an error that's landed the bank
Speaker 2: in the corporate regulators sites. The Australian Securities and Investments
Speaker 2: Commission is gearing up for legal action. A record number
Speaker 2: of businesses have plunged into insolvency since the last election.
Speaker 2: Now construction industry bosses a warning it could put the
Speaker 2: government's home building ambitions in jeopardy. Those stories alive right
Speaker 2: now at the Australian dot com dot It's a pretty
Speaker 2: captivating idea. Blue zones, pockets of the planet where residents
Speaker 2: possess a unique ability to live to one hundred. It's
Speaker 2: a Netflix show and a series of diet books movement,
Speaker 2: all about how we eat, live and move. But now
Speaker 2: an Australian expert is casting doubt and the scientific community
Speaker 2: is paying attention.
Speaker 1: It probably sounds too good to be true, but it's true.
Speaker 3: Our next time, Dan Bucher says he's found the recipe
Speaker 3: for how to reach it happy and healthy one hundred years.
Speaker 3: If we can find the optimal lifestyle of longevity.
Speaker 1: We can come up with a de facto formula for longevity.
Speaker 3: Places around the world where people seem to defy the
Speaker 3: limits of age, and this.
Speaker 1: Is what they eat.
Speaker 2: If he's been anywhere near Netflix lately, you'll have noticed
Speaker 2: the very alluring idea of places on planet Earth where
Speaker 2: people leave to one hundred. What if we could reverse
Speaker 2: engineer longevity.
Speaker 3: I've spent the last twenty years trying to do just that.
Speaker 2: But what if it was all a bit of a
Speaker 2: beat up. Stephen lann is the Australian Social Affairs editor.
Speaker 4: So the blue zone idea was created in about two
Speaker 4: thousand and four. It was a journalist called Dan Buetner,
Speaker 4: and he went and explored areas of the world where
Speaker 4: there was a high proportion of people living to one
Speaker 4: hundred and he wanted to get behind what the commonalities
Speaker 4: were in those areas.
Speaker 3: And these secrets could help every one of us to
Speaker 3: get every good year we.
Speaker 1: Can get out of this body of ours.
Speaker 5: That is the promise of blue zones.
Speaker 4: There's Okinawa in Japan, There's part of Costa Rica, one
Speaker 4: of the Greek islands in the Aegean, Sardinia, among others,
Speaker 4: and he looked for commonalities in those areas to see
Speaker 4: what their secret was for a long life, and it
Speaker 4: came up with a sort of a series of common factors,
Speaker 4: which were things like constant incidental exercise, So if you
Speaker 4: were living a lifestyle where you were always in the
Speaker 4: garden or tending fields, et cetera, that was important, plant
Speaker 4: based diet, limited amount of alcohol but not no alcohol.
Speaker 4: And importantly, continuing social connection so you are close to
Speaker 4: both family and also a broader social connection.
Speaker 1: So no taking the lift up to my second floor office.
Speaker 4: Then no, I don't think you can sit around on
Speaker 4: your backside for ten hours a day and then go
Speaker 4: to the gym half an hour and think that's going
Speaker 4: to be the secret to getting to one hundred.
Speaker 2: So sounds pretty good, sounds like fairly straightforward things that
Speaker 2: we could all be doing.
Speaker 1: So why are we then not all living to one hundred.
Speaker 4: Well, genetics does come into it, and people don't do
Speaker 4: the things that he's suggesting, And the ideas behind blue
Speaker 4: zones are certainly relevant, and you see them in all
Speaker 4: the health information all of the time. It basically boils
Speaker 4: down to moderate intensity exercise of a certain duration most
Speaker 4: days a decent diet, limiting your alcohol, and maintaining connections.
Speaker 4: They're pretty common themes that run through a lot of
Speaker 4: the health information that we have at the moment. The
Speaker 4: Blue Zone story by Dan spawned the Netflix series, a
Speaker 4: range of diet books and exercise books. So it's been
Speaker 4: a fair bit of mileage on the blue zone theory
Speaker 4: in the last twenty years.
Speaker 1: And is it real?
Speaker 4: Well, I've spoken to an Australian academic who is in Oxford.
Speaker 4: His name is Soul Newman, and he's looked carefully at this,
Speaker 4: including going back to all of the areas where these
Speaker 4: centenarians were from and just exploring the data behind it,
Speaker 4: and he came up with some pretty interesting findings, basically
Speaker 4: finding that the majority of people who claim to have
Speaker 4: lived to one hundred in these places are either missing
Speaker 4: or dead, and there's a range of reasons why the
Speaker 4: data is flawed. So he's kind of debunking the foundation
Speaker 4: of blue zones. He doesn't say that the message behind
Speaker 4: blue zones are wrong, but the foundation of where blue
Speaker 4: zones are is based on pretty dodgy data, according to
Speaker 4: Soul Newman.
Speaker 2: So taking probably the most famous one, Okinawa, the island
Speaker 2: in Japan.
Speaker 1: You spend a lot of time in Japan.
Speaker 2: There is a very healthy diet, and we do see
Speaker 2: a lot of old people from Japan. So is it
Speaker 2: not true that people in Okinawa are generally living to
Speaker 2: one hundred Well.
Speaker 4: My interest was piqued in this story because I've been
Speaker 4: to Okinawa and my memory of it. The Okinawan diet
Speaker 4: was that it was spam from the US military forces
Speaker 4: in the forties was one of the foundations of their diet.
Speaker 4: So I was trying to work out how that was
Speaker 4: a big thing. Yes, they used a lot of pickled
Speaker 4: vegetables as well, but none of that kind of translated through.
Speaker 1: Okinawa is actually one hundred and sixty one small islands,
Speaker 1: and in the northern part of the main island.
