Four other longevity Blue Zones

In 2001, soon after the identification of the Sardinian Blue Zone, a validation process was also initiated in Okinawa, where the population was widely known for its longevity. The results of this exercise confirmed that people in Okinawa were indeed long-living, and the status of Blue Zone could be attributed to it as well. In 2004, D. Buettner, an American journalist, who got a grant from National Geographic to investigate long-living population worldwide, visited Okinawa and thereafter Sardinia. In 2005, he published an article in National Geographic comparing the populations of these two exceptional longevity areas with a long-living Adventist community in Loma Linda, California (Buettner 2005). In close collaboration with Buettner, and in the line of L. Rosero-Bixby’s research on nonagenarians in Costa Rica, a field study was organized with the support of National Geographic. Under the leadership of D. Buettner and the scientific support of M. Poulain and G.M. Pes, a third Blue Zone was validated in the Nicoya Peninsula. An attempt to identify a new Blue Zone in Peru was abandoned because there were no reliable data to prove the exact age of the alleged centenarians. It was in Greece then, more specifically on mountainous island of Ikaria, that the fourth Blue Zone was identified and validated by the same team. Starting in 2017, in the framework of the validation of the supercentenarians in France, J. Vallin launched an investigation and validated the age of 8 supercentenarians in Guadeloupe where the proportion of supercentenarians was found to be the highest in Francenational geographic. In the same line, Ginette D’Jaoud, president of the Association ‘Protégeons nos centenaires et leurs aidants’ in Martinique, invited M. Poulain and A. Herm in 2019 to demonstrate the exceptional longevity on the island. Despite of the pandemic, this project reached to an end in February 2023 with the validation of Martinique as the 5^th Blue Zone.