Gianni Pes

There are roughly 22 to 30 centenarians per 100,000 residents.

In the early 2000s, a Sardinian physician named Gianni Pes discovered that in some villages in the mountains of central Sardinia, people were living to 100 at rates nobody had ever documented before in the world.

Nobody really took his findings seriously at first, not until a Belgian demographer named Michel Poulin came across his findings.

The two of them then decided to investigate this together and they conducted research in Sardinia, interviewing the village residents and checking documents.

Whence the name Blue Zones? What's that have to do with?

My colleague in Sardinia, Dr. Gianni Pes, he identified the Sardinian Blue Zone, and he did so by going village to village looking at birth records since about 1850 and doing this exercise that counted how many centenarians have lived in these areas over the last 150 years.

And ones that met the highest criteria, he put a blue check mark.

And in the Nuoro and Oliastra provinces of Sardinia, in the highlands, in the central highlands, there were so many blue check marks that it created a blue blob, and he referred to that area on the map as the Blue Zone.