Data set on mortality of national basketball association (NBA) players
In this work, we present a data set on the survival times and mortality rates of all 4374 professional basketball players who participated in the National Basketball Association (NBA) from its inception in 1946 until July 2019 [[1]]
It contains the data of 412 active and 3962 former players
The youngest NBA player to die was Bryce Dejean-Jones, who was fatally shot in 2016 at the age of 23 years, and the oldest former NBA player to die was Ben Goldfadden, who died in 2013 at the age of 99 years. The estimated median age at death was 81.4 years
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340922008216).
That can’t be because according to people on the internet, all you need to do to live forever is exercise daily, eat healthy (keto with high saturated fat intake) and avoid seed oils.
Here’s something to think about. I bet many reading these statistics think “ok, maybe they got the exercise part down pat, but probably their diets were not great”. Fine. Except when researchers look into the diets of centenarians and supercentenarians, they are all over the place, some are decent, but many are cr@p, and certainly none are “perfect” according to some scientific standard. In fact what you can say about their diets is that they are exactly reflective of the population at large, some OK, some poor and everything in between. It’s not their diet that got them there, and it’s not even their avoidance of vices - Dick Van Dyke recently crossed the 100 year mark, and for decades he was a hardcore alcoholic and smoker - for sure he lived a much unhealthier lifestyle than these athletes. Because it’s not anything about lifestyle or diet and other “natural” factors so many maniacally push as the answer to longevity. It’s the genes. Once you hit your late 80’s, the genetic cards are revealed: either you have a royal flush and get all the chips, or you are wiped clean and given a bum’s rush out by security - all no matter how healthy your lifestyle.
What people also underestimate is just how rare centenarians are statistically. Look at all those NBA players - not one of them won the genetic lottery, simply because the odds are remote. Remote enough, that few if any folks reading this site will hit that 100 landmark… unless they get their pharmaceuticals right, because I got bad news for you: diet and exercise, no matter how perfect are not going to do it.
Kahn, his sisters, and his brother were, collectively, the world’s oldest living quartet of siblings.[4] Kahn himself lived to 109. His sister, Helen Reichert (1901–2011), nicknamed “Happy”, died at age 109. The youngest sibling, Peter Keane (1910–2014), died at the age of 103.[5] Kahn’s other sister, Lee (1903–2005), died at the age of 101.
Helen “Happy” Reichert
The four siblings were all centenarians
She loved rare hamburgers, chocolate, cocktails, and nightlife in New York, including exotic restaurants, Broadway shows, movies, and the Metropolitan Opera. She smoked for over eightyyears.
Agree, centenarians are rare, however, I’m surprised by some online calculators that paint a much more optimistic picture for the future. For instance, the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that a one-year-old girl today has roughly an 18% chance of hitting the 100-year mark. (see Life expectancy calculator - Office for National Statistics)
, because I got bad news for you: diet and exercise, no matter how perfect are not going to do it.