No, the author, Dan Buettner has a consulting practice around helping companies, orgs, municipalities implement the lessons from Blue Zones to help build healthier environments. https://www.bluezones.com/ Where the Blue came from I'm not sure.
I lived in Loma Linda for a few years (in Southern California, 60 miles east of LA), which is one of the blue zones
It is predominantly a 7th day Adventist community. Notably they prioritize healthy lifestyle and typically are vegetarian as well as avoiding alcohol, caffeine, etc.
There is also a big medical school and hospital complex in the city and many people that live there work in the healthcare field.
Another fun fact about Loma Linda is that it was one of the last places in the country to get USPS service on Saturdays. Up until around 2010 they had regular mail deliveries on Sunday instead.
Two years ago my grandmother took a photo with 3 other centenarians at her assisted living center. She was the oldest by 3 years. I just searched their names and two of the others passed away within a year of the photo.
Per the SSA actuarial tables a 100 year old man has a 95% chance of being dead 6 years later and a 100 year old woman has a 92.5% chance of being dead 6 years later.
Terrible take. How old were they when they died? Of course, if you are 95+, you are very likely to die soon, but you you are still part of a 2% percentile of longevity, and that's with western actuarial tables that don't reflect at all longevity in other places.
I'm not sure I buy their list of what makes people live longer, but I found it interesting that 3/5 locations seem to be ~40 degrees north latitude (and 3/5 islands, all locations are very near oceans/seas). It makes sense that all locations would be in warmer areas, as that vastly reduces the dependency on meat consumption, but more bias towards the equator would be expected if that was all. 40 south only touches the edge of Australia and the tail of South America, but I wonder how the life expectancy compares?
> It makes sense that all locations would be in warmer areas, as that vastly reduces the dependency on meat consumption
Are you implying causation or correlation? For example, I can imagine northern latitudes having more variable stocks of animals (and other food) during bad winters, so averages matter less than extremes.
I'm just reasoning that if crops don't grow half the year, you're much less likely to eat a plant-based diet, which is one of their points for living longer.
My bet is blue zones are just places where they don't have good longevity records so you get a bunch of fake centenarians. That turned out to be the case in Japan: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071 and I think also in Greece.
People were just keeping dead relatives "alive" for the social security or rent control.
Interesting correlation: Eating more meat seems to cause people to grow larger, but there is no strong evidence that being physically larger has intrinsic benefits outside of physical strength (which is arguably not very important). You do however need to eat more, you're more likely to get cancer, heart disease, suffer from chronic inflammation, etc.
Interestingly, statistics about growing larger are often used to support more meat eating by meat advocates. There is a lot of talk about protein quality, and the implication is that smaller people are disadvantaged – as though they must be growing less by all measures, not just stature. It isn't so clear that this is true though, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest we shouldn't strive to grow larger (either in stature or in lean mass).
I'm not saying there is a certain truth in there at all. I do find the correlations fascinating though. It defies a lot of what I understood about nutrition for most of my life so it's definitely something I'd like to see more data on. I'm open to a meat-based diet being superior overall (or any tasty diet, really).
How is physical strength unimportant? Stronger people are harder to kill (h/t Rippetoe) and improved strength also helps to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome and neck/back pain for those of us at a computer all day.
Although it would help if they were stronger, this isn't the result of them needing to begin a Starting Strength program. My original point was more so that stature and muscle mass might not benefit you beyond a certain point – I don't doubt at all that being fit is still tremendously beneficial.
It's also pure speculation. I read about this stuff for fun and I know just about nothing about anything. Maybe being larger really is a net positive and I just need to be pointed to the right data.
It helps avoid frailty and it allows you to continue exercising well into old age, for two things. It delays the downward spiral of poor fitness and weak bones that eventually does most of us in.
I'm not going to argue this with you. I'm not up for being dragged into a stupid internet fight with a random internet stranger. But this might interest you:
Right, and I think an important distinction here is sheer strength from general physical fitness.
If someone is relatively weak with below average lean mass, lower than average markers of muscular strength, etc. it seems like the consensus is that they are statistically likely to die or get diseases earlier in life. On the other hand, being on the other side of that seems to yield diminishing returns. It’s great to be fit, but being abnormally strong on the other hand doesn’t appear to increase your lifespan proportionally to your strength.
I can't think of much a human can accomplish with exceptional strength that will aid them in normal day to day life (generally speaking). There are exceptions, but those exceptions would apply only to rare circumstances. Sort of like, say you're going to be murdered by some totally jacked guy, hypothetically, and all you have to defend yourself is your bare hands. Okay great, it would be nice to be ridiculously strong. But how often does that happen to you? Or anyone?
Most predators will kill us even if we're ridiculously ripped, so that's not important either. In most cases, intelligence seems a lot more useful for avoiding or navigating these situations.
There's also a lot to be said for having moderate strength in a wide range of motion. That can matter a lot in a much broader variety of situations where physical strength matters, and it's far more realistic to attain and sustain.
Avoiding carpal tunnel doesn't require special levels of strength so much as normal fitness. It requires regular movement and preventing weaknesses. I'm not saying we should all vegetate at a computer, I'm saying that the evidence seems good that being 5% larger/stronger (or whatever the figure was) is not particularly helpful, and instead potentially harmful.
For example, regular yoga will probably resolve most (not all) people's mobility and repetitive stress issues. They will not need to be large or strong for this to work.
My health-obsessed doctor friend told me that muscle mass is a good predictor for health in later life, which was surprising to me (I thought fitness, heart/lung etc was the thing). I wouldn't dismiss it. :)
It makes me think of all those reports that claim that having a single glass of wine per day makes you healthier.
It's probably the case that people who have just one glass of wine are drinking socially, and therefore have friends, and having friends is an indicator of having status and health. The alcohol itself is poison but one glass is more than offset by otherwise living a good life.
Oh they studied this! It's because if you're the kind of person who can afford a glass of wine every day, you're also the kind of person who can afford health care. In USA at least.
