Correction (July 21, 2026): An earlier version of this article presented Saul Newman’s critique of Blue Zones with more certainty than the available evidence justified. It incorrectly described his central paper as peer-reviewed, and described him simply as a demographer without explaining that his formal academic training is in medical science and that he previously worked in biology and genomics. From our research, Newman’s paper remains an unpublished preprint, with no publicly available record of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This version corrects those points and includes a published scientific response to his conclusions.

For years, Blue Zones have been promoted as places where unusual numbers of people lived beyond one hundred because of a distinctive combination of diet, movement, social connection and purpose. Those ideas were eventually organised into the branded “Power 9” principles. More recently, an unpublished paper by researcher Saul Newman offered a much more destructive explanation: poor records, clerical error and fraud.

We previously wrote about Newman’s argument as though it had largely settled the matter. However, it should be noted that his paper remains a preprint, its conclusions are strongly contested, and experienced researchers have published a substantive response disputing his claims.

A brief history of the term “blue zone”

The term “blue zone” emerged from research by Belgian demographer Michel Poulain and Italian physician Giovanni Pes into exceptional longevity in Sardinia. Their 2004 AKEA study used demographic data to identify a geographically concentrated area of exceptional longevity in central-eastern Sardinia, particularly among men.

Journalist Dan Buettner later helped popularise and expand the idea. In 2005, he published a National Geographic story examining longevity in Sardinia’s Ogliastra region, Okinawa in Japan and Loma Linda in California.

Buettner subsequently registered “Blue Zones” as a trademark. Blue Zones LLC was sold to Adventist Health in 2020. 

A researcher challenges the records

In July 2019, Saul Newman posted a preprint titled “Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans.” The paper was later revised and retitled “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud.”

The paper reports, among other findings, that the introduction of state birth certificates in the United States was associated with a substantial fall in recorded supercentenarians, that many validated supercentenarians lacked birth certificates, and that regions reporting exceptional longevity were often poorer and less healthy than their national averages. Newman interprets those patterns as evidence that error plays a primary role in remarkable-age records.

Newman obtained a PhD from the Australian National University’s John Curtin School of Medical Research. According to his UCL profile, he subsequently worked in plant science, genomics, remote sensing and artificial intelligence before moving into demography at Oxford. He now holds positions at UCL’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies and the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing.

UCL Institute of Education has publicly called Newman a demographer, and his institutional biography says that he moved into demography at Oxford. It is nevertheless more precise to say that he is a researcher trained in medical science who later moved into demographic research, rather than implying that his original academic training was in demography.

Newman’s preprint has been revised since it first appeared. It attracted enormous attention because its explanation was both simple and provocative: perhaps some famous concentrations of centenarians were not evidence of extraordinary longevity at all, but artefacts of unreliable documents.

That possibility deserves investigation. But a preprint is a manuscript made publicly available before formal journal publication; it is not, by itself, an established scientific finding. UCL’s own announcement of Newman’s prize explicitly described the paper as a “pre-print, not yet peer-reviewed.”

The paper remains unpublished

From our research, Newman’s central paper has not been formally published in a peer-reviewed journal. It remains publicly available as a preprint on bioRxiv.

In reporting published by STAT News, Newman said the manuscript had passed through nine rounds of review at BMJ Public Health. According to this report, he attributed the failure to publish it to resistance from established researchers.

That is Newman’s publicly reported account of the review process. To our knowledge, the journal’s editorial correspondence, reviewer reports and complete decision history have not been made public. It is therefore not possible from the public record to establish precisely why the paper was not accepted.

The published scientific response

On December 17, 2025, Steven Austad and Giovanni Pes published a peer-reviewed paper in The Gerontologist titled “The validity of Blue Zones demography: a response to critiques.”As they put it, “All Blue Zones described herein have been extensively validated based on thoroughly cross-checked data from multiple independent sources plus state-of-the-art demographic methods.”

The paper is a substantive response to Newman, but it is not entirely independent of the work being defended. Pes was a co-author of the original 2004 Sardinian Blue Zone study. Austad is the scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research, which convened researchers involved in developing a formal definition of a Blue Zone.

Those connections do not invalidate their analysis. They are relevant because the dispute involves researchers defending or challenging bodies of work with which they have been professionally associated. The appropriate response is not to dismiss either side because of those associations, but to examine the methods, records and calculations directly.

Further scrutiny is under way

The scientific debate has continued beyond the published Austad and Pes response.

According to STAT News, longevity researcher S. Jay Olshansky has been working with Poulain, Pes and Buettner on a separate analysis.mOlshansky is an emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois Chicago whose research focuses on longevity, ageing and life expectancy.

In April 2026, researchers convened by the American Federation for Aging Research announced that they had reached a consensus on a more formal scientific definition of a Blue Zone. The announced criteria included “administrative data strong enough to support age validation”.

The decline in some original regions is real

None of this means that the popular Blue Zones story survives unchanged.

Peer-reviewed research indicates that the exceptional survival patterns associated with at least some original Blue Zone regions have weakened among younger generations.

Demographer Luis Rosero-Bixby found in a 2023 study in Demographic Research that the longevity advantage among men in Nicoya, Costa Rica, was disappearing across later-born cohorts. Nicoyan men born in 1905 had substantially lower adult mortality than other Costa Rican men, while those born in 1945 had higher mortality. The study nevertheless found that surviving Nicoyan men born before 1930 continued to exhibit exceptionally high longevity.

Michel Poulain and Anne Herm reported a similarly important generational division in Okinawa in a 2024 paper in the Journal of Internal Medicine. Their analysis divided the population into generations born before and after the Second World War. The older generations displayed a highly favourable mortality pattern, while later-born Okinawans had mortality levels higher than those in mainland Japan.

The authors noted that Okinawa fell from fourth to 26th among Japan’s 47 prefectures for male life expectancy in 2002. They considered several possible explanations for the divergence, including changing lifestyles and the possible invalidity of some recorded ages among the oldest residents.

These findings do not by themselves show that the original longevity records were fraudulent. Rosero-Bixby concluded that pre-1930 Nicoyan men still alive were exceptional survivors, while Poulain and Herm called for more detailed demographic age validation rather than concluding that Okinawan longevity had been fabricated.

Where the evidence now stands

The most defensible conclusion is not that Blue Zones have been completely debunked, nor that the original story has survived untouched. Future research will likely make the picture clearer.

Some original regions appear to have experienced genuine and carefully documented periods of exceptional longevity. The original Sardinian work identified a concentrated area of exceptional male longevity, while the Nicoya research found that surviving members of older cohorts remained exceptional even as the advantage disappeared among later generations.

Some of those demographic advantages have declined. The decline is documented in Nicoya and Okinawa, but the researchers studying those changes have not treated them as proof of fraud.

The scientific dispute remains active. A peer-reviewed response defending the demographic validity of the original research is already in print, and additional work by well-respected researchers examining the regions has been publicly reported as under way.

Until the competing calculations, source records and methods have been fully examined in published work, claims that either side has conclusively settled the question should be treated with caution.