The cynical failure of "Blue Zones"

How human-centric longevity research turned into a slop trough of marketing schtick.

You’ve probably heard of blue zones, those specific geographic areas on Earth that have a significantly higher than normal ratio of really old people who practice healthy daily habits around food, movement and community. Maybe, like me, you’d watched the blue zones Netflix series, or have read one of the 10 books books written by Mr. Blue Zones himself, Dan Buettner, and felt inspired.

It was nice while it lasted. To quote the late, great B.B. King, the thrill is gone — thanks to Buettner, the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the very American penchant for turning a sweet, cool, original piece of intellectual property into not just a business but an obnoxious marketing monstrosity.

What began as blue zones, an earnest scientific exploration of humans practicing centuries-old habits that inspired the rest of us to learn from them, is now Blue Zones LLC, the artificer of an overweening corporate sales pitch with a loud message: stop what you’re doing and “Shop Now.”

Do it! Shop your Blue Zones® ass off. Buy that $149 Blue Zones® cooking course or clutch of recipes from Blue Zones Kitchen®; pamper your complexion with a $95 Blue Zones® clay mask; grind your own $20 Blue Zones® coffee beans; spice your meals (that sure as hell better include Blue Zones® canned beans) with $40 Blue Zones® hot sauce; and then wash it down with $16 bundles of Blue Zones® black tea.

And if you’re smart, you’ll also get your HSA to pay for Blue Zones® Health consultations, to help you Live Better, Longer®. Your credit card, you see, is the key to unlocking the gates to the Blue Zones Community® and a fulfilling Blue Zones Life® which, according to Blue Zones LLC, leads to — I kid you not — True Happiness®.

Sell, baby, sell

All this feels like a long way from the blue zones origin story, which involves a group of diligent European scientists who around the turn of the century were investigating a preponderance of spry 90-somethings in a remote corner of Sardinia. Because they used a blue pen to draw circles around communities where they found these super-oldies, they — not Dan Buettner — first began referring, in 2000, to them as a “Blue Zone.” They published a research paper on their Blue Zone discovery in 2004.

A few of 46 registered (and 39 pending) trademarks owned by Blue Zones LLC.

The next year, Buettner published his cover story, “Secrets to a Long Life,” in National Geographic magazine. The article identified not only Sardinia but also Okinawa, Japan, and — because Buettner said his editor insisted on the story including an American blue zone — Loma Linda, California, an Adventist community. Loma Linda didn’t fit the original researchers’ strict definition of a “Blue Zone” because the Loma Lindans lived only about 7 years longer than other Californians. By Blue Zone’s own standards, it’s not a Blue Zone.

That same year, 2005, Buettner trademarked the phrase Blue Zones for himself and has gone on to write 10 books on every conceivable blue zones topic¹. Except sex. As of this writing, there’s still no Blue Zones™ Illustrated Guide to Sex After 90.

In 2020, Buettner sold the Blue Zones brand to Adventist Health, a faith-based nonprofit organization affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church (making a book about Blue Zones Sex more unlikely than ever). The serendipity of Buettner’s inclusion of Loma Linda, which is home to the largest Adventist church in the world by membership, as an original Blue Zone in 2005 — 15 years before he sold the Blue Zones brand to a church subsidiary — is noteworthy.

Since then, Adventist Health has registered more than 40 Blue Zones trademarks and has 39 other trademarks pending on everything from guided tours (to Blue Zones, presumably, which now include Singapore) to breakfast cereals, real estate development, yoga instruction, assisted-living services, rain gear, salted nuts, cafés and restaurants and — of course — deodorant.

Blue Zones believers

Amid all the trademarking and brand building, it’s fair to ask: what’s wrong with selling the crap out of healthy food, cooking classes, facial scrubs and even tins of baked beans if it gets people to walk more, lose weight, and eat fewer cheeseburgers and frozen pizzas? Who cares if a healthcare organization focused on clean living and kindness-based spirituality wants to make a legal profit helping communities like Albert Lea, Minn., become healthier through a Blue Zones intervention?

The answer, of course, is: nothing. I don’t condemn the good that may come from even the aggressive exploitation of a beneficial scientific longevity discovery about the lives and habits of worldwide superagers. I just wish it didn’t come with so much relentless marketing of every product or service known to man — not all of it sincere or in good faith.