Here's the best source I can find right now:
> The study authors write that “the observed cardiac benefits of alcohol have been hypothesized to be the product of residual confounding because of favorable lifestyle, socioeconomic, and behavioral factors that tend to coincide with modest alcohol intake.”
It's harder to keep muscles as you grow old. More muscles is indication of good metabolism, which correlates with good health (less chance of getting metabolic syndrome etc, somewhat relevant: https://betterbodychemistry.com/obesity/metabolic-syndrome-m...)
Muscle mass in that equation would be relative to stature, so being smaller wouldn’t be a disadvantage in that regard.
In my comment above I didn’t mean to suggest strength is useless or irrelevant so much as that scaling it up by a few percent doesn’t appear to confer meaningful benefits. Someone 5’6” is probably strong enough to do everything someone 6’ can do in every day life, even without modern technology. You can generally scale down what you need to, and for exceptional things, you can likely recruit and partner to solve the problem or apply intelligent solutions.
I’m open to being wrong. Like I was saying, this is just based on correlations I’ve been reading about lately and far from peer reviewed study results.
Of course. I’m speaking from a biological rather than cultural perspective (as much as you can separate the two, at least). I’m more so interested in what supports longevity as opposed to what supports dating prospects.
I suppose my question is, all other things being equal, would we be healthier if we were of smaller stature? Some data indicate this might be the case, and that’s interesting to me. I suppose my upbringing and culture encourage a “bigger is better” mentality.
A lot of data indicate this could simply be a case of people growing larger because they have access to more food. Genes express, people grow, but the main issue isn’t stature so much as having so much food readily available after they finish growing. Perhaps we eat too much and stature has little to do with it; it’s just a byproduct of access to calorie and protein rich food.
That's an interesting point. I'm not sure how much genetic overlap we have with whales, but I suspect it's significant. I wonder what allows them to live so long without getting cancer, for example. I can see why they wouldn't get cardiovascular diseases (in humans this seems to be mostly induced by diet and sedentary lifestyle), but it seems likely that there's more to it.
Actually remember reading that a number of studies have linked short stature with heart disease. I’m not up-to-date on the latest research on this. But whether shorter or taller you do the best you can with the factors within your control - nutrition, exercise, sleep, etc. Anecdotally two friends’ fathers in elementary school died way prematurely, both quite short of stature.
That’s also an interesting anticorrelation with how we normally relate metabolism and body size; smalller organisms tend to have faster metabolisms and live shorter lives versus much larger organisms.
Maybe the key is being smaller but also having slower (or rather, “calmer”) metabolic rates.
I believe what you want to be is a small member of a large species. Large dogs live much shorter lives than small dogs. Women tend to live longer than men (height or mass probably isn't the only factor here, but this fits the general pattern so one imagines it helps). Giants -- people well over six feet -- tend to live shorter lives than people of ordinary stature. My grandmother was about five feet with a straight spine. With a curved spine in her early hundreds she was probably less than 4'6", but she was still there. She had about two giant lifetimes. If you stacked her on top of herself you would have one giant (until her ever more flexible spine folded in two).
> but there is no strong evidence that being physically larger has intrinsic benefits outside of physical strength (which is arguably not very important).
In the people that use meat’s superior satiety to stay lean, you see lower inflammation, IGF-1, insulin … etc. On a purely meat diet with loads of protein, my IGF-1 was 90, a z-score of -1.
No it isn't? Elephants develop cancerous cells at the same rate per cell as every other animal, but have better biological methods of destroying them when those cells do turn cancerous.
But it conforms to many of the others... it's only 20 miles inland from the pacific, and has an (albeit warmer than normal) Mediterranean climate... "winter" lows are rarely below the mid 40s.
I grew up in the Loma Linda area as a Seventh-day Adventist (though my family left Adventism when I was a teenager after reading some books that explained why some of its core teachings are unbiblical). My grandparents all lived past 90, and my great-grandfather died at 100.
Epidemiologically speaking, I think SDAs in general live longer because they don't smoke, don't drink, and don't eat meat -- and have a religious community in which doing so is against God's law. It also doesn't hurt that they keep Sabbath, which means everyone who doesn't work in healthcare or emergency services has a mandatory day off, no work allowed.
Smog in the whole Inland Empire area is still pretty bad, especially in the summer. It gets pretty hot in the summer, not very cold in the winter - a lot like LA, but hotter :)
Which makes sense, if you assume that any given cohort will have some percentage hit 100 years; and then the cohorts that somehow have people removed "early" will have lower percentages.
For example, the cohort that includes people sent to WWII will have many that died in that war, even if they would have hit 100 otherwise.
And a group that "outlaws" some of the major causes of premature death (alcohol, smoking) would then have more cross the line.
If I may posit an idea. It's not that poor record keeping leads to blue zones.
It's that not caring about the trivialities of paper pushing and imaginary rules that current Western governments use to exert their power, helps one live longer.
Now why do guys like you and me know what a land registry is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?
Andrei Codrescu had a monologue once, about how the world is in truth peopled by two-thousand year old men who "arrived at their great age with the aid of daily doses of yogurt, cigarettes, vodka, and dubious birth records. ... With the exception of their eyelashes, which reach to the ground, they are in very good shape."
ha, my grandpa said (this would have been mid 1980s) there were 150-year old people living in communes in russia and I asked how they lived so long and he said they ate yogurt. But I think he must have been referring to this: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/09/archives/soviet-centenari...
Sometimes people were assuming a parent's name to avoid paying inheritance tax. I remember speculation about the oldest woman in the world may have in fact been her daughter.
I have read the same thing about Greece's Ikaria island centenarians.
As an anecdote my grandfather born in remote mountain village in mainland Greece in the 1900 was actually registered by his father having been born in 1906 as to avoid being drafted as long as possible to fight in the multiple wars fought at the time.
So birth records and certificates from that time are not really trustworthy.
