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Yves here. Another source of media hype bites the dust: the attention given to the very old, and in particular, supposed clusters of the “extreme aged” in the hopes that might give clues for normal people to live longer. But as happens so often in the health arena, the data is bad, here hopelessly so.
By Saul Justin Newman, Research Fellow, Centre For Longitudinal Studies, UCL. Originally published at The Conversation
From the swimming habits of dead trout to the revelation that some mammals can breathe through their backsides, a group of leading leftfield scientists have been taking their bows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 34th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Not to be confused with the actual Nobel prizes, the Ig Nobels recognise scientific discoveries that “make people laugh, then think”.
We caught up with one of this year’s winners, Saul Justin Newman, a senior research fellow at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies. His research finds that most of the claims about people living over 105 are wrong.
How did you find out about your award?
I picked up the phone after slogging through traffic and rain to a bloke from Cambridge in the UK. He told me about this prize and the first thing I thought of was the lady who collected snot off of whales and the levitating frog. I said, “absolutely I want to be in this club”.
What was the ceremony like?
The ceremony was wonderful. It’s a bit of fun in a big fancy hall. It’s like you take the most serious ceremony possible and make fun of every aspect of it.
But your work is actually incredibly serious?
I started getting interested in this topic when I debunked a couple of papers in Nature and Science about extreme ageing in the 2010s. In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.
The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.
Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.
The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.
What about other places?
The same goes for all the other blue zones. Eurostat keeps track of life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece. When the agency first started keeping records in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest old-age life expectancy in Europe out of 128 regions, and Ikaria was 109th. It’s amazing the cognitive dissonance going on. With the Greeks, by my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases.
What do you think explains most of the faulty data?
It varies. In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.
According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.
Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.
The oldest man in the world, John Tinniswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool. The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.
But most people don’t lose count of their age…
You would be amazed. Looking at the UK Biobank data, even people in mid-life routinely don’t remember how old they are, or how old they were when they had their children. There are similar stats from the US.
What does this all mean for human longevity?
The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know. The clear way out of this is to involve physicists to develop a measure of human age that doesn’t depend on documents. We can then use that to build metrics that help us measure human ages.
Longevity data are used for projections of future lifespans, and those are used to set everyone’s pension rate. You’re talking about trillions of dollars of pension money. If the data is junk then so are those projections. It also means we’re allocating the wrong amounts of money to plan hospitals to take care of old people in the future. Your insurance premiums are based on this stuff.
What’s your best guess about true human longevity?
Longevity is very likely tied to wealth. Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well. I just put out a preprint analysing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality. The places consistently reaching 100 at the highest rates according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which doesn’t have a government) and Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were cancelled completely as a legal document in 2010 because they were so full of pension fraud. This data is just rotten from the inside out.
Do you think the Ig Nobel will get your science taken more seriously?
I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.
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For some reason this story made me happy!
Dead people collecting pensions makes so much more sense than dead people voting.
I wonder what else dead people can do?
Best…H
Speaking as a cemetery centenarian, after I’ve exercised my vote as a member of the South African Communist Party and collected three or four social grants, I really don’t have much to do except devour the brains of the living . . .
Yes, this story also made me happy, especially because the author enjoyed his prizegiving so much. I wonder if the Ig Nobels will ever become a challenge to the Nobels, or whether they will ultimately merge?
I wonder how much of an effect this corrupted data base has on American Social Security rates? It would, as noted, effect Medicare planning. (Absent, of course, a ‘vigourous’ Jackpot.)
Curiously enough, it comes across as yet another point against the present-day obsession with “The Narrative.”
“No, Virginia, there are not Struldbrugs running our society.”
I think the points on ultra long lived individuals are well made, especially the issue of pension fraud. Plus individual records can be incorrect – my father had two ‘official’ ages, one on a birth cert, one on a baptismal cert, due to my grandfather making a mistake when registering his birth in 1932 (at 14 years old!). My father happily used whichever birthdate suited him.
However, you can push this argument too far by dismissing all longevity research – the issues with getting longevity figures right in demography are well known and have been worked on intensively by demographers and others over the years. The Okinawan figures have always been recognised as problematic because of the loss of records during WWII, and the radical change in diet of the islanders at least twice in the 20th century is well recorded (once post-war, with another one around the 1980’s). Its no secret now that Okinawans have probably the worst diet in Japan, mostly thanks to the influence of the US bases on the islands.
Another well studied issue is that diets and health can change surprisingly radically in societies, and not always for the better for the rich. There were plenty of periods when the rich lived shorter lives than the poor thanks to their ‘good’ diet. In 17th and 18th century England, for example, the rich ate more animal rich food with lots of sugar in contrast to the grain and root heavy diet of the poor, this was reflected in their teeth and overall health. Jonathan Swift noted this on this way back in the 17th Century. In Japan, the 19th century rich suffered for their fondness for white rice over the more mixed grain diet of the rural poor. So its never a simple causative connection, although its pretty reasonable to assume that in the modern era the well off do live substantively longer, especially once wealthier men stopped smoking so much.
