> The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
Nice work. It just won a 2024 Ig Nobel Prize. Well-deserved, I'd say:
So there's this short little book "Food rules" by Michael Pollan. Not much content but seems like the author went through a lot of research. He comes to conclusion based on this tons of data that all we really know for sure is that people living in these blue regions are living much longer and it seems to be related to what they eat. That it is basically the only solid and stable data point we have. Welp. (I'm overstating it a bit, but not by that much)
Yes, I happen to be interested in this topic and had previously read this paper. So it's interesting to see how many of the commentors (even on HN) didn't even read the first few paragraphs of the paper or the article. I guess I must do that with articles I'm not previously familiar with. :-)
keeping in mind that they live in countries with higher life expectancy than most countries anyway. Indeed they may not even be outliers within those countries.
Except, it misses the point and doesn't really do that while being persuasive.
According to the Blue Zone researchers, some of the Blue Zones are disappearing because the generations that came after the oldest live differently and much shorter. By differently, their eating, body movement, and other characteristics are different. Looking at the whole population doesn't segment for differences between generation. So, nuance is lost.
In some areas, like the Blue Zone in the US other research is finding the people who live there are healthier than the surrounding populations. Then you have to ask, what area do you average over for your measurement and statistics?
> According to the Blue Zone researchers, some of the Blue Zones are disappearing because the generations that came after the oldest live differently and much shorter.
Of course they would say that. But if these zones are simultaneously recording births better and reducing welfare fraud, and if 80%+ of the centenarians either had no birth certificate or were actually dead, I'm going to need more than "but they're also changing lifestyles" as an explanation.
We're talking here about unusually long life, not just "he's still going strong at 85" long. No one here is arguing that people who are active and eat right don't have a longer healthspan, but that's a concept that's provable without the so-called Blue Zones.
I listened to an interview with the author during the week, in short as soon as you start getting reliable recording of births and clamp down on old age welfare fraud the phenomenon disappears.
"Then you have to ask, what area do you average over for your measurement and statistics?"
This is a big thing that I didn't seen in the paper this article is based on. It seemed like the author was comparing adjusted numbers from the blue zone with unadjusted numbers from non-blue zones. Without comprehensive investigation of error rates and even different error mechanisms by locale, it seems like a poor comparison to make. Comparing life expectancies is better than comparing outlier centarian numbers, but you are right that it depends on what other areas we are using as the baseline or average (and I take it a step farther by saying it depends on what error adjustments need to be made to both data sets).
The whole blue zone idea is a bit misapplied though. These population studies find new variables to look at. Then you have targeted studies to investigate thos variables. Discrediting the centarian numbers doesn't discredit the findings on stuff like a mederteranian diet having better health outcomes than the standard western diet, etc.
Kinda depends on how much you value inductive vs. deductive reasoning, but the authors make the deductive case that:
- There's strong incentives to misreport in these areas (the compelling example from Sardinia was that the person is alive for the purposes of pension fraud, but really dead)
- People who are incentivized to report people being older than they are will do so
And the inductive case relies on data, which is presumed to be totally flawed because of the misaligned incentives.
It is very much to the point, addressing the specific claims and methodology of a specific (and apparently somewhat influential) study.
You are, of course, free to speculate that there are other issues related to longevity than those considered in the study in question, but even if these suppositions are correct, in no way would this justify saying the paper being discussed here misses the point. The point is that the blue zones study is too flawed to support any definite position, which includes both its own conclusions and the more nuanced issues about which you speculate.
> It is very much to the point, addressing the specific claims and methodology of a specific (and apparently somewhat influential) study.
Except, the author doesn't discredit specific claims of the Blue Zones. For example, the Blue Zones might take an area and state there is a higher rate of centurions who are healthy and capable. The counter to that might be the average life span in the region isn't an outlier. In one case you're looking at a targeted subgroup and the other your looking at the population as a whole. One observations doesn't disprove another.
This is just one example. It's why I call the work misleading.
You are using "might" more than once here. I have my opinions too, and FWIW, this looks like motivated reasoning, holding the response to a much higher standard of proof than the original claim.
There was a study I read about in Barrons that was noting that places a western diet goes the health care costs then start going up. Other studies have found that a western diet leads to more unhealthy outcomes (increased disease and earlier death).
I state this to point out that there are other variables at plan than just changes in record keeping.
Could there be third correlated variable namely income that correlate with both western diet and health care costs? Or even better records of disease and deaths?
Not exactly. It establishes that error rates are high in those areas, demolishing the centarian numbers. It doesn't give much investigation into the averages at all. Where it does, it seems to compare adjusted numbers of one data set with unadjusted numbers of another. If you really want to get into the averages, you'd have to determine error rates and adjustments for each specific area, probably by jurisdiction or record keeper, and then compare them. The problem is, nobody is going through that process for the entire world so we just use the face value numbers until we want disprove a specific area and then compare the adjusted numbers against unadjusted numbers. The data is too massive to rigorously investigate. But this whole effort is moot. What tangible benefit comes from disproving blue zone data? These population level studies aren't meant to provide answers. They're meant to provide new variables. Each of the blue zone longevity recommendations have their own studies to either prove (food stuff) or disprove (drinking wine daily) them.
So yeah, it's great the errors in the data have been called out it's a bit surprising that the author interviewed is so angry in the article. I guess it's fitting that he got the Ig nobel, since this correction doesn't have any applicable impact to end result, which were additonal studies investigating the individual suggestions/variables, such as specific dietary practices.
It would be different if these were new studies, but this is all in the past. This new finding of unreliability doesn't have any impact, hence the Ig nobel instead of the real nobel.
The Ig Nobel is not for trivial achievements, it is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." This takes different forms.
The part of the wikipedia article you are referencing is an inference from a particular article: "A September 2009 article in The National titled "A noble side to Ig Nobels" says that, although the Ig Nobel Awards are veiled criticism of trivial research, history shows that trivial research sometimes leads to important breakthroughs."
The definition of "blue zones" never had anything to do with average longevity. The entire concept is predicated on unusual numbers of centenarians, not long average life spans. In fact, as is pointed out in the Ig Nobel winning paper, Blue Zone places like Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria have always been paradoxical: they are supposed to have higher numbers of unusually long lived people, but have shorter average lifespans than the rest of their countries. The paradox goes away with the finding that the count of centenarians is incorrect. There's nothing left to the Blue Zone concept without the centenarians.
Yes, it is definitely satirical. But isn't specifically for "trivial", it gets deployed in different ways.
Some of the awards are straight up criticism of the research, like for bunk homeopathy stuff. It was awarded for the prank paper used in the Sokal affair, in which it's definitely praise of what Sokal did. Sometimes it is awarded for a bizarre but funny thing from something being studied in another more serious context like the magnetic frog levitation paper.
What topic are you suggesting to search on Pubmed? I have yet to see anything that supports some places have places with exceptionally long lived people. Especially to the massive outlier values that is often put forth. (So, 105 is not that crazy of a number to consider. 110, however, already starts to stretch credibility quite heavily.)
(Leaving discussion of the ignobel to the other thread.)
So link me a single bloody paper that goes over this? Searching "blue zones" on pubmed shows mainly things older than this paper. And a lot of stuff that, frankly, feels highly suspicious.
Similarly, if there are places that have debunked this paper, link one. It is a genuinely interesting topic to read about.
Please see the comment history for my opinion on blue zones, a link, and the areas to search on Pubmed. You can even find the areas of blue zone recommendations in TFA. You're not supposed to search for blue zones, but for studies on those recommendations (plant heavy or mederteranian diets, exercise, etc).
There are basically zero studies which prove anything about particular foodstuffs. It's all observational studies with small effect sizes and multiple uncontrolled confounding variables: junk science.
We know we need certain essential nutrients to prevent deficiencies, an energy intake surplus causes weight gain, and a few substances like trans fat are problematic. Beyond that, people seem to be making claims and recommendations not backed by hard evidence and frequently confuse correlation with causation.
We aren't talking about unequivocal proof. If someone asks what they can do to increase longevity, it's perfectly reasonable to tell them about studies that show strong correlations and mention the way the confounding factors play a role.
You might be interested to look into some of the twin studies that put twins on similar exercise regimens and differening diets. They seem to be the strongest evidence possible for this sort of thing. Hardly what I would call junk science.
The exercise part I can believe as we have somewhat better quality evidence there. But if you have seen dietary studies on twins that actually meet evidence-based medicine criteria then I would greatly appreciate a citation as those would be interesting to read.
As I suspected, another low-quality study which changed a bunch of variables in a small study group for only a few months and found a minor change in a few blood tests (no actual measured change in longevity or other health outcomes). The most obvious flaw in the study design is that the two diets weren't isocaloric, which basically invalidates all of their conclusions. It's really disappointing to see junk "science" like this make it through peer review. I mean this is the kind of garbage that an undergraduate journal club could rip apart without any advanced statistics.
And I have searched on my own before. Never found much of anything reliable or actionable.
Ozempic is showing that life expectancy is mostly avoiding obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, but not a specific magic food. It is just calories, vitamins and minerals.
Have a link that explains how Ozempic is fiber-mimetic or pro-biotic-mimetic? If that were the case I would expect to see fiber and probiotics to be associated with gastroparesis. They aren't.
Ozempic exists because Americans are addicted to hypercaloric hyper delicious "food" that was engineered by the big tobacco companies that used their excess cash to buy food companies in the 80's. They then applied their research on making tobacco addictive to make food addictive.
Modern American food is literally the new tobacco.
Ozempic disrupts hunger signals. Fiber does that to a certain extent ("increases feelings of satiety"). I haven't seen anything about probiotics doing that, but I think probiotics are bunk and tend not to read about them.
A while back I dug into the research of this author and I was not impressed. Some examples of things that caught me poor and leading...
* The Blue Zones claim that most places that list many centurions are false due to bad record keeping. Only a few places have good enough records that are trustworthy. In this authors research he called out places that were not blue zones as examples of bad data against Blue Zones.
* In Okinawa the Blue Zones claim that only the oldest generation fits the Blue Zone model. That more recent generations eat poorly and have bad health. That this Blue Zone is going away. This researcher has focused on the more recent food and health of younger generations to discount it being a Blue Zone for that oldest generation.
* In the US he fails to find fault in record keeping (last I dug into it) with the only location that is considered a Blue Zone. Instead he focuses on generalities.
There are more examples like this.
This all seems disingenuous. It's not to agree with Blue Zones but rather to look at his arguments against those put forward for Blue Zones.