I knew someone who came over with "the boat people" from Vietnam when he was six or seven; but his parents adjusted his birthday so he would start kindergarten instead - and he still didn't know for sure his actual birthday day.
> team of demographers, scientist and anthropologists were able to distill the evidence-based common denominators of these Blue Zones into 9 commonalities that they call the Power 9
Incredibly embarrassing for all involved if your bet is correct. None of them considered that possibility?
Spending a lot of time in greece in rural areas in the 90ies in my teens. Quite a lot of older greek did not even know or care about their birthday, as it was not celebrated. Name day was the big thing.
And I loved the stories when the government introduced a new land registry (based on reality) and the chaos the ensured, as suddenly lot of land was owned 2 or more times, officially unknown villages were officially discovered ...
I would definitely question the validity of the historic birth register, a lot.
The traditional land registry was from 1853 which seems was just a good enough description of what one owns.
In 1995 a land cadastre was created and it came into law in 1998 to replace the old system. A land survey was started to move presume land ownership from the old into the new system. This land survery / chaos was definitely still going on end of the 2000 years in Crete.
The researchers questioned these details, too. Any place labeled a blue zone has to have excellent records they could trace. One of the blue zones is in California. It’s worth looking at their process
7th Day Adventists have food and lifestyle differences from the surrounding population. They are the ones living longer. There have been a bunch of ongoing long term studies on them.
One of the findings is that diet matters. They’ve looked at diet differences and certain characteristics show up for people who live longer and have more good years. Those same things show up in the other blue zones.
I guess as time progresses, centenarians will come from cohorts with records that can be better trusted. This will confirm or invalidate the blue zone findings.
> In Christianity, a name day is a tradition in many countries of Europe and the Americas, among other parts of Christendom.[1] It consists of celebrating a day of the year that is associated with one's baptismal name, which is normatively that of a biblical character or other saint.[2] […]
> The custom originated with the Christian calendar of saints: believers named after a saint would celebrate that saint's feast day. Within Christianity, name days have greater resonance in areas where the Christian denominations of Catholicism, Lutheranism and Orthodoxy predominate.[1]
Some French I knew followed this and received gifts(IIRC) --or at least they referenced these things as the source of their names --they did not ignore their actual birthdays though.
Indeed. I had no idea it was so exotic.
It’s kinda of a old people thing. It’s associated with your name a specific saint for it. ( multiple saint are named James or John or Anthony, your name day is specifically for one of them. Anthony of Assisi is not the same day as Anthony of Padou and so on on so forth.)
You usually get a card from your religious grandma and a 20$ bill.
having spent a good part of my life with Greek relatives, I beg to differ.
Birthdays might not be accurate due to difficulties in registering births, civil wars and fascist coups (they burnt every record so that people from, for example, Macedonia had to take Greek names) but the difference from on paper age and actual age is on average a few months off (plus or minus, so they balance in the end).
They also care a lot about celebrating birthdays with very big family gatherings.
On other note: if we believe that somewhere they kept false records of births, what should make us believe that in other parts of the World they kept perfect records?
What should make us think that birth records in Azerbaijan, Colombia, Ohio or Fiji are more accurate?
In modern times it dissolved due to diet changes. Looking at the blue zone in California is one of the most enlightening because they can control for so many factors, the records are excellent, and the people seem to be generally open to being studied. There they have found how diet and lifestyle plays a huge role in longevity
In modern (record keeping) times it - might - dissolved due to diet changes.
Nobody disputed that a healthy diet is healthy. And a healthy lifestyle is healthy. Whereby lifestyle is such a broad word that its in fact meaningless.
Maybe the record keeping in Okinawa was correct.
If you look for outliers, you will find outliers.
If you look for correlation, you will find correlation.
Does not mean they are the causation for all the outliers.
So maybe Okinawa just had a lucky streak, which is now over.
Well, record keeping and also an American occupation. From your link:
"We believe that current loss of longevity advantage in Okinawa is a result of diet westernization"
Another common reason is evading the draft during war due to old age.
In my country the region with longest living people is infamous with high corruption rates and general poverty. It also has the highest natal mortality rate which might be a contributing factor too
That's an interesting potential correlation, as I'd guess some percentage of Loma Linda CA are likely to have been "conscientious objectors" like this SDA fellow the movie Hacksaw Ridge was made about:
On the other hand, we know from other research that physical activity, social engagement, low alcohol consumption, and the Mediterranean diet are all healthy. Can it be just coincidence all 7 blue zones exhibit these things?
Glad to see this up at the top. Here is another article that specifically talks about Sardinia and Okinawa, 2 of the identified "Blue Zones", and really puts it down to poor record keeping: https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-...
The other thing interesting about my family members from the Loma Linda lifestyle is they remained healthy, active, and slim, until their 3-digit expiration dates.
Most were still going on long walks in late 90s, only slowed down by vision degeneration.
The assumption being that poor longevity records resulted in fake centenarians. But what if it resulted in missed centenarians?
On the flip side and more seriously.
From your link: "Officials have found that hundreds of the missing would be at least 150 years old if still alive." That's just silly, Japan celebrates their oldest on a regular basis. The false claims would and are scrutinized, not just by Japan.
The link is from 2010. My point being yes, the absurd claims are investigated and debunked. It's a known problem.
It’s not impossible. I’ve got a friend who is 84 and still traveling the world and sexually active, and everyone in his immediate family has made it past 100. He also got covid twice. Really depends.
The largest factors seem to be purpose and community:
> Belong. All but 5 of the 263 centenarians interviewed belonged to some faith-based community. Denomination does not seem to matter. Research shows that attending faith-based services 4 times per month will add 4 to 14 years of life expectancy.
> Loved ones first. Successful centenarians in the Blue Zones put their families first. This means keeping aging parents and grandparents nearby or in the home (it lowers disease and mortality rates of children in the home too.). They commit to a life partner (which can add up to 3 years of life expectancy) and invest in their children with time and love. (They’ll be more likely to care for aging parents when the time comes.)
