Now he insisted he had found it. “There’s no single supplement,” he said. “There’s no individual herb, there’s no one thing that’s going to make us live longer. Nevertheless, there are many little things that when combined will add a decade or more to our lives.” Moncur claimed he found these things while conducting exhaustive research in Sardinia, a large island off the coast of Italy, Okinawa, the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, and Loma Linda, a small town located between Los Angles and Palm Springs that was largely inhabited by Seventh-day Adventists. These areas were dubbed Blue Zones by scientists and demographers—regions where people live to be a hundred or more at astonishing rates. Moncur said he identified what these areas held in common and distilled their secrets into a recipe consisting of one part diet, one part exercise regimen, and one part Confucian-inspired philosophy. Someone suggested Moncur was looking to take a bite out of a thirty-billion-dollar industry that promises to make people look or feel young.