I keep thinking of the phrase "Lies, Damn Lines, and Statistics"
I don't think it is just bad statistics, it is very poor data extractions.
Just an example:
"Like the ‘blue zone’ islands of Sardinia and Ikaria, Okinawa also represents the shortest-lived
and second-poorest region of a rich high-welfare state"
Sardinia[1], at 83.8, had in 2018 one of the EU highest life expectancies, certainly higher than the rest of Italy (83.4). Like the rest of Italy it was badly hit by COVID in 2020. Life expectancy at 55 is 30.6 vs 30.1 for the rest of Italy. I don't know how to match it with their Figure 2 that shows the all Sardinian provinces being extreme outliers in negative other than they completely misinterpreted the data. Also the same graph shows 7 blue dots for Sardinian provinces, historically Sardinia had only 4 provinces and has had 8 only for a short period in the mid 2000s.
[edit: The newer version of the paper[2] is different and doesn't have figure 2]
Figure 2 is now Figures S2 and S3 in the newer paper.
Table S1 is also relevant: all four Sardinian provinces that appear in that table have existed only from 2005 to 2016. The other 4 historical provinces do not appear. I can't help but think that they didn't somehow account for that and it messed up their data.
Although the fact that those four provinces stick out as extreme outliers in their graph should have clued them that something was wrong.
This doesn't really address Loma Linda, California, the Adventist blue zone.
The researcher's criticism of Loma Linda isn't that people don't live longer there; it's that Adventist Health purchased Dan Buettner's marketing company Blue Zones LLC in 2020.
Adventists are teetotalers, so he questions why they'd want to be associated with the Blue Zones guideline of drinking "every day at twice the NHS heavy drinking guidelines."
Which is a fair question -- but it doesn't have anything to do with whether Loma Linda is an area with greater longevity.
From the paper: For example, the Centres for Disease Control generated an independent estimate of average longevity across the USA: they found that Loma Linda, a Blue Zone supposedly characterised by a ‘remarkable’ average lifespan 10 years above the national average, instead has an unremarkable average lifespan29 (27th-75th percentile; Fig S6).
The CDC looked at average life expectancy in Loma Linda across all demographics. Purely geographical and on average.
The blue zones focused on the greater longevity specifically of Adventists in Loma Linda.
It wasn't a question of whether living inside the municipal boundaries of Loma Linda automatically conferred some special health benefits -- clearly it doesn't.
It was, "Why is there an unusually high concentration of outliers living here, and what behaviors cause them to live longer than average?"
There are ~9000 Adventists in Loma Linda. This is two categories you can split people into, then intersect.
There are 330,000,000 million Americans. There are likely millions of categories people can be split into. Just for fun let's say counties (6000+) then any of a zillion other cross items (left handed, blue eyed, above average height, smells like butter, etc., etc.,Etc.) Say we find 10,000 of these categories.
Life expectancy is decently modeled as a gaussian with std deviation 8 years. A 10 year excess is a z-score of 1.25, and 10% of samples will be at this point.
The odds of TONS of subsets of size 9000 of the 330,000,000 people that can be found in the same pair of county+trait from the 600,000,000 pairs is nearly 1.
Thus the Adventists in Loma Linda are far more likely to be one of these many blips that have zero causal power than they are to have special life sauce. Finding them is merely an artifact of being able to filter data, not a special power of the objects.
Or a simpler way: pick two binary traits, split the 330m Americans into 33,000 chunks of size 10,000 where each group has all in one of the four pairs of traits, and you would expect (more or less - there is some more math to do here) that 10% of these groups has average lifespans over 10 years, i.e., 3,300 of the groups are the same as the Loma Linda Adventists.
If "no magic is needed", then why don't you - or someone else - name, say, 5 more such groups/chunks with their exact characteristics? It seems that it is not that easy to find them... and yet someone found such a group in Loma Linda...
It's much easier to find a group of Adventists that have an above average lifespan because Adventists form a community. People with blue eyes or people who are left handed who live in the same county don't all know each other and discuss their statistically insignificant longevity
Doesn’t county or town/cities (doesn’t know the diff in US) counts for "communities", and aren’t those separated in groups while doing national stats? The dice rolling groups are obviously here and have probably been surveyed many time, didn’t they?
I just gave you the math showing such groups are common, with no need for anything special. It's simply math. It as simple as: if I flip a coin long enough, I can find a run of 10 heads, or 100 hears, or a trillion heads.
The number of Americans and the number of ways to organize them is large enough that, just by chance, there will be many that have a 10+ years lifespan for no other reason than we simply have zillions of ways to split people into groups.
The math I presented give you the direction to compute such things. Learn enough math to solve the expected number of such groups, and you will be surprised.
To show one such group is anything other than statistical chance takes far more science and study and analysis than just saying "Look group has desired thing Y all we have is to repeat what the group did!"
> It seems that it is not that easy to find them
It's trivial to find such groups - medicine finds them all the time. Pick any medical result X that is expected to add Y years to life, pick some population center, pick those in the center with the habits/genetics in the study, and voila, you get yet another mystical group with magical life properties.
Except it's not magic. And it will happen with certainly without there being any underlying cause simply due to statistics. Medicine tries to remove the pure randomness of the result and demonstrate a causual relationship, but that is hard and not always done. They do this extra work because they know that stuff like the above happens so often purely randomly.
Simple example: [1] claims (I have not dug into the study, but it is likely well done) that 8 habits (eat healthy, exercise, good body weight, not too much alcohol, not smoking) would add 20ish years to life expectancy. So, go to a big city, find those in this group, and you'll get likely several thousand of them.
And now woo hoo! 24 years!
And for special effect, pick the subset that intersects yet another silly variable, say has red hair, or was bullied as a child, and now you too can get headlines that will spread like this one: "The 8 traits that make readheads live 20 more years!" "Bullied kids can do this one simple trick and outlive their tormentors!"
But this is simply nonsense. There is science, there is causality, and there is statistics, and not being able to disentangle them leads lots of people to post voodoo as if it's not simply random chance.
I don't think that is right. In the Blue Zones marketing material, they characterise Loma Linda's 9000 Adventists, who make up 40% of the population, as living a decade longer on average. That is the claim being investigated.
This claim is hard to reconcile with the CDC's official numbers which show a typical life expectancy for the entire area, unless living next to Adventists somehow lowers the life expectancy for the remaining 60% of the population, which would be far more interesting.
Sure Buettner does focus on the older people of the community by interviewing them, but that does not generalise to the claim of the book (or the website to this day) that this community has a high life expectancy, which is shown to be false by the corrected statistics. This is known as a "population fallacy".
By focusing on the older people only in such a small population, he is introducing selection bias and survivorship bias. Moreover, he did not control or compare studies. I believe there are more than one Adventist community in the US, yet those are not Blue Zones somehow?
> It was, "Why is there an unusually high concentration of outliers living here, and what behaviors cause them to live longer than average?"
Blue Zones LLC also provided a set of answers to that question, and one of those answers (“drinking 1-2 glasses of wine per day”) is clearly not true in this case.
And honestly, it’s just Bayesian statistics—if they present 5 data points, and 4 of those data points are floating somewhere between data errors and fraud, then odds are, that last data point is flawed somehow as well. Certainly they would need to do some extra work to prove that it isn’t.
So first it was Sardinia, Okinawa, Ikaria, Loma Linda. Then it's not even Loma Linda but specifically Loma Linda Adventists. That looks like XKCD-level p-hacking
Yeah, if the point is really about Adventists, I think it's better made with statistics on them. Ditto teetotalers or vegetarians (Adventists are often both). Or if it's about studying individuals with long lifespans, then great, let's do that.
Who's claiming that living inside the boundaries of such zones would confer health benefits?
The paper is pointing out that if you actually look at the data there is nothing remarkable about the region's average lifespan (actually lower than the entire country of Japan), which is what's being discussed here.
> The paper is pointing out that if you actually look at the data there is nothing remarkable about the region's average lifespan
That's my point -- the region's average lifespan is irrelevant. It's only relevant given the misconception that Loma Linda itself has some special properties of rejuvenation.
But that doesn't mean it's not a longevity hotspot. Even if the average lifespan there were lower than normal -- say a large number of unhealthy people lived there -- it still wouldn't negate that, if an abnormally high number of healthy centenarians also live there.
Loma Linda residents do have some of the highest lifespans in the world. Not on average -- but that wasn't Buettner's point. His point was that there's an unusual number of long-living outliers there.
Big enough forest - say, eight billion or so trees - there'll absolutely be 100 weird trees in a spot somewhere.
If Adventists have cracked the code for longevity, you'd find their other congregations with similar benefits. Barring that, we're just p-hacking our way to a spurious conclusion.
This seems pretty explainable by Seventh Day Adventists' behavioral factors leading to increased life, a group with very little smoking and drinking living longer isn't surprising.
The idea wasn't that averaging out the lifespan of all Loma Linda residents, regardless of lifestyle, would yield a higher number than everywhere else. It was that there was an unusually high number of outliers living there, and the question was why.
The CDC's average was purely geographic and irrespective of lifestyle, which is different.
> A slice of carrot looks much like the pupil, iris, and radiating lines of the human eye. Of course, science has demonstrated that carrots
improve eye function.
I've seen a number of byproducts of the "Blue Zone trend" namely in youtube videos and dinner party conversations from so called health experts. The creator of Blue Zones (Dan Buettner) does seem to profit off of this as well, one quick look at the website shows a Blue Zone cooking course sale and other marketing schemes that could trap the unwary. https://www.bluezones.com/about/history/
I'm not questioning whether or not the intent was malicious but he does stand to gain quite a lot. Happy to see this being exposed. In a semi related sense I highly recommend checking out Bryan Johnson's (founder of Braintree Venmo) Blueprint protocol, I've been following his work for a number of years now and it is scientifically backed although the for profit arm of his initiative just reared its (ugly?) head recently with him selling supplements and dietary goods that are vetted by his agency.
The difference that I'm seeing personally and the initial appeal was that he was more open about the science and the results of it. If you go through the site you can see pretty good documentation about different supplements and what their intended purpose was. However, I do think some of the luster of the open-source model he had kind of disappeared when he started selling products which is a double edged sword in the sense that it does somewhat certify the quality of the product but also chips at his ethos.
The extreme to which he is taking things and the level of rigor he is (seemingly) applying, are the differences I see. He has a lot more time and resources at his disposal than most wellness hackers.
Doesn't seem like it. He was doing most of what he claims years before he marketed anything. I remember him on Lex Friedman years ago talking about only eating one meal per day, eating as healthy as possible, optimizing his sleep, etc.