> Right tribe. The world’s longest lived people chose—or were born into—social circles that supported healthy behaviors, Okinawans created moais—groups of 5 friends that committed to each other for life. Research from the Framingham Studies2 shows that smoking, obesity, happiness, and even loneliness are contagious. So the social networks of long-lived people have favorably shaped their health behaviors.
Joining a group that believes in magical sky dwelling beings that grant eternal life in utopia provided you worship them enough isn’t the only path to community and purpose.
But it's one of many, and is one of the simplest ways to join a community as they are literally everywhere.
For the time/effort needed to join this community (plural), its pretty much free, maintenance isn't all that much either. People a few hundred years ago already did the hard part.
Not a bad deal. And all you have to do is suspend a little disbelief in something for a while.
It isn’t but we haven’t found another system that works as well yet. The delusion really gives purpose to life. We haven’t found another way to provide a comparable delusion.
Whether by force/dogma or voluntary, a uniformly religious community connects at least weekly and includes all. Through this meeting, you get to know pretty much everybody, what they do, their families, their businesses. Which serves as a platform for making friends, finding partners, business opportunities, the like.
This has been debunked in general if I recall. It turned out only to be true for the majority religion in a region (and not help for others), and then turned out to be the social connections got people better services and health support. Religion was not useful for the effect.
It sounds weird they say 4 to 14 years. What does that mean? Does it mean on average it adds 8 years? But since this is all about averages anyway why not just state the average?
TL:DW; They go to a Blue Zone village Seulo in Italy's Sardinia Island and spend some time there. The village looks pretty normal in general, they use technology they have plastics all over the place, they eat meat drink wine - albeit locally sourced. On thing that stands out is, maybe, the active lifestyle of the old people and strong community.
Having a diet high in carbs is fine so long as it is reasonably well balanced and you aren't getting fat on it. It just really easy to get fat on carbs.
1. Indeed a controversial finding as 1-2 drinks a day being favorable was a classic finding which somehow got debunked about a decade ago. I suspect not because it isn't true, but instead because of the wildly different context. Stressed out people in a high productivity country drinking a few glasses of wine per day may soon turn into more. The alcohol acting as some kind of pain relief, rather than something to enjoy in moderation during a two hour lunch.
2. One thing that shouldn't be missed from the study is portion control. To never be full. I can personally attest that I feel at my best when empty. It's not the same as hungry, I'm talking about the state of having your last meal digested. I remember an older study about these centurions concluding that they were almost always "slightly hungry".
1. Is just generally not really true. They are referencing debunked science. My strong suspicion is that these communities probably drink the same or less than average overall.
2. Carbs are unfairly vilified. Unless you are doing something very particular like keto or you are a powerlifter or something then a big majority your diet should be carbs. You need just a bit of fat and a bit of protein. But not all carbs are created equal. They probably aren't slamming back a liter of coke a day.
Re 1: the "average" may not matter all that much. The study's suggested 2 drinks per day is the same as the American average, which according to some web sources I found is 1.94 drinks per day (among adults). [1]
The difference may be that the variance is not that high. 16% of Americans binge drink [2], which drags the average up - a significant plurality doesn't drink at all. The truth in this case could be consistency. No binge drinkers, a consistent level of wine purchasing indicating a high level of wealth in the community.
Looked this up. A standard serving of wine is 5 fl oz. Two servings a day makes 10 fl oz, and let's say we're talking about a household of two adults for 20 fl oz. At $20 per 750 mL bottle, that's $15.77 a day or about $5757 a year. I think that's well beyond the range of affordability for the median household, even in wealthy countries like the United States.
Interesting how #1 seems to imply but not explicitly call out the relationship (or lack thereof) with motor vehicles. Their widespread usage in the US is one of the contributing factors in obesity.
I saw the headline and I seriously assumed someone was claiming to have discovered that people in some areas of the world experienced accelerated aging.
(In case it's changed, the headline when I read it: "Blue Zones, where people reach age 100 at 10 times greater rates")
Yeah, I came here for the obligatory Doppler shift joke. I don't see one, so I'll give it a try:
Maybe they're called Blue Zones because they're moving towards us so quickly that we can see all their wrinkles more clearly. So they're not really centenarians, but they just look older!
That's right - I was definitely thinking of the twin paradox! (For those that don't know, the twin paradox is a theory of relativity thing - one twin travels out into space and back to Earth near the speed of light and afterward the stationary twin is older than the travelling twin, so the blue-shifted twin "lives longer" at least from Earth's point of view).
That paper has not been published, despite being posted several years, and the top comment under it seems to supply a decent counter claim with evidence. My guess is it's not as accurate as to support your claim of "pure nonsense."
It’s also super common to use memorable names and phrases in scientific literature/presentations. It’s common in my field (biophysics). I don’t know why “blue zone” is so pseudoscientific.
Communicational style comes from environment, inclination, choice and target, and may suggest but not prove (low) quality of content.
Many are irritated e.g. by the style (apparently very frequent in the USA), in articles and books, using the pattern "John one day left the house and a number of things happened; he had graduated there and does this for a living. Now, the science" - odd conflations of narrative and data following the sequences of a novelist instead of theoretical structures: nonetheless, they do frequently have juice to extract.
I bet it’s a bit of column A, a little of column B. Healthy diets and lifestyles will earn you a few extra years, and fraud gets you the rest of the way.
Your posted article highlights a really great statistical principle that I also discovered on my own owning a really rare car: if someone (company) claims to have parts in stock, it was most likely due to a database error, not the actual parts, because the probability of having the parts was so low. Reports of highly improbable events are probably not true in general.
That seems to explain incredible longevity also- if it basically doesn't actually happen, then instances of it are therefore actually instances of error/fraud.
But there are loads of people who hit 100. The random google search talks about 450k centenarians.