Speaker 3: This is ground zero for world longevity.
Speaker 4: But what soul Newman found when he looked at this
Speaker 4: was that he went to the records to discover and
Speaker 4: hopefully talked to some of these centenarians and discovered that
Speaker 4: around seventy percent of them weren't actually alive, and that
Speaker 4: because of the Second World War, many buildings were blown up,
Speaker 4: including all of the records, so there were no birth
Speaker 4: certificates to find and so there weren't actually the centenarians
Speaker 4: proportion in Okinawa that was originally believed. And he then
Speaker 4: sort of having done that, then went to the other places,
Speaker 4: including this area in Greece and in Sardinia as well,
Speaker 4: where he said about seventy percent of the people who
Speaker 4: claimed to have made it to one hundred hadn't actually
Speaker 4: done so, and much of it was to do with
Speaker 4: welfare frauds, so families were basically keeping their dead relative
Speaker 4: alive so that they continued to claim welfare checks for
Speaker 4: years and years after they had passed on. So in
Speaker 4: uncovering this, he was this year awarded the Ignobel Prize,
Speaker 4: which is a science prize awarded to work that has
Speaker 4: debunked other conventional science. So I think he might have
Speaker 4: a case to answer. I do think though that there
Speaker 4: is something to be said for the messaging behind blue zones,
Speaker 4: but the data that sort of originally led to its creation,
Speaker 4: he's fairly comprehensively debunked. I would say.
Speaker 2: Lunny spoke to doctor Saul Newman via zoom.
Speaker 5: So I have discovered that first of all, most centenarians
Speaker 5: in the blue zones, most one hundred year olds in
Speaker 5: the blue zones were missing or dead when the study
Speaker 5: was conducted. The findings are therefore based on bad data.
Speaker 5: On top of that, all of the lifestyle claims don't
Speaker 5: stack up when measured by independent data. So health from
Speaker 5: the blue zones was claimed to be good, and it
Speaker 5: was in fact poored before, during, and after they were
Speaker 5: established to an extraordinary degree.
Speaker 2: Coming up, how the world's oldest people could be just
Speaker 2: not really that old. If you've spent much time in
Speaker 2: a nursing home, you might be wondering do I even
Speaker 2: want to live to one hundred? And when we see
Speaker 2: the most ancient human beings, they often don't look like
Speaker 2: they're enjoying it that much.
Speaker 5: A birthday cake for the woman thought to be the
Speaker 5: longest living human being in the world.
Speaker 2: Well, get this, a Japanese woman takes the cake as
Speaker 2: the world's oldest person of notification from the Guinness Book
Speaker 2: of World Records that the world's oldest man has died.
Speaker 1: At the age of one hundred and twelve.
Speaker 2: But what if they actually weren't that old anyway?
Speaker 4: Soul Newman also looked at the number of people who
Speaker 4: had claimed to be the world's oldest person and even
Speaker 4: that he said there was a range of dodgy representations
Speaker 4: of people as being the old world's oldest person. There's
Speaker 4: been a number of people, but I think at two
Speaker 4: or three ago was someone from Venezuela who was a
Speaker 4: complete charlatan who started to claim a particular age as
Speaker 4: part of some sort of inheritance dispute and just stuck
Speaker 4: to it. And because the president of Venezuela was getting
Speaker 4: a bad time about the international standing of Venezuela at
Speaker 4: the time, he latched onto this guy's claim that he
Speaker 4: was the world's oldest man and ran with it, and
Speaker 4: so did the world's media. With no one checking any
Speaker 4: data looking for a birth certificate, the fact that there
Speaker 4: was this claim was enough for people to continue to
Speaker 4: cite this Venezuelan as the world's oldest man.
Speaker 2: We were both born in the twentieth century money, So
Speaker 2: I guess one of the factors that we have to
Speaker 2: deal with is we might live to one hundred, whether
Speaker 2: we want to or not, because all of our life
Speaker 2: expectancies have grown, haven't they.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I looked pretty carefully at this, because I was intrigued.
Speaker 4: I went back through the ABS data and looked at
Speaker 4: my birth year, which I'm not going to say on air,
Speaker 4: but the life expectancy at birth for me and for
Speaker 4: males born up to the year nineteen seventy was under
Speaker 4: seventy years old, around sixty eight point five sixty nine
Speaker 4: years of age, and for women it was in their
Speaker 4: seventy three seventy four years old. If you're over fifty now,
Speaker 4: when you were born, you weren't expected to live much
Speaker 4: longer than seventy as a man and seventy five as
Speaker 4: a woman. Things have obviously changed, and those factors take
Speaker 4: into account infant mortality, in which we've obviously done really
Speaker 4: well with. So now Australia's life expectancy at birth is
Speaker 4: one of the highest in the world, around eighty five
Speaker 4: for women and eighty one and a half for men.
Speaker 4: But I see that as a massive change in just
Speaker 4: sort of two generations, that we've gone from a life
Speaker 4: expectancy of under seventy for men to a life expectancy
Speaker 4: of over eighty and for women there's been a similar
Speaker 4: number of years of change. One of the great statistics
Speaker 4: that is collected by some of the data is healthy
Speaker 4: life years and health adjusted life years, and so at
Speaker 4: the moment Australians of both sexes tend to live about
Speaker 4: the last ten years of their life in poor quality health.
Speaker 4: So if we're living healthier for longer, that's a good thing.
Speaker 4: But I guess the trick is to minimize that last
Speaker 4: period of your life when you're living in poor health.
Speaker 2: Stephen lann is the Australian Social Affairs edit up. You
Speaker 2: can read that story, as well as all our teams
Speaker 2: in depth health reporting right now at the Australian dot
Speaker 2: com dot a you slash health