What The World's Longevity Hot Spots Really Teach Us

After reporting that the tech billionaire trying to bio-hack his way to immortality had his lungs wrecked by covid, I did some research on longevity.

What are the conditions that actually deliver a long life?

You won’t be surprised to hear that it isn’t an abstemious existence consisting of a hundred different supplements daily, injecting yourself with child plasma and not eating after 11am.

It is, in fact, almost the complete opposite.

To begin with, in places where people live longest, the day is barely starting by 11am.

These places, dubbed ‘blue zones’ fifteen years ago by researcher Dan Buettner, are home to outsized percentages of people living both beyond 100 and beyond their country’s average life expectancy.

They are Icaria, a small Greek island in the Aegean sea; Ogliastra, a region on the Italian island of Sardinia; the Japanese island of Okinawa; small towns on the Nicoya Peninsula in eastern Costa Rica; and The Seventh-day Adventist community of Loma Linda in California’s San Bernadino Valley.

The conditions that enable long lives in these places are much as you would expect: sun and warmth, active outdoor lifestyles, clean air, a diet rich in locally-grown fruits, vegetables and herbs, moderate fish eating, moderate wine drinking, little to no meat eating, a sex life into old age, good sleep (and daytime naps), low stress, friendships and social interaction. None of these places were ever the site of significant industrial or extractive activity.

There are also some factors that on first glance appear surprising.

Most of these places have high official unemployment. Unemployment on Ikaria, for example, is 40%. (The island also has an illiteracy rate of 10%). Okinawa has the highest unemployment of any region in Japan. Many on Ikaria can’t or don’t drive. A lot of the small towns on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula are not connected, or have only recently been connected to larger towns with asphalt roads.

You might have spotted something else. Three of the five blue zones are found on islands. And the towns of the Nicoya Peninsula are isolated. Only the Seventh Day Adventists are an outlier in this regard (although Loma Linda is small and the Adventists keep a close-knit community).

Yet all the articles I read about these places never mentioned what I think could also be a critical factor in the longevity bestowed on their residents: they are far less visited and far less populous, than many other places on the planet.

What happens when a place or community remains isolated? It isn’t exposed to imported diseases. Low population density is also a natural brake on infectious disease transmission.

As far as I’m aware, no one has ever looked at the connection between life expectancy, population density and isolated communities. We know very well that historically, isolated people were wiped out by diseases introduced by colonialists. It seems no stretch at all to believe that modern day communities which have remained relatively isolated from the global economy, and are sparsely populated, would be less afflicted by infectious disease. Might there also be genetic benefits to being born in a place that retains features of a world before hi-tech globalisation?

Because of Ikaria’s lack of a natural harbour, it was historically outside the main shipping routes in the Mediterranean. The same goes for Ogliastra in eastern Sardinia, which is also the least populated province in all of Italy. Okinawa has a rich trading history, but, again, is the least populated of Japan’s islands. The Nicoya Peninsula is Costa Rica’s largest, but because of this, and its distance from the capital San José, the population density (around 60 people per sq km) is significantly below Costa Rica’s average (around 100 people per sq km).

The link between longevity and viral infection is under-studied but, whenever it has been studied, the link is clear. If you want to live a long life, you should avoid viruses.

We labour under the cultural misconception that viruses kill in the short term. We’re increasing finding out they kill in the long-term too. Research into the 1918 pandemic has shown how viruses can embed ill-health for a generation.

Could low viral infection rates be a key element in blue zone life expectancy?

It wouldn’t surprise me. We know there is no amount of viral exposure that is beneficial. The propaganda that infection with a virus ‘trains’ your immune system is nonsense.

Exposure ideally comes in the form of vaccines, which, if enough people receive, ensures a virus is engineered out of society (herd immunity), or, if that isn’t possible, reduces the risk of serious illness and death if you do come into contact with the virus in question.

But it is never the case that a viral infection is beneficial. Any antibody and T-cell protection you get from infection with a virus is nothing that can’t be achieved with a vaccine.

This is not true for bacteria. And conflating the two, which many often do, is a serious category error.

Bacteria and viruses are very different beasts. It is absolutely the case that exposure to certain bacteria, especially during childhood, helps build a diverse gut microbiome essential to a functioning immune system.

This is never true with viruses. A virus can only deplete, not strengthen, your immune system, as I’ve written about before.

(Residents of the blue zones will also have reaped the bacterial benefits of significant time spent with their hands in the dirt).

Reading the many articles about the blue zones in the mainstream press is striking. The thrust of them is always the same: if you repeat some of these habits you can have longer life. But by attempting to tease out some truths about longevity, they appear as gigantic feats of cognitive dissonance. None of them ever address the elephant in the room and reach for the obvious truth: a blue zone lifestyle is unattainable for most under global, industrial capitalism.

High unemployment, with time spent gardening, sleeping and having sex, is utterly antithetical to a political economy that fetishizes busy-ness and work. Such a world would require a total remodelling of tax frameworks and a basic income for all. Local, organic food, with everyone having access to a garden or plot, would demand a complete restructuring of land rights and ownership. The chemicals lobby would no longer exist. Reducing population density would depend upon deliberate anti-natalist strategies. Right now, billionaires and economists stoke moral panic about young people not having children. Scaling back the conditions for viral transmission would mean de-globalising the world.

The lesson the blue zones really teach us, a lesson that the media could never elucidate, is that the conditions for true health and longevity will always remain out of reach as long as this system endures.

The blue zones, as currently existing models of longevity, scream to us that most dangerous truth: this system must end.