100 years ago is 1922. Perhaps the 100 year old person in the 70s is hard to believe, but 1922 is well into major bureaucracy existing, and where it is harder to just make up a person. There are of course loads of stories of identity fraud and the like, but by the time you would want to execute the fraud (I guess in your 40s?) you're looking at trying to do ID fraud in the 1960s.
For the super extreme cases, it maybe feels worth trying to pull this trick off. But at one point we have confirmed that getting to 100 is a thing.
Compare to the total number of records, very, very few were destroyed in WW2. It's not like every building on the planet were burned down.
And lots of people have their own records in family bibles/other books. Modern genealogy sites (and even general web searches) have (and still are) digitizing old records, news papers, graveyards, and lots of other historical records, and this data is being fed into all sorts of databases/AI/analysis tools, making really precise records of giant family trees possible, with original photos, handwritten notes, census data, and on and on.
So there's likely a better, more accurate records of all of this, back hundreds of years, aggregated than ever before.
I know in my case, it doesn't take long now to trace parts of my family back 400-500 years into ancient France (I'm in the US). The number of original records I can see is astounding. It's only getting better.
And it's pretty easy statistically to count % of people making age 100 in countries or regions where records are very, very good, get a good model of how that works, including as many relevant variables as people want to study, and use that to get a good estimate of how many are in places where records are poorer quality. That is how science is routinely done.
I didn't literally mean that people don't ever make it to 100, just that it seems plausible that incorrect reports (fraud, error, etc.) are orders of magnitude more common on a global level. Imagine trying to study longevity with data that has 4M or 40M erroneous centenarians and only 450k real ones.
Some of these isolated 'blue zones' are cults/small communities that may also have a conflict of interest in convincing people that their way of life leads to longevity.
I was a 4th generation Seventh-day Adventist myself. My great grandparents and grandparents all lived very long lives, and so did many people we knew. For them, living a physically healthy life is part of their religion, and it does increase longevity.
My family left when I was a teenager, and I never looked back -- but I'm writing to say that at least the Loma Linda site isn't nonsense.
Does exercise play an important role in Seventh-day Adventist healthy living, or is the healthy lifestyle more about diet, and not smoking/drinking/drugs?
This is what I commented last time this rebuttal paper made the rounds on HN:
While I've also conjectured in the past that at least a good chunk of extreme supercentenarians are due to anagraphical errors if not outright fraud, I do not think that the paper support the thesis well.
For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do not even show anything concrete for Japan).
Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution.
It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of time that I bothered to look, but the paper doesn't discuss the methodology.
Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extreme outliers should have been a tell. The rest of the Italian provinces are in a tight uniform cluster.
Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4 provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8 provinces).
Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is a factor).
A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.
For an expat like myself, the community aspect is the most difficult part. How can you create a community if you are hopping countries every 4-6 years?
> How can you create a community if you are hopping countries every 4-6 years?
Stop hopping before you get old and infirm. Become part of the local support network helping those older and less fortunate than yourself. In turn, you get helped by those around you.
Religion. I’m as atheist as you can get but I still go to Catholic Church on weekends just to form community. Religious people are also generally good upstanding people (if you ignore their bigotry against LGBTQ people)
Learn Argentine Tango. If you live in a big enough city, most likely there will be a tango community. Classes 2 times a week, one practica and one milonga and puff most of your week is covered.
lol! I needed that laugh, thanks. I know you're being funny, but if you already hold similar belief systems and also practice healthy living / thinking on your own, you'll be fine.
I'm technically a Roman Catholic. My parents told me that if I performed the rituals, like communion, I'd get a new bike and it would make grandma happy. My father's belief system:
Dad: "It's freezing in this church".
Mum: "Shhhht! We're in session, have some respect".
Did they control for marriage and divorce? Maybe religious people are just more likely to marry and remain married when older. Lonely elderly people are at increased risk of death, as loneliness increase risk of mental disease and death from disease and accidents, when nobody is around to call help
Maybe, but in that case they could just say "married couples live longer".
I really think they're referring to the communal feeling of religion. Forget about the religion itself, it's an incredibly effective way to get to know hundreds of people, which enriches your life.
We're social creatures and religion is social on steroids.
Going to a community event on a regular basis is a way to meet people and build relationships.
Faith is a way to incentivize going to a community event on a regular basis, and faith communities provide quite a lot of the supply of community events.
Some religions aren’t really over the moon with dogma and mostly just loosely hold a community together. Try a Friends meeting sometime and see what you think.
And "drinks one to two servings of alcohol a day" is a pretty good proxy for "has enough money to afford to drink wine regularly, but is in a stable enough community to not slide into alcoholism".
Makes a strong case for us atheists to form some sort of community and chat about STEM and acknowledge our science gods like Einstein. Now that I think about it, we will probably end up entering into some sort of debate. haha..
I'm religious and this seems like some serious causation/correlation confusion. Maybe attending services/having purpose is correlated, but establishing causation for such a thing afaik is impossible.
Former born-again evangelical Christian here, stopped believing about 10 years ago. I haven't yet found anything like the communities within the churches I was deeply involved in. But I do think it's possible to find outside religion, and I'm getting closer every year.
I've been lucky to live for the last 10 years in a place* where it's easy to form lasting friendships with like-minded, earnest people. For me, I know I'm in the right place when I have friends with whom I can share my insecurities, and they can share theirs, and there's no judgment.
From here I think it's just a matter of prioritizing community whenever it's time to move next, whether it's seeking out groups of friends from our little diaspora or making new friends. That makes sense to do whether I have a partner or not.
(*never expected that Beijing would be so great in this way. I don't know if the expat scene in other major cities is similar; maybe it's just because the community is small here and the city attracts people who prefer not to coast through life)
426 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadSeveral countries on this list are "low" trust societies?" so the data could be explained very well with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=404IeUzGNZ4
[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/blue-zones
It is predominantly a 7th day Adventist community. Notably they prioritize healthy lifestyle and typically are vegetarian as well as avoiding alcohol, caffeine, etc.