Differing quality of demographic and actuarial information does vary from country to country, which makes comparisons quite difficult sometimes, but the overall (adjusted) data is generally sound, with exception of Africa. Overall population data on lifestyle and health/longevity is much better than many online influencers (keen to press their particular diets or supplements) would have you believe. In the US in particular there are a number of very high quality long term studies which have been ongoing since at least the 1960’s which are generally ignored by people pushing the latest fad diets and junk science.
But what am I supposed to do with all the advice from the very old people telling me to drink and smoke?
I gladly picked up those habits just to live longer.
They’re outliers. Don’t press your luck. Besides, smoking and drinking makes your clothes stink and your belly protrude. Ignoble appearance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/health/alcohol-cancer-young-adults.html
September 18, 2024
Deep Links Between Alcohol and Cancer Are Described in New Report
Scientists continue to rethink the idea that moderate drinking offers health benefits.
By Roni Caryn Rabin
Adults under age 50 have been developing breast cancer and colorectal cancer at increasingly higher rates over the last few decades, and alcohol use may be one factor driving the trend, according to a scientific report * published on Wednesday.
The report, by the American Association for Cancer Research, highlights scientific breakthroughs that have led to new anticancer drugs and improved overall survival.
But the authors also described a troubling pattern: Even as cancer death rates have declined, the overall incidence of several cancers has been rising inexplicably, with an especially alarming increase among younger adults in cancers of the gastrointestinal system, like colorectal cancer.
The report estimates that 40 percent of all cancer cases are associated with modifiable risk factors. It recommends reducing alcohol consumption, along with making lifestyle changes such as avoiding tobacco, maintaining a healthy diet and weight, exercising, avoiding ultraviolet radiation and minimizing exposure to pollutants…
* https://cancerprogressreport.aacr.org/progress/
Thanks for this but the Covid Brain Trust is not convinced. Did not correct for confounders like weight (which correlates with cancer incidence) and level of consumption of ultra processed food. They want to see studies from countries with better diets and long-standing moderate alcohol consumption like Spain, Italy, and France.
This hype train began scheduled service much longer ago than the interview indicates. 60 Minutes’ Caucuses and Okinawa stories aired in the mid-1970s, IIRC.
For a long time, a common theme among American media/people (dunno about non-USA) is that there is a mythical, more primitive “Shangri-La” where people have some secret that lets them live a better life than what’s possible in the modern US and the extant, boring advice of eat veggies, and avoid vices.
I imagine this pre-dates the “Lost Horizon” book by James Hilton by at least decades
A quick Google search returned several articles on the disproportionate numbers of centenarians in the Caucuses. The articles seem to accept without question many of the claims of advanced age until they mention the case of Shirali Muslimov of Azerbaijan, who reportedly lived to a credibility-stretching 168. Otherwise, they tend to attribute the long lives in the region to diet and “mountain air.” In reality, very few credible birth records existed in many parts of the non-Russian parts of the Russian Empire during the 19th century. The Soviet government in the 1970s did use the allegedley long-lived citizens of the three Caucusus republics for propaganda purposes. American capitalism didn’t miss out on an opportunity to take advantage, either. I recall a TV commercial for a well-known brand of yoghurt that featured actors in local costume spooning the product from containers that prominently showed the brand name.
Both my grandfathers lied about their ages to join their respective armies (American and Canadian) during World War I. They both carried the couple of extra years to their deaths. Neither made to 80.
I even wonder about the effect of bad data floating around the internet. For example, if I enter my dad’s name as a search term, multiple sites will imply he’s alive and 98 years old even though he died when he was 79.
People also lie about their ages and women can be bad for this. Decades ago I was reading about this false age phenomena and one guy in America was saying that he had lied about his age by ten years for insurance purposes though I do not know how that worked out. Doing genealogy, you can see in the records how people change their ages with each census and it may be that people just forget. If somebody asked my age, I have to stop for a minute to do some quick calculations to answer it. You get old enough and keeping track of years is not really a priority anymore.
> If somebody asked my age, I have to stop for a minute to do some quick calculations to answer it.
Me too. But I suspect that we are not typical, since I remember the nurse doing vaccinations a few years ago being amused when I paused to do the calculation. (Younger people would probably need to do the calculation on their phone).
I also have to do the math when questioned about my age. I noticed it happened around age 70.I have a theory as to why it happens.
In Canada one can take early retirement at age 55…..then women can start collecting their old age pension at age 60…..then of course 65 is the official retirement date…then one reaches 70, and nothing, it’s not even a special age, you have to wait until age 80 that’s a big deal..
Sadly, women are convinced from their youth that they are worthless as they age: youth = beauty at all costs (face lifts, injectables says it all).
I stopped coloring my stunning, white hair in my mid 50s. You would not believe me if I told you of the many females friends who were cross with me (even when I explained the health impact of the chemicals on my scalp and in the water supply) nor the number that approach me to admire me for my ‘courage’.
Personally, I have never been more beautiful at 63 because I am healthy, strong and finally acquiring wisdom.
Aside: the man I’ve been dating for many years has lied to me over and over again about 1 stinking year. He has many other fantastic attributes and I do find this more comical than an indicator of his overall integrity. We all have our insecurities!
