The rise of ‘super return’ financial elixirs

The so-called ‘blue zones’ have garnered much interest, understandably. Why would you not want to know the secret of hotspots around the world that have an unusually high number of centenarians? If not seeking the 100-year life, you might at least hope for some additional healthy years.

Each ‘blue zone’ has a primary reason for the fizzing zeal of its residents. You may have digested these silver bullets in the Netflix series created by explorer, storyteller and blue zone founder Dan Buettner. Or perhaps they have been regurgitated to you at a dinner party. Here’s a flavour.

• The durable islanders of Okinawa in Japan have been supercharged by a particular type of purple sweet potato, and they garden a lot.
• The spritely Sardinians eat well but also walk uphill a lot and particularly in one steep village, perched high above the Tyrrhenian Sea.
• The Seventh Day Adventists of Loma Linda in California live a decade longer than the average American. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke but they also care for each other in a close-knit community that values volunteering.

When I watched the TV series a few years ago, these were the silver bullets that stuck with me. They all came rushing back on a recent visit to my first blue zone - the Nicoya region of Costa Rica. Its silver bullet, I read (in the blue zone book in the blue zone shop at San Jose airport) is that they eat a lot of black beans in corn tortillas, made for 8,000 years by mixing some ash from the wood fire they are cooked on into the dough. The ash breaks down the corn’s cell walls, making niacin (vitamin B3) available and freeing amino acids for absorption.

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Our need for simple fixes makes for big business, as the blue zone empire shows. A well-travelled colleague even bought purple sweet potato-infused KitKats in Okinawa.

But it’s about more than soot or a single type of vegetable, of course. Complex factors combine to create regional variability in longevity, as the blue zones narrative acknowledges. Among laid-back Costa Ricans, there is a pura vida approach to life that reduces stress, for instance.

However, our cognitive biases make us hang on to simple solutions - the single silver bullets.

It can be argued that we do the same with our retirement savings - the very thing that we will need to help us afford the greater chance of a 100-year life.

The boring but very sensible approach to retirement saving is to invest early and a create a portfolio of mostly stock market investments. This has worked for generations of savers. Over longer periods, stock market returns have mostly beaten inflation and other types of investment, such as property or bonds, and certainly money in savings accounts.

But a ‘get rich slow’ approach lacks the lustre of a shiny bullet - and especially for a young generation where the basics, such as buying a home, feel so unachievable. They need quicker results.

Cryptocurrencies are an obvious example where super returns are increasingly expected and sought. Investors were asked where they anticipate greatest opportunity in our recent ‘Be Invested’ report. It found 13% named crypto investments, such as bitcoin. For comparison, only 12% thought investment funds were the best bet. Crypto enthusiasm was highest among 20 and 30-somethings - 29% of both age groups thought it was the best opportunity for the year ahead.

• Read: Can I invest in cryptocurrency within my ISA?

If you cut the data again, narrowing it down to those who are ‘very optimistic’ about markets, then crypto emerges as the top asset to back. The excitement is palpable.

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