What always seemed questionable to me about Blue Zones is how they account for unnatural causes of death. A decade ago centenarians would've had to live through two world wars and the devastation and famine they caused. How do you compare a population that went through that to a population that didn't?
I come from one of these blue zones on the southern coast of Europe. That low income low literacy people live longer, provided they have good genetics seems plausible to me. These people tend to lead a semi-agrarian life and remain active well into their 80s. Their more educated higher income counterparts will probably have spent their life being sedentary and their retirement in a coffee shop indulging themselves.
If food plays a role, it's only insofar as them being less indulgent. Otherwise I believe the obsession on diet is only because it is one factor that is relatively easy for people to change.
Genetics plays a huge role, because if your body betrays you early on, you won't be able to remain active and focused on life in your later years.
Climate probably also plays a role because again, you need good climate to remain active all year round.
So does family. Seeing your family everyday keeps you planted in life.
Healthcare might also play a role. Our healthcare is much more caring than the one in the northern European states.
They should make a study focusing on northern European retirees who decide to live here on the coast. We have quite a few of those and I wonder whether they tend to live longer compared to their counterparts back home.
The allegation that its simply fraud is ridiculous. If someone in the village dies, the whole village would know before sunset, and pretty much nobody dies at home anyway. And what about inheritance? Or paying rent? No, that's completely ridiculous. Not to mention that pretty much everyone is highly religious around those parts and not giving your relatives a proper Catholic burial is one of the worst things you could do. Not even a staunch atheist would stoop that low.
> The allegation that [it is] fraud is ridiculous.
No? Even the writeup gives specific examples. Number of pension payouts to Greek 100+ year olds was cut by 72% after an audit.
Even if they had a proper Catholic burial. Never underestimate the power of greed. In a predominantly low-income area great-grandpa's pension might be what is keeping you from losing your home.
> That low income low literacy people live longer, provided they have good genetics seems plausible to me.
That it seems plausible is why the story has circulated for so long, but that doesn't make it true. We do research precisely to check what seems plausible against actual data.
Since you're using a throwaway anyway, can you share which part of the Southern coast of Europe you live in? Maybe together we can find data that would help.
The people in the village know, but the culture is such that they aren’t going to rat out the family for the fraud. The priest has nothing to do with the state bureaucracy.
That happens all over the place. People get busted for collecting grandmas social security checks all of the time in the US. When I was in college in the mid-90s, I rented an apartment from a dude who died in the early 80s.
Unfortunately the fraud is real. The fact that blue zones are islands makes it easier to hide the fact from authorities (if it is widespread practice that many people exploit)
Just chiming in to add one factor that you overlooked: selective caloric restriction.
We know caloric restriction can extend lifespan. It's usually tested as a discrete variable, but its statistical effect in the wild is continuous. It can be unintentional, coincidental, income-related, historical event-related, culturally related, and related to the local economy. Multiple categories can apply at the same time, complicating the analysis.
Add fasting to the mix, and the analysis is even harder. Here's a difficult to refute conjecture: areas that underwent episodes of accidental fasting during world wars may have spikes of ultra-centenarians. The keyword is may, because you have to subtract out the negative correlations that come with the event. For instance, during a famine you may end up eating lifespan-reducing foods.
The one part of the blue zone theory that does make sense--a lifestyle that involves a lot of physical activity. Which goes along with what we know elsewhere.
>Climate probably also plays a role because again, you need good climate to remain active all year round.
You can be active in any climate. Spain is too hot during the summer so the Spanish aren't active during those hours. If it's too cold you can use a gym or even exercise at home.
>and pretty much nobody dies at home anyway.
That's just not true. A lot of people die in their sleep in their beds.
>The allegation that its simply fraud is ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous.
Your whole post is just littered with statements that just aren't true.
My guess is blue zones are countries that have good social programs and medical systems. Also helpful are regions where the environment isn't going to kill you.
Highly developed countries with access to affordable or free healthcare seem to be real blue zones. Especially in highly urban areas. Hong Kong, Singapore, and the big cities of some countries (Tokyo, Sydney) have very high life expectancy numbers.
Seems like getting treatment when you're sick, and having regular check ups to induce lifestyle changes are what makes a place a blue zone.
I think you're confusing correlation with causation. There is no reliable evidence that having regular check ups improves longevity, or even benefits healthy patients at all. And advice given by doctors about lifestyle changes is notoriously ineffective: long-term patient compliance close to zero.
"having regular check ups to induce lifestyle changes"
More likely that those areas have society level positive lifestyles by default, especially relating to foods (eg Okinawa eating until 80% full, Italy and the mederteranian diet, Loma Linda plant heavy diet, etc).
Plenty of people get at least an annual covered checkup, but that doesn't mean they will make lifestyle changes. Even the ones that try end up like a new years resolution - not being strict about it or giving up after a month or two.
Isn’t the whole point of this research that people Okinawa and Italy probably don’t live any longer. In fact these areas have shorter average life span? So, all the stories about the benefit of the Mediterranean fish heavy diet are post-hoc rationalizations of bad data?
"Isn’t the whole point of this research that people Okinawa and Italy probably don’t live any longer."
I didn't see that claim in the article. What I did see is that the data on centarians was shown to be invalid. It's certainly possible that the overall life expectancy stats could be distorted. In most cases (excluding Okinawa), I doubt that the mistakes or fraud are that rampant. The problem with the blue zone studies is that they explicitly focused on outliers from the beginning. Any mistakes or fraud become a big impact in a small population like that. If you use population level life expectancy, the impact should become much smaller, or at the very least any systemic fraud and mistakes should become readily visible and be able to be corrected in the numbers if further studies are done to measure it.
The article is very emotional and seems to mischaracterize some things, such as claiming that every blue zone must fit each piece of the suggestions. The idea of drinking every day is probably not a good suggestion as there is some research contesting the benefits of a glass of wine a day. But let's take Okinawa as an example. It's uncontested that the records have problems, it's trending in the wrong direction (younger generations, probably better records), and it doesn't fit all the practices (eg religion). But does this invalidate the longevity recommendation of eating to 80% full that comes out of the blue zone recommendation? No. There are independent studies showing the benefits of this practice to reduce cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, and obesity.
So even if the blue zone centarian data is wrong (it is), that doesn't say anything about the suggested practices. Those have always needed their own studies to validate the suggested practices anyways. Fot example, there are numerous studies on the mederteranian diet that shows it is beneficial compared to a typical western diet and especially compared to the typical American diet.
The point is that, if the Blue Zones concept is BS and none of these places have high life expectancy, then there is no reason to discuss them in the context of nutrition or lifestyle recommendations of any kind. Those recommendations may be good or bad, but they are unrelated to the non-existent longevity of these "blue zones".
Yeah, but it's all ancient history at this point. The recommendations have already been proven or disproven through followup studies. Disproving blue zones at this point in time is basically moot.
The real Blue Zones are the friends we made along the way.
The problem will always be that you need to find places that keep good records, and have done so for the last century.
What they set out to do was to find correlations between lifestyle and longevity, and what they ended up finding was a great tool for spotting pension fraud.
The levels of fraud aren't that rampant. Focusing on life expectancy in those regions still seems to have some valid correlation. It was a mistake from the beginning to try to focus on outliers (people living over 100).
Yeah, it does show that for some of the areas, but not others. The problem with these population studies is they do not give you answers, only new variables. In my view, the whole blue zone study is moot, at least in the way it is typically applied. What it does give us are new variables to study. Those smaller studied can control for variables that the population level cannot. They can also apply those studies to populations of different decent (genetics).
The glass of wine recommendation has had many studies done and the results are conflicting.
The eating guidelines like heavy in plants, mederteranian, eating to 80% full all have multiple studies showing benefits over the typical western diet and especially the typical American diet. It's a no brainer that if you want to live a long life you have a better chance of doing that if you have a reduced risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, etc.
Most of these guidelines are based on the same sort of flawed population-level studies that can't control for many other aspects. For example, the "Mediterranean diet" is consumed in countries that have all sorts of other specific lifestyle differences that are just as likely to influence health and longevity - siesta, a general tendency not to stress or work in exaggerated amounts, a month or more of vacation per year, significant sun exposure, good social healthcare, and many others. All of these together have certain (mild) effects on longevity and health, but there is virtually no way to isolate any one from all of the others.
There are also many studies that suggest other kinds of diets are beneficial, and many populations that consume significantly different diets and have even better health than the average person around the Mediterranean. For example, inuit populations also display generally low obesity and risks of heart attack, stroke, diabetes etc - while consuming almost the opposite of a Mediterranean diet or of plant heavy diets.
"For example, inuit populations also display generally low obesity and risks of heart attack, stroke, diabetes etc - while consuming almost the opposite of a Mediterranean diet or of plant heavy diets."
There are it's just the outlier blue zones where people are supposed to be reaching very hugh maximum ages at a surprising rate that are probably not real. There are still plenty of correlations between healthier lifestyles generally you just shouldn't attempt to live past 100 by emulating what people in an alleged blue zone do.
That is no way shape or form invalidates any actual link between lifestyle and longevity. It just means you can't simply assume that any given example of longevity, or data indicating longevity, must be due to lifestyle.
There is correlation (and maybe even causal relation) between lifestyle and longevity. It's just the lifestyle in those "Blue Zones" is not different from the lifestyle of surrounding areas (or as in Okinawa - gradient points in the wrong direction), so cannot serve as the sure way to longevity.
There’s extensive literature on the lack of modern disease in hunter gatherers. Frontier doctors could get a case report published when they found cancer.
Some lived long but on average their lives were short because they didn’t have antibiotics or emergency medicine and lived in harsh environments that few of us would be able to survive today.
Their wisdom appropriately coupled to a modern less harsh environment might lead to greater longevity. But the harshness is what ensures exercise, movement, unprocessed food, etc.
Do you have any evidence you can point to for this assertion? The book Good Calories Bad Calories has a section that reviews the literature on the subject. Disease and Western Civilization reviews specific populations in detail. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration for a geographically diverse primary source although it’s not about cancer or longevity.
The assertion that older people get cancer more than young people? You could try any medical source whatsoever that deals with cancer or longevity, instead of picking one that doesn't, e.g. [0]
> Advancing age is the most important risk factor for cancer overall and for many individual cancer types. The incidence rates for cancer overall climb steadily as age increases, from fewer than 25 cases per 100,000 people in age groups under age 20, to about 350 per 100,000 people among those aged 45–49, to more than 1,000 per 100,000 people in age groups 60 years and older.
