The Blue Zones

It all began at a work desk, not on a paradise beach. Dan Buettner, an American journalist and explorer, teamed up with the demographers Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, who were studying why Sardinia, in Italy, had a concentration of male centenarians far above the world average. The two researchers marked the island's villages with a blue pen on a map, wherever the most people reached one hundred. That is where the name blue zone was born.

Buettner saw something bigger there than an academic paper. With support from National Geographic and the American National Institute on Aging, he put together expeditions to find other places with the same pattern: ordinary people living longer and with less chronic disease than the average, checked against birth records and census data, not neighbors' anecdotes.

The result, published in 2008 and revised in 2012, brought together five regions: Barbagia, in the mountainous interior of Sardinia; Okinawa, in Japan; the Adventist community of Loma Linda, in California; the Nicoya Peninsula, in Costa Rica; and, in the revised edition, the Greek island of Ikaria. None of them is wealthy, none has a fancy gym or imported supplements, and that contrast is exactly what holds the whole book together.

In Barbagia, a shepherding region in the mountainous heart of Sardinia, Buettner found villages with a record proportion of men who lived past one hundred, which stands out because in most of the world women live much longer than men. The explanation the book offers starts with geography: steep terrain forces shepherds to climb up and down hills every day, for decades on end, without ever setting foot in a gym.

But the point Buettner stresses most is social: the elderly in Barbagia are not retired in the sense of being pushed out of useful life. They keep being consulted, respected, and asked to weigh in on family decisions, almost as if age were a promotion, not a cut in duties.

You can think about this by comparing it to the grandfather who, here in the U.S., becomes a decorative presence after he retires, only called over for Sunday lunch. In Barbagia, the grandfather is still summoned to settle inheritance fights, give his opinion on family business, and look after the grandkids while the parents work regular jobs.

Okinawa, an archipelago in southern Japan, appears in the book as the home of the world record for female centenarians. Buettner credits part of that to a concept residents carry from childhood: ikigai, a Japanese word with no exact translation, centered on having a clear reason to get out of bed every day, even in old age.

The book also describes the traditional Okinawan diet, historically low in meat and rich in sweet potatoes, tofu, and vegetables, along with the custom of eating slowly until you feel eighty percent full, a practice called hara hachi bu, which avoided calorie overload without turning into a boring restrictive diet.

A third point is the moai, a small group of friends formed in childhood who commit to supporting each other financially and emotionally for life, like a social savings account. If one loses a job, the group helps.