Dan Buettner

The Blue Zones American Kitchen collects recipes from the regions Dan Buettner has spent twenty years reporting on, places he identified with the demographers Michel Poulain and Gianni Pes where people were said to reach very great ages: Sardinia, Okinawa, Ikaria, Nicoya and Loma Linda. National Geographic published it in 2022. Buettner is a journalist and long-distance cyclist, not a demographer, and the commercial side is substantial: he sold Blue Zones LLC to Adventist Health in 2020, and a Netflix series followed in 2023. The concept is contested. Saul Newman, at Oxford, argues the centenarian clusters largely reflect poor record keeping and pension fraud, work that won an Ig Nobel and has not appeared in a peer-reviewed journal; Newman is a plant biologist rather than a demographer, which his critics raise and he does not dispute. Buettner answers that his team checked ages against church registers and civil records. He has separately told American reporters that Loma Linda went on the list because his editor wanted an American entry.