That study doesn’t include hunter gathers. Certainly cancer rates increase for them as they age as well. The point is the rate is orders of magnitude less than we experience today.
You can look to the Amish for some answers. They aren't hunter gatherers but they do live a more primitive lifestyle. Some studies seem to show they have lower rates of cancers. It's not really a secret that if you are active, eat fairly healthy, aeent obese, and don't drink or smoke that you will be significantly healthier than the baseline rates in the US.
Could be that that "more primitive lifestyle" could fall victim to some of the same issues that lead us to see the cancer rates throughout history as much lower. (E.g., lack of diagnosis)
I took a look at the Hutterites in Canada because while they live a simpler lifestyle with a more traditional diet, no smoking, and minimal alcohol consumption, they are generally much less averse to modern conveniences where they supplement their lifestyle. Combined with Canada's public health system, that means they have few barriers in the way of receiving modern medical care.
It's a bit old, but I found a study from the 80s[0] that found men have significantly lower rates of lung cancer (yep, not smoking helps) but they found an increased risk of stomach cancer and leukemias. Women had lower rates of uterine cancer. This was fairly consistent across all three traditional groups in North America.
Other sources seem to show their life expectancy is in line with the general population, removing that as a factor.
So not smoking helps. If I had to take a wild guess, the lower rate of uterine cancer could potentially be explained by lower rates of HPV as we now know that's the main risk factor for developing cervical cancer. I can't find any reports on the rates of STDs among the Hutterites, but I would hazard a guess it's "lower".
Which, on the surface, makes it look like the lifestyle and diet (besides not smoking!) isn't having a lot of impact.
I'm definitely less familiar with the Amish, so I did some looking beforehand. What I was finding that their willingness to use modern medicine, or to use it preferentially, is said to vary a lot from community to community.
As well, I found they self-fund access to healthcare, and I have no idea what the dynamics would be like with that--would you decide not to see a doctor so you're not placing a burden on your neighbours?
Neither's a factor with Hutterites in Canada. They're very willing to use and rely on modern technology (they probably have some of the most technologically advanced farming setups you've seen, have cell phones, etc) and there's no cost barrier to accessing healthcare.
I was curious, shared what I found. Take from it what you'd like!
And note that it's not "get cancer" but "find cancer".
In a harsh environment how many die of a tumor that saps their energy before causing any specific effect that causes them to seek out a doctor and presents with something the doctor can find without the million-dollar machinery?
Let's grab our Mr. Fusion and head back a quarter century. My father came to visit. He had definitely declined since the last time we saw him but had no known major health issues. There wasn't anything in particular, yet what my wife saw was enough that she said we wouldn't see him again. Half a year later the big machines found the cancer. Would he have made it that half year in a harsh environment? No.
And on your "had a life expectancy of about 45 years", you have a math problem. The average life span was closer to 25 years but was dragged down but the huge amount of infant mortality which is normal in humans.
The Tsimané of the Amazon are know to live well into their 70s.
> The Tsimané of the Amazon are know to live well into their 70s.
Some of them do, but those are filtered to the most healthy if the lot. It's not really surprising that if you lose the sickly ones while they're infants the ones who make it to adulthood are less likely to get sick.
This is further confounded when you have generations that have lived longer, as we do in the first world, because now not only do the sickly ones live long enough to get modern diseases, they also live long enough to reproduce and pass on the previously-non-viable genes. So generation after generation gets added that would never have survived without modern medicine.
I consider it to be a good thing that we can optimize our evolution for different traits now besides raw survivability, but it does mean that we should expect our disease numbers to be higher.
My point was that when someone says the "life expectancy is 45" that does not mean that everyone dies at 45.
> I consider it to be a good thing that we can optimize our evolution
We cannot "optimize" our evolution for different traits. Evolution is optimization to the environment. We cannot use human thought to optimize evolution, and that is eugenics anyway so no thanks.
I wonder if there was anything historically equivalent to the Antediluvian lifespans described in the Old Testament. If, for example, there was something in the food a few thousand years ago in the area of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, now underwater, that could extend lifespan.
In some ancient cultures around that region, stating that someone was hundreds of years old was a sign of respect for their wisdom, authority, and line. The numbers weren't meant to be taken literally.
The whole Blue Zone thing cracks me up. They think everyone will live longer on a plant based diet? Tell that to the Inuit and Sami who have genetically adapted after generations of eating very few, if any, plants.
If they Blue Zones do exists, they exist because people are eating their traditional genetic diet.
And if they eat plants, what plants? Should someone of Irish decent eat wheat even though they are more likely to have Celiac?
I have Sami heritage. I was also a Vegan at one time. A healthy Vegan. The plant based diet was literally killing me with hyperglycemia and immune issues. These people who think there is one true diet are dangerous adn do not know the first thing about nutritional genetics.
>These people who think there is one true diet are dangerous
In my observation (after examining anecdotes, and accounting for flawed anecdotes) everyone without exception does well on an animal based diet. It's when it comes to plants there are enormous variations.
For all the nutrition wars raging these days about plant based vs animal etc I really agree with you. Modern transportation of the industrial age shuffled humans around the globe everywhere. Prior to this distinct groups were adapting in distinct biomes for thousands upon thousands of generations. Some were pure carnivore, some were high carb almost all plants, some in between.
If you search for a nutritional genomics, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. There are plenty of researchers who are trying to do the hard work or telling people how important genetics is to our personalized health. The University of North Carolina at Kannapolis has a very good program.
Right, the hype is nuts. My read is regardless of the flaws in demographic data, one observation does seem told hold up: if you go somewhere that's been slower to adapt modernity, and introduce western levels of inactivity and hyperprocessed food, you get all the same maladies.
Which I think is a good sign? It suggests you don't need island magic, you don't need to settle these purist debates or figure out The Answer™. The only thing that matters is addressing the two really bad things that are obviously pathogenic.
And then we can argue about moderate drinking until the end of time.
I live in a community that was part of the Blue Zones project, that has cultural ties to one of the original Blue Zones geographies. While I think there is something to the general idea - eat well, limit stress, have a sense of community, keep moving physically - it was always clear that there was a lot of pseudoscience going on. The videos put out by the project in particular (I think maybe it was a Netflix program for a while?) had a lot of unsubstantiated but authoritative sounding statements. Regardless, I felt like the overall message was positive and got people thinking about how they were living. That said, there was a merchandise angle on it, and thinking back there are ideas we've talked about as a community that Blue Zones could have stewarded - but they would have been outside their established game plan.
If you go to Hawaii where there are japanese-style graves with YOB and YOD inscribed, the centenarians all seem to have Okinawan names (and there are quite a few).
> the astounding thing is that one of the guidelines is that you should drink every day at twice the NHS heavy drinking guidelines. That is a recipe for alcoholism.
Say what? The article implies that 1 glass of wine every day or two (i.e., half of 1–2 per day) is heavy. That seems frankly insane to me.
Are you saying that defining half of 7-14 (or 3.5.7) drinks per week as heavy seems insane to you?
Current science proposes that even 2 drinks a week significantly increases cancer rate, and is the current suggested limit for health - I suspect it would be lower but for reactions like you're having. It seems likely that double or triple that is indeed unsafe.
According to the CDC, NIH and other respected credible, mostly objective federal health research groups have all suggested up to 2 drinks per day for men and 1 drink for women is not only safe but also beneficial, citing that moderate drinking "reduced risk of heart attack, atherosclerosis, and certain types of strokes". Obviously this would not be the case for people prone to alcoholism or some other complications or contraindications.
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6761695/
More recent research has come out pretty much destroying the claim that moderate drinking "reduced risk of heart attack, atherosclerosis, and certain types of strokes". So CDC, NIH suggestions are outdated and they'll probably update it in a year or two (hopefully lol).
It's political, people react strongly to it so they can't. But the studies they used have all been shown to be nonsense. What's surprising to me is to see the gp comment when the original post is specifically addressing the data used to back the claim.
> The UK government's guidelines on how much it is safe to drink are based on numbers "plucked out of the air" by a committee that met in 1987. According to The Times newspaper, the limits are not based on any science whatsoever, rather "a feeling that you had to say something" about what would be a safe drinking level. This is all according to Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party who produced the guidelines. [1]
One might think that having admitted this Smith would be circumspect, apologetic and more careful with his claims about health in future. Of course he did the exact opposite:
> However, Mr Smith says this doesn't mean alcohol is not dangerous. He later told The Guardian that this would be a "serious misinterpretation" of his comments. He also argued that the figures were "in the right ball park", and called for heavier taxes to cut consumption
The numbers were based on no evidence but also amazingly in the right ballpark. No contradiction there if you work in public health. Sure enough, ten years later the guidance had become even more extreme [2], with men and women now becoming biologically identical and the government telling citizens that even one drop of alcohol was dangerous:
> The report recommend an upper limit of 14 units per week for both adult men and women, and then included the much-derided “no safe limits” observation.
This highly ideological guidance might have been because:
> Members of the expert group include prohibitionists and anti-alcohol campaigners
Alcohol is just as bad for you as smoking according to the data, the only safe amount is 0. Why it's not packaged with giant warning labels is another question entirely
The two are greatly correlated, so at a population level it's a distinction without a difference. There's no population of people all living to be 100 but spending their 90s on a respirator.
The distinction matters for individual health decisions, and for comparing different interventions, where you can extend someone's life at the cost of their quality of life.
In theory that is a reasonable distinction (and that type of trade-off can come up in very specific situations like treatment of terminal disease in elderly people) but in terms of lifestyle choices there is currently no known difference between lifestyle choices that increase expected longevity and lifestyle choices that increase expected quality years.
Technically speaking (the best kind of speaking) you didn’t need new research to conclude this. All you had to do was ask “is this a pop science book?” and “will I hear about it at my next family gathering from the one person who thinks of themselves as qualified on subject matter but is in fact the furthest from the truth?”
If you answer yes to both, you may safely discard the material as simply a means for the author to advance their career.
Other greatest hits from this genre: Grit, Deep Work, Why We Sleep, Thinking Fast and Slow, How Not to Die.
Paper:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
Abstract:
> The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
Nice work. It just won a 2024 Ig Nobel Prize. Well-deserved, I'd say:
https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2024
So there's this short little book "Food rules" by Michael Pollan. Not much content but seems like the author went through a lot of research. He comes to conclusion based on this tons of data that all we really know for sure is that people living in these blue regions are living much longer and it seems to be related to what they eat. That it is basically the only solid and stable data point we have. Welp. (I'm overstating it a bit, but not by that much)
The one thing that this paper does is demolish the claim that people living in these blue regions are living much longer than average.
