Are Sardinia's famous pensioners really 100 - or is it all made up? As it's claimed 'Blue Zones' that help you live into old age are a myth... some Mediterranean pensioners admit they might have a reason to exaggerate

Brunda Antoni is impossibly dapper in a check shirt and navy cardy. His skin is smooth, his back is straight, his moustache is neatly trimmed, and he doesn’t seem remotely jaded after his birthday celebrations yesterday.

It was a pizza party, he tells me. And very nice, too. With all his family and a huge, fancy cake with his age on: 106.

Which means he was born in 1918, when World War I was still raging.

Not that he or anyone in his home village of Perdasdefogu, a ridiculously hilly village perched on Sardinia’s rugged central spine, are making much of a fuss about it.

Why would they? Living long and well is the local superpower here and centenarians are two-a-penny.

Brunda’s sister Maria is 104. His father lived to 103. One of his best friends passed away last month aged 103. Down the road from where he grew up, Gildo Mancosu (102), Efisia Furcas (103) and Spano Vittorio (103) are all still going strong.

Usunta Floreddu, an impossibly teeny 96-year-old widow with a high, clear voice, lives in Villagrande Strisaili commune. She has two glasses of wine a day and lashings of minestrone soup

The Daily Mail's Jane Fryer with 106-year-old Brunda Antoni. His sister is 104 and his father lived to 103

Pinned to the wall in the local hairdresser is a large, glossy, black and white calendar featuring some of the town’s most venerable residents, including Brunda

A fresh-faced Brunda pictured in his uniform during his military service for Sardinia. He was born in 1918 at the end of World War I

A laminated copy of Brunda's baptism record from the local church is proof of his impressive age

Everyone looks younger than their age... Brunda’s with his daughter Beatrice (79 but looking 60), granddaughter Patrizia (56 but looking 40) and his great-granddaughter, Francesca (28 but looking 15)

In fact, there are so many cententenari — as they call them — that, pinned to the wall in the local hairdresser is a large, glossy, black and white calendar featuring some of the town’s most venerable residents.

Four women and three men (including Brunda, with his cap balanced high on his head) all looking astonishingly perky, given many were born before the first ever Transatlantic flight. Especially Lai Pia, who with her thick thatch of yellow hair and massive grin looks barely 80. In fact, she is 102.

Back in 1990, researchers documented a disproportionately high incidence of centenarians in the rugged mountain villages of Sardinia, who didn’t just live longer, but better. So not just slumped in high-backed chairs, but living independently — socialising, shopping, cooking, gardening, yomping up hills, well into their 90s and 100s.

Even better, it turned out it wasn’t just Sardinia.

Because, in 2005 and in conjunction with National Geographic, longevity expert Dan Buettner identified four more regions where residents enjoyed exceptional health and longevity. They were Nicoya in Costa Rica, Okinawa in Japan, Icaria in Greece and Loma Linda in California.

Buettner called them Blue Zones — named after the blue splodges originally used to mark the Sardinian villages on a map — and, well, things rather took off.

Ever since, we have been obsessed with the Blue Zoners: their lifestyle, diet, sleep patterns, communities, way of life — even their sex lives.

Villagrande Strisaili commune, another hilly hotspot of longevity in Sardinia. The exercise walking up the steep hills could be one of the secrets to living a long life

Usunta Floreddu hard at work preparing the ground for crops behind younger members of the family

Usunta as a young woman on her wedding day in 1959 surrounded by her family and friends

Usunta is now a widow but she is pictured here as a young woman dressed smartly with her husband Mario 

Usunta has some great advice for a long life: ‘If you live a life in front of a computer, looking at screens, watching the Netflix, you will die sooner. You need to move your body. Get outside'

Because they give us all hope that, if we drink enough olive oil and boiled greens, walk up and down a few hills and ditch our screens for a bit, we might live as long as they.

Today the multi-million-dollar ‘Blue Zone industry’ encompasses everything from tourism to diets, cookbooks, cafes, podcasts, academic papers and, recently, a four-part Netflix series.

There have been endless academic papers, studies and newspaper articles — one of them mine, from Icaria in Greece — bringing breathless tales of what these brilliantly bouncy oldies are up to, drinking, dancing, living well, having impressively buoyant love lives well into their 90s.

So it was quite a shock earlier this month to hear Dr Saul Newman, an academic at Oxford University’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, insist that Blue Zones are a load of old bunkum or ‘statistical junk’.

Most alarming are his claims that, due to chaotic birth reporting systems at the beginning of the last century, many of the centenarians may not be that old at all. 

Some, he says, particularly in Japan, have been defrauding their pension system for years. Many have either never had a birth certificate or lost it years ago and now are just guessing.

‘Why do you think so many seem to be born on the first day of the month?’ he says.

Which is why I am here in Sardinia, in the heart of Blue Zone territory, limbering up to ask some awkward questions.

Clearly, Brunda’s family have been here before, because the second I even hint at ‘evidence’, his daughter Beatrice (79, but looks 60) whips out a gigantic, laminated copy of his baptism record from the local church and reminds me that he’s on the official Perdasdefogu calendar.

And that seems to be that.

So we move safely on to his top lifestyle tips for long life — goat meat, cheese, wine, water, cards (‘I played for wine, I was very good!’), friends, family and hard work outdoors.

He also shares a very complicated cheese recipe with me and tells me the villagers call him ‘pistol’, because he was always hunting.

The span of his life is extraordinary. He and wife Gemma (who died aged 92) had five sons and daughters and struggled during the hardship of the Mussolini years.

‘So many rules. It was hard. But back then we knew what was good and what was bad. Today, people just do what they want.’