There’s also the more recent skepticism about the entire Blue Zones premise. But my analysis is more about how, if you market Blue Zones as everything everywhere all at once, people will eventually think of it as nothing anywhere at all anyhow.

The Blue Zones Power 9®, apparently before that phrase was trademarked, too.

Blue zones b.s. and misinformation

More specifically, here are ways the Blue Zones brand has diminished itself.

1. An aggressive intellectual property grab: Buettner perhaps shouldn’t have claimed in his first book, nor continue to claim on his website now, that he “coined” Blue Zones as a concept. He didn’t. Two researchers using that blue pen, Michel Poulain and Giovanni Mario Pes, did in 2000 while studying longevity in Sardinia. Buettner’s argument seems to be that he was the first to apply the researchers phrase — “Blue Zone” (singular) — to a worldwide phenomena — Blue Zones (plural) — of long-lived people living their best Power 9® lives.

2. Marketing a book claiming “100 recipes to live to 100” is sloganeering. If you get to 100, it’s mostly due to your immune system, strength of friendships and ongoing purpose in life, not a recipe book. Please don’t b.s. people.

3. Pushing daily alcohol use as healthy. The Blue Zones website has a page dedicated to “How Wine Helps You Live Longer,” which is what many people thought a decade ago, before an avalanche of more recent research showed that it doesn’t. Elsewhere on its website, Blue Zones says things like, “People who drink — in moderation — tend to outlive those who don’t,” and, “Moderate drinkers outlive non-drinkers” and links to “recent research”….from 2014. But if “Wine at 5” was long ago burned into your trademarked Power 9 graphic, maybe it’s more important to remain on-brand than be accurate and accountable.

4. The gratuitous and cynical inclusion of Loma Linda as a blue zone. Buettner has said the only reason he included Loma Linda, the Adventist community in California, in the five original blue zones was that his editor at National Geographic insisted that he include an American blue zone. “I never bothered to delist it,” he’s quoted as saying in November. This feels quite disingenuous, given Buettner’s written and spoken about blue zones for two decades. Why not bother to correct the record on a sub-par blue zone? If the scientists on the team he lead to verify blue zones don’t believe Loma Linda is one, and given that Buettner has admitted it was included solely to give his Nat Geo article an American spin (as if that magazine’s readers need a ‘Merica twist to find interest in blue zones), Buettner should bother. But, now that Adventist Health owns the Blue Zones brand, Loma Linda seems unlikely to be decertified. Not exactly rigorous science in action.

5. Crappy marketing and false advertising. Scroll down Blue Zones Health’s web page, and you’ll find a banner that says, “Real people, real results.” Under it are fake photos, taken from stock photo agencies, claiming to be images of those “real people” with glowing quotes about how great Blue Zones Health is. For example, “Anika P.” of Culver City, Calif., says:

Anika P. probably isn’t real, because her photo definitely isn’t, and neither are those of all the other “real people” on the page. Adventist Health, whose mission, according to its 2023 IRS tax filing, is “Living God's love by inspiring health, wholeness and hope,” should market its services by a higher standard than “Gaslighting our customers!”

6. About the Adventist Health tax returns….A 2022 IRS filing showed a $7.3 million loss on Blue Zones LLC, and its 2023 tax return — nonprofit organizations’ returns are public record — showed a $91.8 million investment in Blue Zones. That’s quite a significant ramp up, showing where the church aims to go with Blue Zones LLC. Which means that perhaps the only thing standing between you and health, wholeness and hope is your credit card.

1. Buettner’s books include:

1. "The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest" (2008)

2. "Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way" (2010)

3. The Blue Zones (Second Edition): 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest,” with a cover blurb from Dr. Oz.

4. "The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People" (2015)

5. "The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons From the World’s Happiest People" (2017)

6. "The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100" (2019)

7. "The Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-week Plan for A Longer, Better Life" (2021)

8. “The Blue Zones American Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100” (2022)

9. "The Complete Blue Zones: Lessons From the Healthiest Places on Earth" (May 2, 2023)

10. "The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer: Lessons From the Healthiest Places on Earth" (August 29, 2023)

In September, his 11th book, “The Blue Zones Kitchen One Pot Meals: 100 Meals to Live to 100,” is scheduled to publish.