I think a lot of commenters either didn't read the abstract or assumed from its tone that it was supportive of the idea of blue zones.
Yes, I happen to be interested in this topic and had previously read this paper. So it's interesting to see how many of the commentors (even on HN) didn't even read the first few paragraphs of the paper or the article. I guess I must do that with articles I'm not previously familiar with. :-)
keeping in mind that they live in countries with higher life expectancy than most countries anyway. Indeed they may not even be outliers within those countries.
Except, it misses the point and doesn't really do that while being persuasive.
According to the Blue Zone researchers, some of the Blue Zones are disappearing because the generations that came after the oldest live differently and much shorter. By differently, their eating, body movement, and other characteristics are different. Looking at the whole population doesn't segment for differences between generation. So, nuance is lost.
In some areas, like the Blue Zone in the US other research is finding the people who live there are healthier than the surrounding populations. Then you have to ask, what area do you average over for your measurement and statistics?
> According to the Blue Zone researchers, some of the Blue Zones are disappearing because the generations that came after the oldest live differently and much shorter.
Of course they would say that. But if these zones are simultaneously recording births better and reducing welfare fraud, and if 80%+ of the centenarians either had no birth certificate or were actually dead, I'm going to need more than "but they're also changing lifestyles" as an explanation.
We're talking here about unusually long life, not just "he's still going strong at 85" long. No one here is arguing that people who are active and eat right don't have a longer healthspan, but that's a concept that's provable without the so-called Blue Zones.
I listened to an interview with the author during the week, in short as soon as you start getting reliable recording of births and clamp down on old age welfare fraud the phenomenon disappears.
"Then you have to ask, what area do you average over for your measurement and statistics?"
This is a big thing that I didn't seen in the paper this article is based on. It seemed like the author was comparing adjusted numbers from the blue zone with unadjusted numbers from non-blue zones. Without comprehensive investigation of error rates and even different error mechanisms by locale, it seems like a poor comparison to make. Comparing life expectancies is better than comparing outlier centarian numbers, but you are right that it depends on what other areas we are using as the baseline or average (and I take it a step farther by saying it depends on what error adjustments need to be made to both data sets).
The whole blue zone idea is a bit misapplied though. These population studies find new variables to look at. Then you have targeted studies to investigate thos variables. Discrediting the centarian numbers doesn't discredit the findings on stuff like a mederteranian diet having better health outcomes than the standard western diet, etc.
Kinda depends on how much you value inductive vs. deductive reasoning, but the authors make the deductive case that:
- There's strong incentives to misreport in these areas (the compelling example from Sardinia was that the person is alive for the purposes of pension fraud, but really dead)
- People who are incentivized to report people being older than they are will do so
And the inductive case relies on data, which is presumed to be totally flawed because of the misaligned incentives.
It is very much to the point, addressing the specific claims and methodology of a specific (and apparently somewhat influential) study.
You are, of course, free to speculate that there are other issues related to longevity than those considered in the study in question, but even if these suppositions are correct, in no way would this justify saying the paper being discussed here misses the point. The point is that the blue zones study is too flawed to support any definite position, which includes both its own conclusions and the more nuanced issues about which you speculate.
> It is very much to the point, addressing the specific claims and methodology of a specific (and apparently somewhat influential) study.
Except, the author doesn't discredit specific claims of the Blue Zones. For example, the Blue Zones might take an area and state there is a higher rate of centurions who are healthy and capable. The counter to that might be the average life span in the region isn't an outlier. In one case you're looking at a targeted subgroup and the other your looking at the population as a whole. One observations doesn't disprove another.
This is just one example. It's why I call the work misleading.
You are using "might" more than once here. I have my opinions too, and FWIW, this looks like motivated reasoning, holding the response to a much higher standard of proof than the original claim.
Or now better records are kept the incorrect data dies off
There was a study I read about in Barrons that was noting that places a western diet goes the health care costs then start going up. Other studies have found that a western diet leads to more unhealthy outcomes (increased disease and earlier death).
I state this to point out that there are other variables at plan than just changes in record keeping.
Healthcare spending goes up. As you’d expect from a country starting to become richer.
Also, please show reliable studies that show that western diets lead to more unhealthy outcomes.
Compared to what, third world diets with their insufficient nutrition and starvation?!
Furthermore food studies are notoriously badly done.
I think the more likely causation here is that higher incomes drive increase in western diets, and higher incomes lead to higher healthcare spending.
Could there be third correlated variable namely income that correlate with both western diet and health care costs? Or even better records of disease and deaths?
> the generations that came after the oldest live differently and much shorter.
This presupposes that the previous generation was in fact living longer, which the linked study showed is not the case at all.
Not exactly. It establishes that error rates are high in those areas, demolishing the centarian numbers. It doesn't give much investigation into the averages at all. Where it does, it seems to compare adjusted numbers of one data set with unadjusted numbers of another. If you really want to get into the averages, you'd have to determine error rates and adjustments for each specific area, probably by jurisdiction or record keeper, and then compare them. The problem is, nobody is going through that process for the entire world so we just use the face value numbers until we want disprove a specific area and then compare the adjusted numbers against unadjusted numbers. The data is too massive to rigorously investigate. But this whole effort is moot. What tangible benefit comes from disproving blue zone data? These population level studies aren't meant to provide answers. They're meant to provide new variables. Each of the blue zone longevity recommendations have their own studies to either prove (food stuff) or disprove (drinking wine daily) them.
So yeah, it's great the errors in the data have been called out it's a bit surprising that the author interviewed is so angry in the article. I guess it's fitting that he got the Ig nobel, since this correction doesn't have any applicable impact to end result, which were additonal studies investigating the individual suggestions/variables, such as specific dietary practices.
If the error rates are high, there is no reliable signal that these areas are different, so how the hell can looking at their "new variables" help?
Go look up the studies that came out of it.
It would be different if these were new studies, but this is all in the past. This new finding of unreliability doesn't have any impact, hence the Ig nobel instead of the real nobel.
Any chance you can point to the specific studies?
And the ignobel isn't supposed to be that the research had no impact. Is it?
There are roo many to list. You can search each topic in Pubmed.
The Ig nobel is a satirical award for trivial achievements.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize
The Ig Nobel is not for trivial achievements, it is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." This takes different forms.
The part of the wikipedia article you are referencing is an inference from a particular article: "A September 2009 article in The National titled "A noble side to Ig Nobels" says that, although the Ig Nobel Awards are veiled criticism of trivial research, history shows that trivial research sometimes leads to important breakthroughs."
The definition of "blue zones" never had anything to do with average longevity. The entire concept is predicated on unusual numbers of centenarians, not long average life spans. In fact, as is pointed out in the Ig Nobel winning paper, Blue Zone places like Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria have always been paradoxical: they are supposed to have higher numbers of unusually long lived people, but have shorter average lifespans than the rest of their countries. The paradox goes away with the finding that the count of centenarians is incorrect. There's nothing left to the Blue Zone concept without the centenarians.
It's hard to believe it's not satirical...
"Ig Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Elena Bodnar demonstrates her invention (a brassiere that can quickly convert into a pair of protective face masks)"
Yes, it is definitely satirical. But isn't specifically for "trivial", it gets deployed in different ways.
Some of the awards are straight up criticism of the research, like for bunk homeopathy stuff. It was awarded for the prank paper used in the Sokal affair, in which it's definitely praise of what Sokal did. Sometimes it is awarded for a bizarre but funny thing from something being studied in another more serious context like the magnetic frog levitation paper.
What topic are you suggesting to search on Pubmed? I have yet to see anything that supports some places have places with exceptionally long lived people. Especially to the massive outlier values that is often put forth. (So, 105 is not that crazy of a number to consider. 110, however, already starts to stretch credibility quite heavily.)
(Leaving discussion of the ignobel to the other thread.)
You missed the entire point of blue zone research - the recommended areas to research. Stuff like diet, exercise, community, etc.
So link me a single bloody paper that goes over this? Searching "blue zones" on pubmed shows mainly things older than this paper. And a lot of stuff that, frankly, feels highly suspicious.
Similarly, if there are places that have debunked this paper, link one. It is a genuinely interesting topic to read about.
Please see the comment history for my opinion on blue zones, a link, and the areas to search on Pubmed. You can even find the areas of blue zone recommendations in TFA. You're not supposed to search for blue zones, but for studies on those recommendations (plant heavy or mederteranian diets, exercise, etc).
There are basically zero studies which prove anything about particular foodstuffs. It's all observational studies with small effect sizes and multiple uncontrolled confounding variables: junk science.
We know we need certain essential nutrients to prevent deficiencies, an energy intake surplus causes weight gain, and a few substances like trans fat are problematic. Beyond that, people seem to be making claims and recommendations not backed by hard evidence and frequently confuse correlation with causation.
We aren't talking about unequivocal proof. If someone asks what they can do to increase longevity, it's perfectly reasonable to tell them about studies that show strong correlations and mention the way the confounding factors play a role.
You might be interested to look into some of the twin studies that put twins on similar exercise regimens and differening diets. They seem to be the strongest evidence possible for this sort of thing. Hardly what I would call junk science.
The exercise part I can believe as we have somewhat better quality evidence there. But if you have seen dietary studies on twins that actually meet evidence-based medicine criteria then I would greatly appreciate a citation as those would be interesting to read.
You can search for your own. This should be just as rigorous as any exercise studies.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38032644/
As I suspected, another low-quality study which changed a bunch of variables in a small study group for only a few months and found a minor change in a few blood tests (no actual measured change in longevity or other health outcomes). The most obvious flaw in the study design is that the two diets weren't isocaloric, which basically invalidates all of their conclusions. It's really disappointing to see junk "science" like this make it through peer review. I mean this is the kind of garbage that an undergraduate journal club could rip apart without any advanced statistics.
And I have searched on my own before. Never found much of anything reliable or actionable.
I believe the mid study data from the end of the meal service is what you are looking for as that was isocaloric.
"And I have searched on my own before. Never found much of anything reliable or actionable."
Basically a tautology.
That's my point.
I think a single "Welp" at the end of the comment is not communicating that clearly enough.
Ozempic is showing that life expectancy is mostly avoiding obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, but not a specific magic food. It is just calories, vitamins and minerals.
No as Ozempic mimics the reaction of the body to certain classes of food such as fibre and probiotics.
For most people if they eat more fibre and probiotics we would not need Ozempic.