While I would bet my house that Brunda is the real deal, Newman’s attack is extreme.

In fact, he rubbishes everything about the Blue Zone, starting with Buettner.

‘He’s not a scientist. He’s not a medical expert.’

In Japan, he says, there was a self-reporting system for birth and deaths.

‘An inquiry in Japan discovered that 80 per cent of the people supposedly over 100 were dead. They just do not exist,’ he says. ‘Many had died in the Second World War.’

And in Costa Rica, he says, the Blue Zone has moved.

‘It was originally two zones. Then a couple of months ago, they decided one of them had shrunk by 90 per cent and the other one had moved to the opposite end of the country, 300 kilometres away!’

Even Sardinia gets both barrels. Not least because the original research paper, from which it all stemmed, credited the villagers’ longevity to a combination of the mountainous terrain and inbreeding!

The other thing that really gets Newman’s goat is the money. Because Blue Zones are big business.

He tells me that certificates are sold for between $3million and $40million a pop by Adventist Health — to whom Buettner sold the Blue Zones organisation, which promotes longevity and community wellbeing, in 2020 — to, well, all sorts of places.

Singapore is one of the latest states to gain Blue Zone status.

‘Singapore!’ cries Newman. ‘They did not have birth certificates until 1938, so how can they say they have a higher rate of 100-year-olds then elsewhere in the world?’

While someone is clearly making a lot of money, it is not the calendar girls and boys in Perdasdefogu.

Or Usunta Floreddu, an impossibly teeny 96-year-old widow with a high, clear voice, who lives in Villagrande Strisaili commune, another hilly hotspot of longevity.

When I ask her what she thinks about living in a Blue Zone and having inspired millions around the world, Usunta rolls her eyes and snorts.

‘Blue Zone! I have never heard of it. It sounds like a nasty virus! I don’t like the sound of it at all.’

She also isn’t very impressed when I ask if she really is 96. Though, to be fair, she is so spry and perky that she could pass for 20 years younger.

‘I think I know my own age!’ she says firmly. ‘I was born on May 6, 1927.’

And with that, we skip quickly back to her life tips, which include two glasses of wine a day (one with lunch and one with dinner), lashings of minestrone soup, and always to walk — up and down the hills.

‘If you live a life in front of a computer, looking at screens, watching the Netflix, you will die sooner. You need to move your body. Get outside,’ she says.

It goes without saying that Buettner and the Blue Zoners have no truck with Newman’s allegations. 

And after all this time, Newman has been pretty much the sole dissenting voice, or a ‘one-voice echo chamber’, as Buettner puts it.

‘National Geographic, which is very careful and thorough with their fact-checking, exhaustively fact checked all of my articles,’ he adds.

Here in Sardinia, officials aren’t happy, either. Not just because Blue Zone status is brilliant for tourism, the economy and general self-esteem, but because Sardinians are passionate about documenting births and deaths.

Dr Paulo Filigheddu PhD is the spokesperson of the Archivist of the diocese of Tempio-Ampurias and insists he’ll prove all the ages here, should Dr Newman fancy a trip.

‘Regarding his perplexity, we are willing to invite him here in Sardinia to see with his own eyes our research from the ecclesiastic archives since 1559 and from the civil archives since 1861,’ he says.

While everyone looks younger than their age — even Brunda’s great-granddaughter, Francesca Atzeni, looks 15, when actually she’s 28 — I don’t sense anything disingenuous here.

But even if there was a teeny bit of fudging around the dates, there’s a lot we can learn from these oldies.

Not just about the benefits of eating a mostly plant-based diet of non-processed foods and getting plenty of aerobic exercise.

But about backbone and endurance and resilience in the times of extreme poverty and heartache.

Because while living to 110 is probably brilliant if you’re dancing and drinking and playing cards until midnight with all your centenarian pals, it isn’t the same for everyone.

Many of these Sardinian villagers have had impossibly hard, long lives.

Brunda’s life was dominated by rugged work — everything from goat-herding to tree-felling to laying some of Sardinia’s very first roads.

‘I worked very hard to feed my family. All those years outside in the rain — now I feel it in my bones,’ he says. ‘The torment of life is hard. You have to be strong. I have seen too many wars. If I could get all the presidents of the world together and decide to stop all the wars.’

He had just two years’ schooling, has never travelled and worked solidly on the land until he was 96, when his eyesight started failing.

‘I’d rather still be working, but my children won’t let me,’ he says. ‘So now I’m waiting for God to pick me up and bring me to paradise.’

Usunta, also, did not have it easy, despite her perky glint.

The daughter of goatherds, she married Mario, a handsome fireman.

‘Everyone loved him, she says. We were very happy,’ she says.

But after just ten years, he was caught in a fire, and she was left with four young children and no money.

‘I had to leave them at home with God when I went out to work,’ she says.

As well as Mario, she lost her two sons, aged 44 and 50.

Today, her eyesight is the only thing about her that is failing.

‘I cried too much in my life and so now I cannot see so well,’ she says. ‘I lived the two seasons. I had the good times and the very bad times. You have to be strong to live this long — in the heart and the spirit.’

Again, if Usunta is not 96, I’ll eat my hat. But before we go, I brave her very beady stare one last time, and ask if she knows anyone who does fib about their age.

‘Of course!’ she says. ‘Some people will always say they are younger than they are. But there are also some that say they are older,’ she adds with a naughty grin.

‘I will not say the names, but there will always be a bit of competition to be the oldest, but to look much younger. But no one will never admit it.’

And, well, maybe that helps to explain a teeny bit of it.