There is also a big medical school and hospital complex in the city and many people that live there work in the healthcare field.
There are of course plenty of other explanations.
Features Stamatis Moraitis. Dead.
Features Dr. Ellsworth Wareham. Dead.
Features Marge Jetton. Dead.
Features....oh well I don't want to spoil your day. They are all dead.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/photos/photos-greek-isle-resid...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth_Wareham
https://adventist.news/news/blue-zones-icon-jetton-dies-at-1...
I suppose if we hoped they’d get to 110, we might actually have to do a bit of research.
At the moment, we’re simply relying on getting lucky to get to 100.
Are you implying causation or correlation? For example, I can imagine northern latitudes having more variable stocks of animals (and other food) during bad winters, so averages matter less than extremes.
People were just keeping dead relatives "alive" for the social security or rent control.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/25/health/longevity-blue-zone-we...
high percentage of vegetarians, active lifestyle, religious folks, etc.
I've never looked at it like that. Is it true?
https://www.wcrf.org/why-taller-people-are-at-greater-risk-o...
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/taller-people-mor...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox
Across different species, there's no correlation.
Within the same species though, there is correlation.
Interestingly, statistics about growing larger are often used to support more meat eating by meat advocates. There is a lot of talk about protein quality, and the implication is that smaller people are disadvantaged – as though they must be growing less by all measures, not just stature. It isn't so clear that this is true though, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest we shouldn't strive to grow larger (either in stature or in lean mass).
I'm not saying there is a certain truth in there at all. I do find the correlations fascinating though. It defies a lot of what I understood about nutrition for most of my life so it's definitely something I'd like to see more data on. I'm open to a meat-based diet being superior overall (or any tasty diet, really).
If you look at the top X causes of death in humans, very very few of them could have been avoided "if only the deceased were stronger."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5899404/
It's also pure speculation. I read about this stuff for fun and I know just about nothing about anything. Maybe being larger really is a net positive and I just need to be pointed to the right data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14667430
If someone is relatively weak with below average lean mass, lower than average markers of muscular strength, etc. it seems like the consensus is that they are statistically likely to die or get diseases earlier in life. On the other hand, being on the other side of that seems to yield diminishing returns. It’s great to be fit, but being abnormally strong on the other hand doesn’t appear to increase your lifespan proportionally to your strength.
Most predators will kill us even if we're ridiculously ripped, so that's not important either. In most cases, intelligence seems a lot more useful for avoiding or navigating these situations.
There's also a lot to be said for having moderate strength in a wide range of motion. That can matter a lot in a much broader variety of situations where physical strength matters, and it's far more realistic to attain and sustain.
Avoiding carpal tunnel doesn't require special levels of strength so much as normal fitness. It requires regular movement and preventing weaknesses. I'm not saying we should all vegetate at a computer, I'm saying that the evidence seems good that being 5% larger/stronger (or whatever the figure was) is not particularly helpful, and instead potentially harmful.
For example, regular yoga will probably resolve most (not all) people's mobility and repetitive stress issues. They will not need to be large or strong for this to work.
You just don't see a lot of sedentary people with poor nutrition who have a high muscle mass index.
It's probably the case that people who have just one glass of wine are drinking socially, and therefore have friends, and having friends is an indicator of having status and health. The alcohol itself is poison but one glass is more than offset by otherwise living a good life.
Here's the best source I can find right now:
> The study authors write that “the observed cardiac benefits of alcohol have been hypothesized to be the product of residual confounding because of favorable lifestyle, socioeconomic, and behavioral factors that tend to coincide with modest alcohol intake.”
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/health-benefits-alcohol-st...
In my comment above I didn’t mean to suggest strength is useless or irrelevant so much as that scaling it up by a few percent doesn’t appear to confer meaningful benefits. Someone 5’6” is probably strong enough to do everything someone 6’ can do in every day life, even without modern technology. You can generally scale down what you need to, and for exceptional things, you can likely recruit and partner to solve the problem or apply intelligent solutions.
I’m open to being wrong. Like I was saying, this is just based on correlations I’ve been reading about lately and far from peer reviewed study results.
I suppose my question is, all other things being equal, would we be healthier if we were of smaller stature? Some data indicate this might be the case, and that’s interesting to me. I suppose my upbringing and culture encourage a “bigger is better” mentality.
A lot of data indicate this could simply be a case of people growing larger because they have access to more food. Genes express, people grow, but the main issue isn’t stature so much as having so much food readily available after they finish growing. Perhaps we eat too much and stature has little to do with it; it’s just a byproduct of access to calorie and protein rich food.
Separating the effects of steroids and other growth hormones vs. just having a lot of muscle seems difficult.
My general understanding is that overweight is overweight is overweight, it's hard on your body when excessive, even if it's muscle.
Maybe the key is being smaller but also having slower (or rather, “calmer”) metabolic rates.
Tall people get paid more.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...
super interesting
Loma Linda's core contributing factors seem to be:
* High incidence of vegetarianism
* High incidence of non-smokers and non-drinkers
* Strong religious / social community
* Access to great healthcare
All while having birth records that are just about as accurate as anyplace else in the United States.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Loma+Linda,+CA/Huntington+Be...
Epidemiologically speaking, I think SDAs in general live longer because they don't smoke, don't drink, and don't eat meat -- and have a religious community in which doing so is against God's law. It also doesn't hurt that they keep Sabbath, which means everyone who doesn't work in healthcare or emergency services has a mandatory day off, no work allowed.
Smog in the whole Inland Empire area is still pretty bad, especially in the summer. It gets pretty hot in the summer, not very cold in the winter - a lot like LA, but hotter :)
For example, the cohort that includes people sent to WWII will have many that died in that war, even if they would have hit 100 otherwise.
And a group that "outlaws" some of the major causes of premature death (alcohol, smoking) would then have more cross the line.
If I may posit an idea. It's not that poor record keeping leads to blue zones.