Have a link that explains how Ozempic is fiber-mimetic or pro-biotic-mimetic? If that were the case I would expect to see fiber and probiotics to be associated with gastroparesis. They aren't.
Ozempic exists because Americans are addicted to hypercaloric hyper delicious "food" that was engineered by the big tobacco companies that used their excess cash to buy food companies in the 80's. They then applied their research on making tobacco addictive to make food addictive.
Modern American food is literally the new tobacco.
Ozempic disrupts hunger signals. Fiber does that to a certain extent ("increases feelings of satiety"). I haven't seen anything about probiotics doing that, but I think probiotics are bunk and tend not to read about them.
Sure, but all the health benefits stress not because it’s a better metamucil. It’s because when you’re not obese, you don’t end up sick and dying.
Title says "New research" but this paper was posted 5 years ago, on July 16, 2019.
Here's a tweet from the same year referencing it: https://x.com/Mangan150/status/1159074479194066944
A while back I dug into the research of this author and I was not impressed. Some examples of things that caught me poor and leading...
* The Blue Zones claim that most places that list many centurions are false due to bad record keeping. Only a few places have good enough records that are trustworthy. In this authors research he called out places that were not blue zones as examples of bad data against Blue Zones.
* In Okinawa the Blue Zones claim that only the oldest generation fits the Blue Zone model. That more recent generations eat poorly and have bad health. That this Blue Zone is going away. This researcher has focused on the more recent food and health of younger generations to discount it being a Blue Zone for that oldest generation.
* In the US he fails to find fault in record keeping (last I dug into it) with the only location that is considered a Blue Zone. Instead he focuses on generalities.
There are more examples like this.
This all seems disingenuous. It's not to agree with Blue Zones but rather to look at his arguments against those put forward for Blue Zones.
I keep thinking of the phrase "Lies, Damn Lines, and Statistics"
Yes, I did a bit of investigation and I commented on it the few times this article made the rounds on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20633769
I don't think it is just bad statistics, it is very poor data extractions.
Just an example:
"Like the ‘blue zone’ islands of Sardinia and Ikaria, Okinawa also represents the shortest-lived and second-poorest region of a rich high-welfare state"
Sardinia[1], at 83.8, had in 2018 one of the EU highest life expectancies, certainly higher than the rest of Italy (83.4). Like the rest of Italy it was badly hit by COVID in 2020. Life expectancy at 55 is 30.6 vs 30.1 for the rest of Italy. I don't know how to match it with their Figure 2 that shows the all Sardinian provinces being extreme outliers in negative other than they completely misinterpreted the data. Also the same graph shows 7 blue dots for Sardinian provinces, historically Sardinia had only 4 provinces and has had 8 only for a short period in the mid 2000s.
[edit: The newer version of the paper[2] is different and doesn't have figure 2]
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/demo_r_mlifex... (Sardegna In the table).
[2] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
Figure 2 is now Figures S2 and S3 in the newer paper. Table S1 is also relevant: all four Sardinian provinces that appear in that table have existed only from 2005 to 2016. The other 4 historical provinces do not appear. I can't help but think that they didn't somehow account for that and it messed up their data.
Although the fact that those four provinces stick out as extreme outliers in their graph should have clued them that something was wrong.
It is definitely a bit fishy.
I am sure there are other places with bad record keeping which were not included in the study to deflate the pvalues of book keeping.
This doesn't really address Loma Linda, California, the Adventist blue zone.
The researcher's criticism of Loma Linda isn't that people don't live longer there; it's that Adventist Health purchased Dan Buettner's marketing company Blue Zones LLC in 2020.
Adventists are teetotalers, so he questions why they'd want to be associated with the Blue Zones guideline of drinking "every day at twice the NHS heavy drinking guidelines."
Which is a fair question -- but it doesn't have anything to do with whether Loma Linda is an area with greater longevity.
From the paper: For example, the Centres for Disease Control generated an independent estimate of average longevity across the USA: they found that Loma Linda, a Blue Zone supposedly characterised by a ‘remarkable’ average lifespan 10 years above the national average, instead has an unremarkable average lifespan29 (27th-75th percentile; Fig S6).
This misses the forest for the trees.
The CDC looked at average life expectancy in Loma Linda across all demographics. Purely geographical and on average.
The blue zones focused on the greater longevity specifically of Adventists in Loma Linda.
It wasn't a question of whether living inside the municipal boundaries of Loma Linda automatically conferred some special health benefits -- clearly it doesn't.
It was, "Why is there an unusually high concentration of outliers living here, and what behaviors cause them to live longer than average?"
There are ~9000 Adventists in Loma Linda. This is two categories you can split people into, then intersect.
There are 330,000,000 million Americans. There are likely millions of categories people can be split into. Just for fun let's say counties (6000+) then any of a zillion other cross items (left handed, blue eyed, above average height, smells like butter, etc., etc.,Etc.) Say we find 10,000 of these categories.
Life expectancy is decently modeled as a gaussian with std deviation 8 years. A 10 year excess is a z-score of 1.25, and 10% of samples will be at this point.
The odds of TONS of subsets of size 9000 of the 330,000,000 people that can be found in the same pair of county+trait from the 600,000,000 pairs is nearly 1.
Thus the Adventists in Loma Linda are far more likely to be one of these many blips that have zero causal power than they are to have special life sauce. Finding them is merely an artifact of being able to filter data, not a special power of the objects.
Or a simpler way: pick two binary traits, split the 330m Americans into 33,000 chunks of size 10,000 where each group has all in one of the four pairs of traits, and you would expect (more or less - there is some more math to do here) that 10% of these groups has average lifespans over 10 years, i.e., 3,300 of the groups are the same as the Loma Linda Adventists.
No magic needed. Just rolling dice.
If "no magic is needed", then why don't you - or someone else - name, say, 5 more such groups/chunks with their exact characteristics? It seems that it is not that easy to find them... and yet someone found such a group in Loma Linda...
It's much easier to find a group of Adventists that have an above average lifespan because Adventists form a community. People with blue eyes or people who are left handed who live in the same county don't all know each other and discuss their statistically insignificant longevity
Doesn’t county or town/cities (doesn’t know the diff in US) counts for "communities", and aren’t those separated in groups while doing national stats? The dice rolling groups are obviously here and have probably been surveyed many time, didn’t they?
> If "no magic is needed",
I just gave you the math showing such groups are common, with no need for anything special. It's simply math. It as simple as: if I flip a coin long enough, I can find a run of 10 heads, or 100 hears, or a trillion heads.
The number of Americans and the number of ways to organize them is large enough that, just by chance, there will be many that have a 10+ years lifespan for no other reason than we simply have zillions of ways to split people into groups.
The math I presented give you the direction to compute such things. Learn enough math to solve the expected number of such groups, and you will be surprised.
To show one such group is anything other than statistical chance takes far more science and study and analysis than just saying "Look group has desired thing Y all we have is to repeat what the group did!"
> It seems that it is not that easy to find them
It's trivial to find such groups - medicine finds them all the time. Pick any medical result X that is expected to add Y years to life, pick some population center, pick those in the center with the habits/genetics in the study, and voila, you get yet another mystical group with magical life properties.
Except it's not magic. And it will happen with certainly without there being any underlying cause simply due to statistics. Medicine tries to remove the pure randomness of the result and demonstrate a causual relationship, but that is hard and not always done. They do this extra work because they know that stuff like the above happens so often purely randomly.
Simple example: [1] claims (I have not dug into the study, but it is likely well done) that 8 habits (eat healthy, exercise, good body weight, not too much alcohol, not smoking) would add 20ish years to life expectancy. So, go to a big city, find those in this group, and you'll get likely several thousand of them.
And now woo hoo! 24 years!
And for special effect, pick the subset that intersects yet another silly variable, say has red hair, or was bullied as a child, and now you too can get headlines that will spread like this one: "The 8 traits that make readheads live 20 more years!" "Bullied kids can do this one simple trick and outlive their tormentors!"
But this is simply nonsense. There is science, there is causality, and there is statistics, and not being able to disentangle them leads lots of people to post voodoo as if it's not simply random chance.
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/8-healthy-longevit...
I don't think that is right. In the Blue Zones marketing material, they characterise Loma Linda's 9000 Adventists, who make up 40% of the population, as living a decade longer on average. That is the claim being investigated. This claim is hard to reconcile with the CDC's official numbers which show a typical life expectancy for the entire area, unless living next to Adventists somehow lowers the life expectancy for the remaining 60% of the population, which would be far more interesting.
> they characterise Loma Linda's 9000 Adventists, who make up 40% of the population, as living a decade longer on average
> This claim is hard to reconcile with the CDC's official numbers which show a typical life expectancy for the entire area
Buettner's focus was on the outliers. Loma Linda is a longevity hotspot, and the question is why.
He found the long-living outliers practiced certain behaviors that they associated with Adventism, like vegetarianism.
Not all Adventists practice those behaviors. About half of Adventists eat meat, for example.
But the long-living outliers were Adventist and practiced the behaviors that he highlighted. So that was his takeaway.
Sure Buettner does focus on the older people of the community by interviewing them, but that does not generalise to the claim of the book (or the website to this day) that this community has a high life expectancy, which is shown to be false by the corrected statistics. This is known as a "population fallacy".
By focusing on the older people only in such a small population, he is introducing selection bias and survivorship bias. Moreover, he did not control or compare studies. I believe there are more than one Adventist community in the US, yet those are not Blue Zones somehow?
Why are Adventists or vegetarians outside of Loma Linda not super centarians, why the Loma Linda boundary?
> It was, "Why is there an unusually high concentration of outliers living here, and what behaviors cause them to live longer than average?"
Blue Zones LLC also provided a set of answers to that question, and one of those answers (“drinking 1-2 glasses of wine per day”) is clearly not true in this case.
And honestly, it’s just Bayesian statistics—if they present 5 data points, and 4 of those data points are floating somewhere between data errors and fraud, then odds are, that last data point is flawed somehow as well. Certainly they would need to do some extra work to prove that it isn’t.
So first it was Sardinia, Okinawa, Ikaria, Loma Linda. Then it's not even Loma Linda but specifically Loma Linda Adventists. That looks like XKCD-level p-hacking
https://www.xkcd.com/882/
Yeah, if the point is really about Adventists, I think it's better made with statistics on them. Ditto teetotalers or vegetarians (Adventists are often both). Or if it's about studying individuals with long lifespans, then great, let's do that.
I don't get your point.
Who's claiming that living inside the boundaries of such zones would confer health benefits?
