There is a wonderful down-to-earth piece by Dr. Mokotoff (@davidmokotoff) here on Medium (https://medium.com/beingwell/i-am-a-cardiologist-and-i-am-telling-you-there-is-no-magic-bullet-to-insure-you-live-until-100-3ad60f74bac6).

I fully endorse his genetics argument. After all, the populations residing in those relatively closed blue zone communities, though not inbred, probably share some hereditary similarities to a degree that goes beyond the “normal” in more open and fluid communities.

There is one fundamental flaw with arguments like those presented by Buettner: The lack of a control group.

Let me explain this using a more frequently encountered scenario. Popular books about which habits make billionaires or business leaders so wildly successful typically contain a list of their common-denominator habits. What they don’t check is how many people who have the same habits don’t have the same success. That’s a control group.

The same applies to the blue zone argument: The question of whether non-blue-zone residents, who live equally health-promoting lifestyles, fare equally well in terms of life- and health-expectancy.

I strongly favor the theory that it is all about matching one’s lifestyle habits to one’s genetic predisposition. It’s the perfect match that ensures compression of morbidity to the very end of life, and probably a longer life as well.

The problem is, that we can never know that perfect match in advance. The statistics about CVD-free survival in relation to meeting the AHA’s ‘Life’s Essential 8’ deliver one clear message: quite a number of those who flunk on one or a few of those essential 8 will remain fit and healthy (I have written about this in my post https://medium.com/right-to-rejuvenation/cvd-risk-factors-may-actually-not-kill-you-or-make-you-sick-the-stunning-statistics-e1c835d30f6a), and almost everyone with a “straight-A” will perform exceptionally well. How else to reconcile this than with the “perfect match” idea that I mentioned.