Where are Utah’s ‘blue zones’ — places people are living the longest?

A “Blue Zone” is an area where people are known for living to extreme ages such as Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Loma Linda, California; and the entire country of Costa Rica. There is a whole cottage industry of associated books about what those places are doing right lifestyle-wise, generally revolving around good diets and family/community involvement.

Utahns tend to live a long time , too, even though Utah is not typically listed on Blue Zone lists. A child born in Utah has an expected lifespan of 78.6 years, which is the ninth highest in the nation, in between Vermont and Connecticut.

Utah is a varied, diverse place, too, of course, with both highly impoverished communities as well as highly affluent Salt Lake suburbs. This means that a baby born in some areas can expect a much longer life than a baby born in others. These stark differences are reflected in the Census Bureau’s U.S. Small-area Life Expectancy Estimates Project , which calculated the life expectancy of Americans at the census tract level using 2010-2015 data.

Based on this data, the specific area of Utah with the highest life expectancy is rural Duchesne County (Census tract 9406, to be precise), with a life expectancy of 90.4 years, which is higher than any country in the world. That’s also 54th out of the 67,199 census tracts in the U.S. with life expectancy estimates.

That doesn’t mean Duchesne as a whole is higher than every other county, since there are areas of Duchesne that have noticeably lower life expectancy — as well as some suburb areas that are higher too. (A county-level analysis would reach different conclusions, with this one more focused on specific census tracts.)

That being said, there are some patterns evident. When data is cut up this small there is enough statistical fuzziness that Duchesne is in a statistical tie with a number of other long-living areas in Utah — with other “Blue Zones” in the state including rural areas of Garfield and Wayne counties in southern Utah (life expectancy at birth: 89.6 and 89.3 years, respectively). Two North Salt Lake City neighborhoods also stand out, including the area by Emigration Canyon (88.9 years) and the area just north of Ensign Peak (86.9 years).

And what about areas of Utah where people live relatively short (and presumably harder) lives? The lowest life expectancy in Utah is the inner city area by Pioneer Park . Although only a few geographic miles from the “Blue Zone” of North Salt Lake, the life expectancy there is approximately 24 years less, at 66.1 years. Other shorter life expectancy areas include downtown Ogden, with life expectancies in the area between 68.9 and 70.8, and the eastern part of downtown Price, with a life expectancy of 71.3.

Income matters, of course — with North Salt Lake being relatively wealthy. Race seems to matter too, with racial minorities tending to live shorter lives .

On any characteristic where Utah sticks out, of course, people are quick to connect it to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sometimes this is warranted; sometimes it is not . To really parse out a religious effect by county would require more intensive analyses controlling for race and income, which this particular dataset makes difficult.

But there are at least two older studies that have examined Latter-day Saint life expectancy in depth. Using data from 1980 to 2004, two non-Latter-day Saint researchers at UCLA found that “active” California Latter-day Saints had “total death rates that are among the lowest ever reported for a cohort followed 25 years.”

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also had “among the longest life expectancies yet reported in a well-defined U.S. cohort.”

Another study published by a BYU professor using 1994-1998 data compared Utah members with other groups in terms of adjusted life expectancy estimates — finding that although differential tobacco use explains some of the higher life expectancy in Latter-day Saints, it only accounts for about 1.5 years of the 7.3 year difference for males and 1.2 years of the 5.8 year difference for females.

Other factors that appear to be involved include better physical health, better social support and healthier lifestyle behaviors, the study noted, with religious activity also potentially having an “independent protective effect against mortality.”

While these are older studies, the lifestyles, dietary factors and dynamics they have identified as contributing to longer Latter-day Saint lives have not changed. Famously, Loma Linda in California is a “Blue Zone” because of the clean-eating, religiously involved and active Seventh-day Adventist community there, and it is likely that the Latter-day Saint influence similarly has at least something to do with Utahn’s longer life span.

That being said, as shown by downtown Price and other areas where lives are shorter, having Latter-day Saints in your neighborhood doesn’t automatically raise the life span overall. Most of us can clearly do better.

While most Latter-day Saints seem to be good about the prohibitions in the Word of Wisdom — a revelation in one of our books of scripture — there is likely room for improvement among most people in focusing on the positive, good elements of the same standard. For example, Utahns may take a page from Adventist pagebook and eat more fruits and vegetables — and maybe less hamburgers.

While people quibble about this or that dietary principle, the literature on the health benefits of eating eating your fruits and vegetables (or “every herb in the season thereof, and every fruit in the season thereof” as Doctrine & Covenants Section 89 puts it) are non-controversial and indisputable. As soon-to-be-centenarian President Russell M. Nelson has shown us with his own example , we may then receive even more the Doctrine & Covenants Section 89 promises, “the destroying angel shall pass by them, as the children of Israel, and not slay them.”

Utah has all the potential for a bona fide Blue Zone: healthy food, families, outdoor activities, strong communities, and the sense of purpose provided by religion — if Utahns are willing to take advantage of them.

It would be a mistake to boil down these differences exclusively to income or race. And these differences are not simply a matter of lifestyle either — with lower-income people living much shorter lives on average. While people who live in longer-lifespan areas might pat themselves on the back for all the exercise and home-cooked, vegetable-based meals they have the time for, they should be aware that, sometimes a few miles away, there are people who are not so fortunate.