The paper is pointing out that if you actually look at the data there is nothing remarkable about the region's average lifespan (actually lower than the entire country of Japan), which is what's being discussed here.
> The paper is pointing out that if you actually look at the data there is nothing remarkable about the region's average lifespan
That's my point -- the region's average lifespan is irrelevant. It's only relevant given the misconception that Loma Linda itself has some special properties of rejuvenation.
But that doesn't mean it's not a longevity hotspot. Even if the average lifespan there were lower than normal -- say a large number of unhealthy people lived there -- it still wouldn't negate that, if an abnormally high number of healthy centenarians also live there.
This is just the No true Scottsman fallacy.
"Loma Linda residents have some of the highest lifespans in the world."
"Well it turns out they actually just have average lifespans."
"Only true Loma Linda residents have the highest lifespans."
If you discount everyone who died at a normal age, you can conclude that Loma Linda residents are doing something special.
Loma Linda residents do have some of the highest lifespans in the world. Not on average -- but that wasn't Buettner's point. His point was that there's an unusual number of long-living outliers there.
That doesn’t seem to be a claim I see, he said ten years longer on average.
This is not a No True Scotsman fallacy ... and if you argue otherwise, you're falling for the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Just kidding. But more seriously, the original claim was deeply flawed so it makes sense to challenge the criteria for the population study.
> This misses the forest for the trees.
In a large enough forest, there's always one or two randomly weird trees.
yeah but there isn't a cluster of 100 trees, all sharing the same religion. they are a cluster, the Adventists, that is.
Big enough forest - say, eight billion or so trees - there'll absolutely be 100 weird trees in a spot somewhere.
If Adventists have cracked the code for longevity, you'd find their other congregations with similar benefits. Barring that, we're just p-hacking our way to a spurious conclusion.
> It was, "Why is there an unusually high concentration of outliers living here, and what behaviors cause them to live longer than average?"
Isn't there bound to be some random noise?
This seems pretty explainable by Seventh Day Adventists' behavioral factors leading to increased life, a group with very little smoking and drinking living longer isn't surprising.
It does if you read it.
Loma Linda residents don't have a notable longer life span than the other residents of California.
The idea wasn't that averaging out the lifespan of all Loma Linda residents, regardless of lifestyle, would yield a higher number than everywhere else. It was that there was an unusually high number of outliers living there, and the question was why.
The CDC's average was purely geographic and irrespective of lifestyle, which is different.
https://manna.amazingfacts.org/amazingfacts/website/medialib...
Here is probably why: https://manna.amazingfacts.org/amazingfacts/website/medialib...
What, thats its completely made up?
> A slice of carrot looks much like the pupil, iris, and radiating lines of the human eye. Of course, science has demonstrated that carrots improve eye function.
Seriously?
Absolutely incredible.
I've seen a number of byproducts of the "Blue Zone trend" namely in youtube videos and dinner party conversations from so called health experts. The creator of Blue Zones (Dan Buettner) does seem to profit off of this as well, one quick look at the website shows a Blue Zone cooking course sale and other marketing schemes that could trap the unwary. https://www.bluezones.com/about/history/
I'm not questioning whether or not the intent was malicious but he does stand to gain quite a lot. Happy to see this being exposed. In a semi related sense I highly recommend checking out Bryan Johnson's (founder of Braintree Venmo) Blueprint protocol, I've been following his work for a number of years now and it is scientifically backed although the for profit arm of his initiative just reared its (ugly?) head recently with him selling supplements and dietary goods that are vetted by his agency.
https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/
What's the difference between Johnson and the other 40,000 wellness hackers who make the same claims?
The difference that I'm seeing personally and the initial appeal was that he was more open about the science and the results of it. If you go through the site you can see pretty good documentation about different supplements and what their intended purpose was. However, I do think some of the luster of the open-source model he had kind of disappeared when he started selling products which is a double edged sword in the sense that it does somewhat certify the quality of the product but also chips at his ethos.
The extreme to which he is taking things and the level of rigor he is (seemingly) applying, are the differences I see. He has a lot more time and resources at his disposal than most wellness hackers.
Isn't this just marketing, though?
Doesn't seem like it. He was doing most of what he claims years before he marketed anything. I remember him on Lex Friedman years ago talking about only eating one meal per day, eating as healthy as possible, optimizing his sleep, etc.
What always seemed questionable to me about Blue Zones is how they account for unnatural causes of death. A decade ago centenarians would've had to live through two world wars and the devastation and famine they caused. How do you compare a population that went through that to a population that didn't?
I come from one of these blue zones on the southern coast of Europe. That low income low literacy people live longer, provided they have good genetics seems plausible to me. These people tend to lead a semi-agrarian life and remain active well into their 80s. Their more educated higher income counterparts will probably have spent their life being sedentary and their retirement in a coffee shop indulging themselves. If food plays a role, it's only insofar as them being less indulgent. Otherwise I believe the obsession on diet is only because it is one factor that is relatively easy for people to change. Genetics plays a huge role, because if your body betrays you early on, you won't be able to remain active and focused on life in your later years. Climate probably also plays a role because again, you need good climate to remain active all year round. So does family. Seeing your family everyday keeps you planted in life. Healthcare might also play a role. Our healthcare is much more caring than the one in the northern European states.
They should make a study focusing on northern European retirees who decide to live here on the coast. We have quite a few of those and I wonder whether they tend to live longer compared to their counterparts back home.
The allegation that its simply fraud is ridiculous. If someone in the village dies, the whole village would know before sunset, and pretty much nobody dies at home anyway. And what about inheritance? Or paying rent? No, that's completely ridiculous. Not to mention that pretty much everyone is highly religious around those parts and not giving your relatives a proper Catholic burial is one of the worst things you could do. Not even a staunch atheist would stoop that low.
> The allegation that [it is] fraud is ridiculous.
No? Even the writeup gives specific examples. Number of pension payouts to Greek 100+ year olds was cut by 72% after an audit.
Even if they had a proper Catholic burial. Never underestimate the power of greed. In a predominantly low-income area great-grandpa's pension might be what is keeping you from losing your home.
> That low income low literacy people live longer, provided they have good genetics seems plausible to me.
That it seems plausible is why the story has circulated for so long, but that doesn't make it true. We do research precisely to check what seems plausible against actual data.
Since you're using a throwaway anyway, can you share which part of the Southern coast of Europe you live in? Maybe together we can find data that would help.
The people in the village know, but the culture is such that they aren’t going to rat out the family for the fraud. The priest has nothing to do with the state bureaucracy.
That happens all over the place. People get busted for collecting grandmas social security checks all of the time in the US. When I was in college in the mid-90s, I rented an apartment from a dude who died in the early 80s.
Unfortunately the fraud is real. The fact that blue zones are islands makes it easier to hide the fact from authorities (if it is widespread practice that many people exploit)
how would islands help? it means they're isolated and static compared to areas with lots of people flowing in and out.
In the past they were the opposite, hard to move out, everyone knows each other, the priest can agree not to register the death
Just chiming in to add one factor that you overlooked: selective caloric restriction.
We know caloric restriction can extend lifespan. It's usually tested as a discrete variable, but its statistical effect in the wild is continuous. It can be unintentional, coincidental, income-related, historical event-related, culturally related, and related to the local economy. Multiple categories can apply at the same time, complicating the analysis.
Add fasting to the mix, and the analysis is even harder. Here's a difficult to refute conjecture: areas that underwent episodes of accidental fasting during world wars may have spikes of ultra-centenarians. The keyword is may, because you have to subtract out the negative correlations that come with the event. For instance, during a famine you may end up eating lifespan-reducing foods.
You can have a proper burial and just not submit the death certificate to the government.
The one part of the blue zone theory that does make sense--a lifestyle that involves a lot of physical activity. Which goes along with what we know elsewhere.
>Climate probably also plays a role because again, you need good climate to remain active all year round.
You can be active in any climate. Spain is too hot during the summer so the Spanish aren't active during those hours. If it's too cold you can use a gym or even exercise at home.
>and pretty much nobody dies at home anyway.
That's just not true. A lot of people die in their sleep in their beds.
>The allegation that its simply fraud is ridiculous.
It's not ridiculous.
Your whole post is just littered with statements that just aren't true.
My guess is blue zones are countries that have good social programs and medical systems. Also helpful are regions where the environment isn't going to kill you.
Also helpful are regions where the people aren't going to kill you. Either directly, or by selling you fentanyl.
Why hasn't the Ignoble Paper been published somewhere? Note that it was first drafted in 2019
So what are the real Blue Zones if there are any? Where do people actually live the longest in other words?
Highly developed countries with access to affordable or free healthcare seem to be real blue zones. Especially in highly urban areas. Hong Kong, Singapore, and the big cities of some countries (Tokyo, Sydney) have very high life expectancy numbers.
Seems like getting treatment when you're sick, and having regular check ups to induce lifestyle changes are what makes a place a blue zone.
I think you're confusing correlation with causation. There is no reliable evidence that having regular check ups improves longevity, or even benefits healthy patients at all. And advice given by doctors about lifestyle changes is notoriously ineffective: long-term patient compliance close to zero.
"having regular check ups to induce lifestyle changes"
More likely that those areas have society level positive lifestyles by default, especially relating to foods (eg Okinawa eating until 80% full, Italy and the mederteranian diet, Loma Linda plant heavy diet, etc).
Plenty of people get at least an annual covered checkup, but that doesn't mean they will make lifestyle changes. Even the ones that try end up like a new years resolution - not being strict about it or giving up after a month or two.
Edit: why disagree?
Isn’t the whole point of this research that people Okinawa and Italy probably don’t live any longer. In fact these areas have shorter average life span? So, all the stories about the benefit of the Mediterranean fish heavy diet are post-hoc rationalizations of bad data?
"Isn’t the whole point of this research that people Okinawa and Italy probably don’t live any longer."
I didn't see that claim in the article. What I did see is that the data on centarians was shown to be invalid. It's certainly possible that the overall life expectancy stats could be distorted. In most cases (excluding Okinawa), I doubt that the mistakes or fraud are that rampant. The problem with the blue zone studies is that they explicitly focused on outliers from the beginning. Any mistakes or fraud become a big impact in a small population like that. If you use population level life expectancy, the impact should become much smaller, or at the very least any systemic fraud and mistakes should become readily visible and be able to be corrected in the numbers if further studies are done to measure it.
