Exceptional lifespans in Italy predate the introduction of proper old-age recordkeeping… Nearly three decades ago, it was found that the Italian government was paying out pensions to about 30,000 dead people…
Consider that some 42% of Costa Ricans who were aged 99 and greater were people who simply misstated their ages in the 2000 census…
[In Japan] police found the body of a man thought to be one of Japan’s oldest, at 111 years, mummified in his bed, dead for more than three decades. His daughter, now 81, hid his death to continue collecting his monthly pension payments, the police said…
In 2010, the Ministry of Justice put out a memo noting that there were 234,354 people aged 100 and older whose addresses were not recorded. Some 77,118 of them were older than 120 and 884 were older than 150. These people didn’t exist; in some cases, they never existed, and in others they were long dead, including many cases where these dead people’s pension checks just kept coming. A simple check shows that Japan’s centenarian numbers were off by over 80%.
Like Italy, Greece has struggled with the unfortunate reality of paying dead people lots of money. In 2012, it was found that almost three-quarters of Greek centenarians were either dead or pension fraudsters listed as having the wrong ages.
The conclusion is noteworthy - we can’t derive “lessons learned” about lifestyle from bad data:
If you want to succeed at giving humans longer lives, we must obtain better data. Places like the blue zones don’t have an especial relevance to longevity, and focusing on them will tend to be a waste of time that distracts from other, more important work. The faultiness of the data from these and other places will also tend to make the search for longevity secrets all the more difficult because, for example, due to this sort of error, we don’t really know the shape of late-life mortality, and we certainly don’t have great ideas about the sorts of health behaviors that sustain the longest possible human lives.
Based on what we know for real (saturated fat causing disease via apoB, etc), then it should make sense these are long lived populations. I don’t think the diets were high in this.
I do agree that it is a distraction. And a money maker for those “coaches” who guide people to a blue zone lifestyle. Which is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Real advances in longevity are not going to come from where people live, what they eat or what they do. Those things can have a positive impact on health span but will not increase real life span due to the many limitations in human biology.
Even people like Bryan Johnson who do everything humanly possible to live a longer healthier life are not going to defeat aging without significant gene editing and you won’t find that in any “blue zone” program.
Extending human life span with full functionality is going to be very expensive
The same with Michael Lustgarten. He basically only optimizes food right now, not sure how that’ll conquer aging @ConquerAging? Although it is a good foundation, of course.
