The key to longevity
You may have read about “blue zones,” certain communities that have an unusually large number of centenarians: Loma Linda in California, Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, Nicoya in Costa Rica, and Ikaria in Greece. Since we can’t all move there, the next best thing would be to discover the key to longevity in these places.
“The overall populations within these blue zones, as well as those individuals who appear to be living into extreme old age, have been analyzed for their life patterns, social connections, biomarkers, genomic variations and so on. All of these studies are searching for the same answer: what are the secrets to long life?
‘But Newman believes the answer has less to do with any particular lifestyle factor, and rather more to do with dodgy data.
‘In his new preprint study, yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, Newman shows that the highest rates of achieving old age are predicted by three factors: high poverty, a lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds.
‘Poverty, in this context, leads to greater pressure to commit pension fraud. At the same time, the state-specific introduction of birth certificates, Newman claims, is associated with a 69 to 82 percent decrease in the number of supercentenarian records.
‘This work even challenges supposedly validated cases of the world’s oldest people, including the world’s oldest man, who appears to have three different birthdays.
“Substantial error rates were recently uncovered in every ‘Blue Zone’,” Newman writes.”
So the answer appears to be “fake it till you make it.”
Longevity fake news
“The overall populations within these blue zones, as well as those individuals who appear to be living into extreme old age, have been analyzed for their life patterns, social connections, biomarkers, genomic variations and so on. All of these studies are searching for the same answer: what are the secrets to long life?
‘But Newman believes the answer has less to do with any particular lifestyle factor, and rather more to do with dodgy data.
‘In his new preprint study, yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, Newman shows that the highest rates of achieving old age are predicted by three factors: high poverty, a lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds.
‘Poverty, in this context, leads to greater pressure to commit pension fraud. At the same time, the state-specific introduction of birth certificates, Newman claims, is associated with a 69 to 82 percent decrease in the number of supercentenarian records.
‘This work even challenges supposedly validated cases of the world’s oldest people, including the world’s oldest man, who appears to have three different birthdays.
“Substantial error rates were recently uncovered in every ‘Blue Zone’,” Newman writes.”
So the answer appears to be “fake it till you make it.”
Longevity fake news