Looking forward to an election cycle of nonagenarians rolling back the odometer and claiming they are millenials. Grandfathers ghost 96th birthday just passed, he was 1st gen son of Polish-Ukrainian immigrant parents. I think they were just preceding some immigrant crackdown legislation. I have the photocopy of Social Security record of deceased birth to death I requested. His mothers family died of ingesting wild mushrooms well short of 100 years!
eat real food, not too much, mostly plants. avoid the sun and accidents.
And the hypothesis of largely eating largely vegetables has been around and documented in mass media at least 100 years.
bonus: drink distilled water (or very good reverse osmosis) as much as possible (without being crazy about it)….. if you hold the hypothesis that American federal and state drinking water standards are woefully inadequate and your water source plausibly has been contaminated by past/current industrial-commercial-residential sources.
My father in law lives with us; he has lived with us for eight years now. He turned 100 last Friday. We did not have a party both due to covid and due to none of us liking parties. We asked a bunch of people from his old home area back east to send him emails, along with people whom he has gotten to know here, and we set up decorations and had cake and ice cream. He is still completely “with it”; he still reads stuff online and pays his own bills and follows chess games online. He is extremely frail but nonetheless goes out for a walk in our condo complex every day; he does use a walker.
He grew up very poor during the Depression, and even worked as a coal miner as a child, then was in WWII, went to college through the GI bill, and became an academic. So he had a mix of poor and comfortable. He has had plenty of stress in his life; his wife had Alzheimer’s for 12 years. He visited her twice a day, every day, during those years. When he moved in with us his savings were nearly depleted.
So he is for real 100 years old. I have his birth certificate since I had to send for it at one point. If I had to point to what I think has kept him alive, it is definitely not his genes; there is no great longevity in his family. I think it is a combo of caloric restriction (which he has practiced for 50+ years), and his Roman Catholic faith, which gives him great solace. Also we have made sure that he hasn’t caught covid.
My grandmother is still alive and kinda mad about it. She is 101. She grew up on a farm during the depression, moved during WWII to work in a factory doing clerical work. She married, had 2 children and lived a middle class life. She didn’t drink or smoke, drank a glass of milk with her dinner, and took a walk almost every evening. She is a killer bridge player and had all her faculties until the last year or so.
She lived alone and independently until a fall and a broken hip at age 96 made the move to assisted living necessary. She is very angry with God that she has outlived her husband (27 years+), all her siblings, and the 1st 2 pastors she wanted to do her eulogy.
My Dad calls her a “tough old bird”
There was a women from the New York area in the news recently for being 112 years old.
When asked what the secret to a long life was she said: “No husband, no children.”
Jimmy Carter has another 11 days to make it to 100. Good luck to him!
I hope he winds up living longer than Henry Kissinger.
>I hope he winds up living longer than Henry Kissinger.
>
Amen to that.
I’m almost 87. My mom lived to be 101. I am ambulatory & mentally sharp except for some short term memory loss. All my old friends and relatives under 75 are dead. My goal is to be able to live a pleasant life as long as possible. And once that becomes impossible, I will terminate.
Besides inheriting good genes, these may be my longlivevity “secret(s)” in the order of importance:
(if I forgot anything, let me know -Peter Taradash)
#1 Avoid stress! Make up your mind not to get excited about politics, or world events. Try to have happy thoughts & memories. Don’t have negative thoughts or hate anyone (or any group). If something big or small bothers you, remember “Troubles will pass, They don’t really matter. Tomorrow is another, new day. You can always undo things and start over.”
#2. If possible have enough wealth in the form of savings, a pension (or whatever), so that you won’t have any financial worries.
#3. Exercise at least 30 minutes a day. Don’t drink much booze or smoke, eat plenty of salads & vegetables. Stay skinny. Take a 2 or 3-km medium to fast walk every day.
#4. Get plenty of deep sleep. Take 2-hour naps every afternoon. Sleep another 7 to 8 hours every night.
#5. Have some serious goal(s), interest, business, or hobby to keep busy with after you retire,
#6. If possible, have daily play contact with grandchildren, or any children, friends, or family who love you– or at least act like they do.
#7 Absent that, Play (fetch the ball or other Physical game) for at least an hour or two daily with a jolly dog that acts like a puppy and loves you. Love and affection is important.
#8. Reduce alcohol consumption. One (maybe 2 glasses of wine or Sangria per day with a meal is OK.
#9. Drink fresh mountain spring water or distilled or purified water as much as possible. A liter a day is fine. Chlorinated & fluoridated Faucet water is usually not as good for you as it should be.
#10. Regular sex is great if possible.
#11. Avoid strong liquor, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, or similar recreational drugs.
#10 Maintaining a healthy daily diet with fiber (like morning oatmeal, prunes raisins and Psyllium husks). Also vegetables (like corn on the cob, Brown rice instead of white, Leave peels on potatoes)
#11. Maintain proper weight for your size (no potbelly!) Exercise (2 kg dumbbells – 100 reps.- OK). #12. Minimize exposure to pollutants–i.e. Don’t breathe air with chemical insect or weed killer fumes, nor auto or factory exhaust, etc.…