It's that not caring about the trivialities of paper pushing and imaginary rules that current Western governments use to exert their power, helps one live longer.
Now why do guys like you and me know what a land registry is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?
As an anecdote my grandfather born in remote mountain village in mainland Greece in the 1900 was actually registered by his father having been born in 1906 as to avoid being drafted as long as possible to fight in the multiple wars fought at the time. So birth records and certificates from that time are not really trustworthy.
It’s not like they’re going to waste money on photographing every person in a tiny village either.
Incredibly embarrassing for all involved if your bet is correct. None of them considered that possibility?
And I loved the stories when the government introduced a new land registry (based on reality) and the chaos the ensured, as suddenly lot of land was owned 2 or more times, officially unknown villages were officially discovered ...
I would definitely question the validity of the historic birth register, a lot.
Could you provide some links expanding on this? Or a phrase to Google? Sounds fascinating.
https://www.elra.eu/the-present-landscape-of-land-registrati...
The traditional land registry was from 1853 which seems was just a good enough description of what one owns.
In 1995 a land cadastre was created and it came into law in 1998 to replace the old system. A land survey was started to move presume land ownership from the old into the new system. This land survery / chaos was definitely still going on end of the 2000 years in Crete.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loma_Linda,_California
Blue zones could simply be a result of The modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifiable_areal_unit_proble...
One of the findings is that diet matters. They’ve looked at diet differences and certain characteristics show up for people who live longer and have more good years. Those same things show up in the other blue zones.
I’m reminded of the Okinawan case, where postwar rule by the US introduced younger cohorts to much unhealthier eating habits.
For anyone curious:
> In Christianity, a name day is a tradition in many countries of Europe and the Americas, among other parts of Christendom.[1] It consists of celebrating a day of the year that is associated with one's baptismal name, which is normatively that of a biblical character or other saint.[2] […]
> The custom originated with the Christian calendar of saints: believers named after a saint would celebrate that saint's feast day. Within Christianity, name days have greater resonance in areas where the Christian denominations of Catholicism, Lutheranism and Orthodoxy predominate.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day
You usually get a card from your religious grandma and a 20$ bill.
Birthdays might not be accurate due to difficulties in registering births, civil wars and fascist coups (they burnt every record so that people from, for example, Macedonia had to take Greek names) but the difference from on paper age and actual age is on average a few months off (plus or minus, so they balance in the end).
They also care a lot about celebrating birthdays with very big family gatherings.
On other note: if we believe that somewhere they kept false records of births, what should make us believe that in other parts of the World they kept perfect records?
What should make us think that birth records in Azerbaijan, Colombia, Ohio or Fiji are more accurate?
Now that they know about these places, scientists have spent a fair amount of time studying and publishing about them.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3362219/
Nobody disputed that a healthy diet is healthy. And a healthy lifestyle is healthy. Whereby lifestyle is such a broad word that its in fact meaningless.
Maybe the record keeping in Okinawa was correct.
If you look for outliers, you will find outliers.
If you look for correlation, you will find correlation.
Does not mean they are the causation for all the outliers.
So maybe Okinawa just had a lucky streak, which is now over.
basic science, do not look for verification, but falsification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Doss
Most were still going on long walks in late 90s, only slowed down by vision degeneration.
On the flip side and more seriously. From your link: "Officials have found that hundreds of the missing would be at least 150 years old if still alive." That's just silly, Japan celebrates their oldest on a regular basis. The false claims would and are scrutinized, not just by Japan.
The link is from 2010. My point being yes, the absurd claims are investigated and debunked. It's a known problem.
And what steps did the study take to make sure the results aren't just random noise?
> Belong. All but 5 of the 263 centenarians interviewed belonged to some faith-based community. Denomination does not seem to matter. Research shows that attending faith-based services 4 times per month will add 4 to 14 years of life expectancy.
> Loved ones first. Successful centenarians in the Blue Zones put their families first. This means keeping aging parents and grandparents nearby or in the home (it lowers disease and mortality rates of children in the home too.). They commit to a life partner (which can add up to 3 years of life expectancy) and invest in their children with time and love. (They’ll be more likely to care for aging parents when the time comes.)
> Right tribe. The world’s longest lived people chose—or were born into—social circles that supported healthy behaviors, Okinawans created moais—groups of 5 friends that committed to each other for life. Research from the Framingham Studies2 shows that smoking, obesity, happiness, and even loneliness are contagious. So the social networks of long-lived people have favorably shaped their health behaviors.
Well shit.
For the time/effort needed to join this community (plural), its pretty much free, maintenance isn't all that much either. People a few hundred years ago already did the hard part.
Not a bad deal. And all you have to do is suspend a little disbelief in something for a while.
Whether by force/dogma or voluntary, a uniformly religious community connects at least weekly and includes all. Through this meeting, you get to know pretty much everybody, what they do, their families, their businesses. Which serves as a platform for making friends, finding partners, business opportunities, the like.
Or does it mean always 4 and never more than 14?
TL:DW; They go to a Blue Zone village Seulo in Italy's Sardinia Island and spend some time there. The village looks pretty normal in general, they use technology they have plastics all over the place, they eat meat drink wine - albeit locally sourced. On thing that stands out is, maybe, the active lifestyle of the old people and strong community.
There are many more studies linking diet and health.
Here is a non-profit presenting them.
https://nutritionfacts.org/
1. Moderate drinkers outlive nondrinkers. Moderate being 1-2 drinks a day, which IMO is a lot.
2. Diets high in carbs seem to be ok.
I guess low caloric intake and low stress outweigh any of the negative effects of the above
Having a diet high in carbs is fine so long as it is reasonably well balanced and you aren't getting fat on it. It just really easy to get fat on carbs.
2. One thing that shouldn't be missed from the study is portion control. To never be full. I can personally attest that I feel at my best when empty. It's not the same as hungry, I'm talking about the state of having your last meal digested. I remember an older study about these centurions concluding that they were almost always "slightly hungry".
