Blue Zones — Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest
In plain English
Journalist Dan Buettner and a team of demographers and dietitians identified five regions with the world's highest rates of healthy centenarians: Okinawa, Sardinia, Ikaria, Nicoya and Loma Linda. They distilled common habits ('Power 9') including ~95% plant-based diet, daily natural movement, strong social ties, and a sense of purpose.
Why it matters
5 longevity zones share ~95% plant diet, daily movement and strong social connection.
Informs: Life Expectancy·Blue Zones
Provenance
- Design
- Ecological / population-level
- Sample size (n)
- 250,000
- Peer-reviewed
- No
- Replications
- 2
- Funding
- Mixed (public + private/non-profit)
- Funders
- National Geographic Society
- Institutions
- National Geographic, Blue Zones LLC
decades.plus score
A transparent 0–100 weighted sum across six components. Higher scores reflect bigger, cleaner, more replicated work.
Caveats
Synthesis is journalistic, not peer-reviewed in the conventional sense — the underlying demographic data, however, is peer-reviewed (Poulain, Rosero-Bixby, Willcox, Panagiotakos).
