Saul Newman’s new book, Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science, has ruffled quite a few feathers. It critiques everything from notions of expanded human lifespan to the blue zones (where centenarians are said to be more common) to the scientific claims underpinning the booming longevity industry.

Morbid pulls no punches. Why did Newman write it? “Sheer bloody-mindedness,” the scientist tells me over Zoom from his home in Australia.

Newman, who holds a PhD in medical science and has worked in genomics and AI, wrote the book to sort fact from flawed research. “I care about what’s true,” he says.

His media image is that of a brash, eccentric, wild-haired scientist: In 2024, he wore a suit patterned with neon Tetris bricks to collect his Ig Nobel prize (a satirical award for scientific achievements that “make people laugh, then think”).

The Newman I meet is quite different.

Saul Newman: The “worried well” are easy to sell to.Saul Newman: The “worried well” are easy to sell to.

Describing himself as an “oddbod”, Newman grew up on a farm “about five hours west of Sydney”. He’s warm, polite, generous with his time, and a deep thinker who wants to know answers not for laurels, but for truth and understanding’s sake.

His exposé of blue zones has caused much controversy. The zones are so well known that there’s even a Netflix show about them and a website that describes itself as “a lifestyle brand”.

The blue-zone concept began with demographic research in Sardinia in the early 2000s that suggested a higher incidence of centenarians. In 2004, Dan Buettner and National Geographic built on that research and identified other areas of the globe with unusually high rates of extreme old age.

Buettner and his team found that, in these areas, longevity was achieved through nine lifestyle habits:

purpose (have one);
downshift (employ a method that sheds stress, such as prayer or napping);
move naturally (incorporate it in to your day);
80% rule (stop eating when you’re 80% full);
plant bias (eat mostly plants);
wine at five (drink in moderation after 5pm);
belong (be part of a faith-based community);
loved ones first (prioritise family);
right tribe (be born into a social circle that chooses healthy behaviours).

Isn’t that good advice, I ask? “Some of it is terrible advice,” Newman says. “Drinking two glasses of wine a day is terrible advice.”

To be clear, he isn’t saying that all the advice is poor, but the advice isn’t the point. The point is, he contends, that the demographic data underpinning the blue-zones theory is flawed, so it is not possible to say that those regions’ lifestyle habits actually promote longevity. The evidence just isn’t there.

Newman points to Eurostat data, which shows that Sardinia and Ikaria (two blue zones) were not among Europe’s leading regions for old-age life expectancy, coming in at 51st and 109th, respectively.

He also cites examples from Japan and Greece, where large numbers of people recorded as centenarians or older were subsequently found to be dead or missing from official records.

Newman’s audit of pension records in Greece found that, of around 9,000 people cited as being over 100, at least 72% were dead, missing, or had not reached the ages recorded for them.

The blue zones, Newman says, “are bullshit”, and he goes into forensic detail in Morbid to back up this assertion.

In his book, Newman, who is a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute of Population Ageing, details how he realised that a 2016 paper published in Nature, a prestigious scientific journal, was “utterly defective”.

The paper had asked the question, ‘Is there a maximum age that humans can realistically reach?’ and concluded that, yes, human lifespan appeared to have a natural limit, and that the absolute limit was roughly 125 years.

Why should we care about scientists arguing over data? The findings matter, says Newman, because key societal pillars — such as insurance, pensions, and healthcare — depend on accurate statistics about longevity. And if those findings are flawed, the financial and social consequences could be lasting.

So what does the longevity researcher do to improve his own longevity? “Exercise. I don’t drink, don’t smoke. Go to the doctor. That’s it.”

He’s deeply concerned about the “unregulated cowboy culture” of longevity medicine, which he describes as “the Bitcoin of medicine” — a rebranding that means “nobody has to follow any rules”.

The “worried well” are particularly easy to sell to, he says. “There’s a big segment of society that wants to be healthy, and they put in the effort. But they think there’s more.”

These people are highly motivated, “and if you’re already doing everything you should do, that motivation has nowhere to go. So the next thing you know, you’ve got peptides and highly specific diets, or whatever it is,” he says.

“In a sense, that’s fine. The primary problem is it’s leading to the erosion of actual medicine” and the people being sidestepped, he says, “are the doctors that would normally just sit you down and say, ‘This is what’s going well. This is not what’s going well’.

“Instead, we’re just straight into an interface with YouTube with someone who’s telling us we have to munch all these pills.”

The health evidence we have for ageing and longevity, he points out, is plain-old, bog-standard medicine, which is based on reams of rigorous data and clinical trials.

“The simple thing is to go and talk to your doctor. Because it’s just that it might not be perfect, but it’s the best thing we’ve got, and it is miles ahead of what you’ll find on the internet.”

‘Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science’, by Saul Justin Newman, will be published by the MIT Press in October