Conversely, low(er) caloric intake relative to expenditure being probably good has been scientific consensus for many decades.
2. Carbs are unfairly vilified. Unless you are doing something very particular like keto or you are a powerlifter or something then a big majority your diet should be carbs. You need just a bit of fat and a bit of protein. But not all carbs are created equal. They probably aren't slamming back a liter of coke a day.
The difference may be that the variance is not that high. 16% of Americans binge drink [2], which drags the average up - a significant plurality doesn't drink at all. The truth in this case could be consistency. No binge drinkers, a consistent level of wine purchasing indicating a high level of wealth in the community.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/12/28/ho...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/data-stats.htm
If you're active, you probably want to be eating your carbs.
(In case it's changed, the headline when I read it: "Blue Zones, where people reach age 100 at 10 times greater rates")
Maybe they're called Blue Zones because they're moving towards us so quickly that we can see all their wrinkles more clearly. So they're not really centenarians, but they just look older!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2
“Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud”
And it is utter bullshit, published in a fourth tier journal by a non-scientist with something to sell.
“Blue zone”, “power 9”, “vitality compass” — please spare me. This is pure pseudo-scientific crap.
And it got published, unlike your rebuttal.
It's also got 170+ citations, none of which I found to claim to debunk the paper. Many of those citations are in good journals.
Do you know any papers published in good journals rebutting this one?
Maybe you should carefully write up your objections and publish that. You certainly are going to great lengths to claim it's crap.
Communicational style comes from environment, inclination, choice and target, and may suggest but not prove (low) quality of content.
Many are irritated e.g. by the style (apparently very frequent in the USA), in articles and books, using the pattern "John one day left the house and a number of things happened; he had graduated there and does this for a living. Now, the science" - odd conflations of narrative and data following the sequences of a novelist instead of theoretical structures: nonetheless, they do frequently have juice to extract.
That seems to explain incredible longevity also- if it basically doesn't actually happen, then instances of it are therefore actually instances of error/fraud.
Although in this case the paper's authors did attempt to account for such errors.
100 years ago is 1922. Perhaps the 100 year old person in the 70s is hard to believe, but 1922 is well into major bureaucracy existing, and where it is harder to just make up a person. There are of course loads of stories of identity fraud and the like, but by the time you would want to execute the fraud (I guess in your 40s?) you're looking at trying to do ID fraud in the 1960s.
For the super extreme cases, it maybe feels worth trying to pull this trick off. But at one point we have confirmed that getting to 100 is a thing.
And lots of people have their own records in family bibles/other books. Modern genealogy sites (and even general web searches) have (and still are) digitizing old records, news papers, graveyards, and lots of other historical records, and this data is being fed into all sorts of databases/AI/analysis tools, making really precise records of giant family trees possible, with original photos, handwritten notes, census data, and on and on.
So there's likely a better, more accurate records of all of this, back hundreds of years, aggregated than ever before.
I know in my case, it doesn't take long now to trace parts of my family back 400-500 years into ancient France (I'm in the US). The number of original records I can see is astounding. It's only getting better.
And it's pretty easy statistically to count % of people making age 100 in countries or regions where records are very, very good, get a good model of how that works, including as many relevant variables as people want to study, and use that to get a good estimate of how many are in places where records are poorer quality. That is how science is routinely done.
Some of these isolated 'blue zones' are cults/small communities that may also have a conflict of interest in convincing people that their way of life leads to longevity.
My family left when I was a teenager, and I never looked back -- but I'm writing to say that at least the Loma Linda site isn't nonsense.
Nutrition, Execise, Water, Sunlight, Temperance, Air, Rest, and Trust in GOD.
See: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/alexandrine_noel/AlexINFO/newstar...
Many testifies being healed from cancer as well, I know some personally who are following these principles.
While I've also conjectured in the past that at least a good chunk of extreme supercentenarians are due to anagraphical errors if not outright fraud, I do not think that the paper support the thesis well.
For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do not even show anything concrete for Japan).
Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution.
It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of time that I bothered to look, but the paper doesn't discuss the methodology.
Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extreme outliers should have been a tell. The rest of the Italian provinces are in a tight uniform cluster.
Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4 provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8 provinces).
Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is a factor).
A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.
Stop hopping before you get old and infirm. Become part of the local support network helping those older and less fortunate than yourself. In turn, you get helped by those around you.
> Religious people are also generally good upstanding people
I think people are generally good upstanding people. I don't think religion has anything to do with it.
Uh-oh.
"Research shows that attending faith-based services 4 times per month will add 4 to 14 years of life expectancy."
Looks like my atheism is is worse than smoking, who knew.
Dad: "It's freezing in this church".
Mum: "Shhhht! We're in session, have some respect".
Dad: "At least it will be warm in hell".
I really think they're referring to the communal feeling of religion. Forget about the religion itself, it's an incredibly effective way to get to know hundreds of people, which enriches your life.
We're social creatures and religion is social on steroids.
It's plausible that the faith-based stuff is just a decent proxy for actually having a functional community and community support.
Going to a community event on a regular basis is a way to meet people and build relationships.
Faith is a way to incentivize going to a community event on a regular basis, and faith communities provide quite a lot of the supply of community events.
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Society_of_Fri....
I'm not saying only religion offers a sense of purpose. But just a bunch of nice people in a building talking about being nice doesn't often work.
From my own experience, I'd guess 50pc or more don't really believe.
I've been lucky to live for the last 10 years in a place* where it's easy to form lasting friendships with like-minded, earnest people. For me, I know I'm in the right place when I have friends with whom I can share my insecurities, and they can share theirs, and there's no judgment.
From here I think it's just a matter of prioritizing community whenever it's time to move next, whether it's seeking out groups of friends from our little diaspora or making new friends. That makes sense to do whether I have a partner or not.
(*never expected that Beijing would be so great in this way. I don't know if the expat scene in other major cities is similar; maybe it's just because the community is small here and the city attracts people who prefer not to coast through life)