There's a New Blue Zone—And It Holds Clues to Women's Longevity

A diet rich in bacon, blueberries, and chocolate. Having a “lighthearted spirit” and a positive attitude. Forty cigarettes a day. Ask a centenarian about the key to longevity, and each will have a different response. Though blueberries certainly won’t hurt (the cigarettes might), the real answer to the question of how to live a long, healthy life might actually be hidden along the slopes of the Marghine mountains, in a tiny town on Sardinia called Bolotana.

Surrounded by woodlands and dotted with fresh springs, Bolotana is a small village of around 2,262 people, 10 of whom are at least 100 years old. This prevalence of centenarians—about 442 per 100,000 residents—is roughly 10 times the Sardinian average and 11 times the U.S. average. Those numbers have made Bolotana of particular interest to National Geographic Explorer and longtime longevity researcher Dan Buettner, who is best known for his work on blue zones, geographic regions in which residents 70 and older have exceptional survival and longevity odds. 

Previously identified blue zones include Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; and a cluster of mountain villages elsewhere in Sardinia. But when Buettner and his team heard about Bolotona and then began digging into the data, they were astounded by what they found.

“By some measures, Bolotana is the most extraordinary blue zone,” Buettner said in an interview. “While the other blue zones are waning, this one is waxing. In other words, every year there are more centenarians.”

Buettner and his co-researcher Gianni Pes assembled a team that included the professor and gerontologist S. Jay Olshansky, who set about conducting a scientific age-verification process on a randomized sample of the village’s known centenarians. 

“What was interesting about Bolotana, which we’ve never seen anywhere else and probably will not see anywhere else, is they have photographs of every single centenarian,” Olshansky said in an interview. He randomly identified a group of centenarians from the photographs and combed through the village’s remarkably kept records, cross-checking births and deaths with baptism records and marriage records to verify that each centenarian had actually reached 100. The results of their study are published in Frontiers in Aging on Monday.

“In Bolotana, we discovered that the life expectancy of females, in particular, is significantly higher than that observed among the longest-lived populations in the world,” Olshansky said. And women in Bolotana who reached 70 were three times more likely to reach age 100 than women in the United States.

“It didn’t have to be that dramatic to be important,” Olshansky said of the findings.

The fact that female centenarians are driving the longevity trends in Bolotana sets it apart from other blue zones. According to the research, the chance of surviving from 70 to 100 was 4.92 percent for men and 13.83 percent for women in the village. 

“There’s generally a three-to-five-year advantage of females over males everywhere in the world,” Olshansky said. “In Bolotana, it seems to be even larger, so we’re not sure why.”

In order to determine what lifestyle factors potentially contribute to the population’s longevity, the team pored over historical dietary surveys and interviewed village doctors. What they found was that traditionally, the village’s diet was about 90 percent plant based, with inhabitants eating meat only about five times a month for most of their lives. They consume primarily what they grow themselves, including cheese from the sheep they raise and olive oil and wheat from their fields. 

“They’re eating beans and pastas and potatoes and what they can grow from their garden, and they weren’t importing a lot of American junk food,” Buettner said. That changed in 2005 when imports opened up, but “it’s not that bad yet. There’s no fast food restaurants,” he added.

When Olshansky spoke to one of the village’s main doctors, she pointed out that despite the population’s health, Bolotana doesn’t have a gym. That surprised him.

“Nobody there works out,” Olshansky said. “Which is pretty interesting in and of itself. It looks as though they’re not trying to live long, but they do so anyway.”

Still, the village’s steep terrain and lack of cars means that inhabitants are getting “medium-range cardio every day without thinking about it,” Buettner said. “And that’s the big insight, and that’s mostly where we get it wrong in America. We always think we’re going to schedule in enough exercise, and we never do.”

Families also tend to live in multigenerational dwellings, sharing household responsibilities and child-rearing and emotionally and spiritually benefiting from being surrounded by their loved ones.

Yet these lifestyle factors don’t account for the finding that, unlike in other blue zones, in Bolotana many more women than men are reaching 100. That could indicate genetics are heavily at play, or it could be that unlike in other parts of Sardinia, because the village is half pastoral and half agricultural, many more of the men are home to help their wives share the burdens of daily life. In Bolotana, “men stay home, and they share the stress load,” Buettner said.

Though the team still has much more to study, including just how much genetics could possibly be at play, Buettner called the Bolotana data a “treasure chest” when it comes to understanding human longevity.

“We know that the environment and lifestyle of Bolotana manifestly yielded the longest-lived people on the planet, and the opportunity is to study what they’ve been doing,” he said. “When cars, iPhones, and American junk food arrive, you’ll see type 2 diabetes skyrocket, cardiovascular disease go up, dementia go up, many types of cancer go up, and the longevity phenomena will be gone. I give it a generation. But before that, before that happens, we have a generation to bring our archaeological tools and uncover what they’ve been doing.

“The value proposition for America is in the trillions,” he added. “If we could achieve this level of longevity, given our five-trillion-dollar annual healthcare budget, we’d save the equivalent of two or three trillion.”