The article is very emotional and seems to mischaracterize some things, such as claiming that every blue zone must fit each piece of the suggestions. The idea of drinking every day is probably not a good suggestion as there is some research contesting the benefits of a glass of wine a day. But let's take Okinawa as an example. It's uncontested that the records have problems, it's trending in the wrong direction (younger generations, probably better records), and it doesn't fit all the practices (eg religion). But does this invalidate the longevity recommendation of eating to 80% full that comes out of the blue zone recommendation? No. There are independent studies showing the benefits of this practice to reduce cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, and obesity.
So even if the blue zone centarian data is wrong (it is), that doesn't say anything about the suggested practices. Those have always needed their own studies to validate the suggested practices anyways. Fot example, there are numerous studies on the mederteranian diet that shows it is beneficial compared to a typical western diet and especially compared to the typical American diet.
The point is that, if the Blue Zones concept is BS and none of these places have high life expectancy, then there is no reason to discuss them in the context of nutrition or lifestyle recommendations of any kind. Those recommendations may be good or bad, but they are unrelated to the non-existent longevity of these "blue zones".
Yeah, but it's all ancient history at this point. The recommendations have already been proven or disproven through followup studies. Disproving blue zones at this point in time is basically moot.
The real Blue Zones are the friends we made along the way.
The problem will always be that you need to find places that keep good records, and have done so for the last century.
What they set out to do was to find correlations between lifestyle and longevity, and what they ended up finding was a great tool for spotting pension fraud.
The levels of fraud aren't that rampant. Focusing on life expectancy in those regions still seems to have some valid correlation. It was a mistake from the beginning to try to focus on outliers (people living over 100).
Part of the research shows that when you drop the outliers these regions have a lower than average life expectancy.
Yeah, it does show that for some of the areas, but not others. The problem with these population studies is they do not give you answers, only new variables. In my view, the whole blue zone study is moot, at least in the way it is typically applied. What it does give us are new variables to study. Those smaller studied can control for variables that the population level cannot. They can also apply those studies to populations of different decent (genetics).
The glass of wine recommendation has had many studies done and the results are conflicting.
The eating guidelines like heavy in plants, mederteranian, eating to 80% full all have multiple studies showing benefits over the typical western diet and especially the typical American diet. It's a no brainer that if you want to live a long life you have a better chance of doing that if you have a reduced risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, etc.
Most of these guidelines are based on the same sort of flawed population-level studies that can't control for many other aspects. For example, the "Mediterranean diet" is consumed in countries that have all sorts of other specific lifestyle differences that are just as likely to influence health and longevity - siesta, a general tendency not to stress or work in exaggerated amounts, a month or more of vacation per year, significant sun exposure, good social healthcare, and many others. All of these together have certain (mild) effects on longevity and health, but there is virtually no way to isolate any one from all of the others.
There are also many studies that suggest other kinds of diets are beneficial, and many populations that consume significantly different diets and have even better health than the average person around the Mediterranean. For example, inuit populations also display generally low obesity and risks of heart attack, stroke, diabetes etc - while consuming almost the opposite of a Mediterranean diet or of plant heavy diets.
"For example, inuit populations also display generally low obesity and risks of heart attack, stroke, diabetes etc - while consuming almost the opposite of a Mediterranean diet or of plant heavy diets."
That doesn't seem to be true.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30578133/
The studies backing up specific diets are not population level, but rather specific study groups. And yes, there are other healthy diets too.
Right, I have no problem with dietary recommendations that are inspired by "blue zones" and then validated with research in other populations.
so no correlations between lifestyle and longevity? doubt
There are it's just the outlier blue zones where people are supposed to be reaching very hugh maximum ages at a surprising rate that are probably not real. There are still plenty of correlations between healthier lifestyles generally you just shouldn't attempt to live past 100 by emulating what people in an alleged blue zone do.
That is no way shape or form invalidates any actual link between lifestyle and longevity. It just means you can't simply assume that any given example of longevity, or data indicating longevity, must be due to lifestyle.
There is correlation (and maybe even causal relation) between lifestyle and longevity. It's just the lifestyle in those "Blue Zones" is not different from the lifestyle of surrounding areas (or as in Okinawa - gradient points in the wrong direction), so cannot serve as the sure way to longevity.
> what they ended up finding was a great tool for spotting pension fraud
I mean, that’s not nothing, y’know?
i mean there are studies that show good socialization leads to longer life expectancy so you're not wrong
A marketing term to push TV shows, books, Business Insider articles, clicks/engagement, etc.
It's likely the most significant zones simply aren't geographical.
The numbers probably look better in the Affluent Alliance versus the Protectorate of Poverty, for starters.
Reminds me of the South Park episode where they discover Magic Johnson's secret for curing his HIV.
There’s extensive literature on the lack of modern disease in hunter gatherers. Frontier doctors could get a case report published when they found cancer.
Some lived long but on average their lives were short because they didn’t have antibiotics or emergency medicine and lived in harsh environments that few of us would be able to survive today.
Their wisdom appropriately coupled to a modern less harsh environment might lead to greater longevity. But the harshness is what ensures exercise, movement, unprocessed food, etc.
Their "wisdom" of avoiding cancer amounts to dying young. Cancer rates shoot up well beyond 50 years.
Do you have any evidence you can point to for this assertion? The book Good Calories Bad Calories has a section that reviews the literature on the subject. Disease and Western Civilization reviews specific populations in detail. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration for a geographically diverse primary source although it’s not about cancer or longevity.
The assertion that older people get cancer more than young people? You could try any medical source whatsoever that deals with cancer or longevity, instead of picking one that doesn't, e.g. [0]
> Advancing age is the most important risk factor for cancer overall and for many individual cancer types. The incidence rates for cancer overall climb steadily as age increases, from fewer than 25 cases per 100,000 people in age groups under age 20, to about 350 per 100,000 people among those aged 45–49, to more than 1,000 per 100,000 people in age groups 60 years and older.
[0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
That study doesn’t include hunter gathers. Certainly cancer rates increase for them as they age as well. The point is the rate is orders of magnitude less than we experience today.
Who was diagnosing hunter gatherers with cancer?
I lost my wife to melanoma that spread to the brain. I don’t know how some hunter gatherer society would detect a brain tumor.
You can look to the Amish for some answers. They aren't hunter gatherers but they do live a more primitive lifestyle. Some studies seem to show they have lower rates of cancers. It's not really a secret that if you are active, eat fairly healthy, aeent obese, and don't drink or smoke that you will be significantly healthier than the baseline rates in the US.
Could be that that "more primitive lifestyle" could fall victim to some of the same issues that lead us to see the cancer rates throughout history as much lower. (E.g., lack of diagnosis)
I took a look at the Hutterites in Canada because while they live a simpler lifestyle with a more traditional diet, no smoking, and minimal alcohol consumption, they are generally much less averse to modern conveniences where they supplement their lifestyle. Combined with Canada's public health system, that means they have few barriers in the way of receiving modern medical care.
It's a bit old, but I found a study from the 80s[0] that found men have significantly lower rates of lung cancer (yep, not smoking helps) but they found an increased risk of stomach cancer and leukemias. Women had lower rates of uterine cancer. This was fairly consistent across all three traditional groups in North America.
Other sources seem to show their life expectancy is in line with the general population, removing that as a factor.
So not smoking helps. If I had to take a wild guess, the lower rate of uterine cancer could potentially be explained by lower rates of HPV as we now know that's the main risk factor for developing cervical cancer. I can't find any reports on the rates of STDs among the Hutterites, but I would hazard a guess it's "lower".
Which, on the surface, makes it look like the lifestyle and diet (besides not smoking!) isn't having a lot of impact.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6624898/
"the same issues that lead us to see the cancer rates throughout history as much lower. (E.g., lack of diagnosis)"
Except the Amish have access to modern medicine and there are modern studies investigating their population level disease rates.
I'm definitely less familiar with the Amish, so I did some looking beforehand. What I was finding that their willingness to use modern medicine, or to use it preferentially, is said to vary a lot from community to community.
As well, I found they self-fund access to healthcare, and I have no idea what the dynamics would be like with that--would you decide not to see a doctor so you're not placing a burden on your neighbours?
Neither's a factor with Hutterites in Canada. They're very willing to use and rely on modern technology (they probably have some of the most technologically advanced farming setups you've seen, have cell phones, etc) and there's no cost barrier to accessing healthcare.
I was curious, shared what I found. Take from it what you'd like!
And note that it's not "get cancer" but "find cancer".
In a harsh environment how many die of a tumor that saps their energy before causing any specific effect that causes them to seek out a doctor and presents with something the doctor can find without the million-dollar machinery?
Let's grab our Mr. Fusion and head back a quarter century. My father came to visit. He had definitely declined since the last time we saw him but had no known major health issues. There wasn't anything in particular, yet what my wife saw was enough that she said we wouldn't see him again. Half a year later the big machines found the cancer. Would he have made it that half year in a harsh environment? No.
There’s extensive literature on the lack of modern disease in hunter gatherers.
Well yeah because their life expectancy is about 45 years
Well we seem to now be doing worse than the hunter gatherer's who "had a life expectancy of about 45 years" with the rise in early onset cancers.
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/early-onset-cancer-in-youn...
And on your "had a life expectancy of about 45 years", you have a math problem. The average life span was closer to 25 years but was dragged down but the huge amount of infant mortality which is normal in humans.
The Tsimané of the Amazon are know to live well into their 70s.
> The Tsimané of the Amazon are know to live well into their 70s.
Some of them do, but those are filtered to the most healthy if the lot. It's not really surprising that if you lose the sickly ones while they're infants the ones who make it to adulthood are less likely to get sick.
This is further confounded when you have generations that have lived longer, as we do in the first world, because now not only do the sickly ones live long enough to get modern diseases, they also live long enough to reproduce and pass on the previously-non-viable genes. So generation after generation gets added that would never have survived without modern medicine.
I consider it to be a good thing that we can optimize our evolution for different traits now besides raw survivability, but it does mean that we should expect our disease numbers to be higher.
My point was that when someone says the "life expectancy is 45" that does not mean that everyone dies at 45.
> I consider it to be a good thing that we can optimize our evolution
We cannot "optimize" our evolution for different traits. Evolution is optimization to the environment. We cannot use human thought to optimize evolution, and that is eugenics anyway so no thanks.
I was anthropomorphizing the natural process of evolution, not suggesting eugenics. I thought that would be obvious, but apparently not.
I wonder if there was anything historically equivalent to the Antediluvian lifespans described in the Old Testament. If, for example, there was something in the food a few thousand years ago in the area of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, now underwater, that could extend lifespan.
You're wondering if there was any ancient food that allowed people to live to 800 or 900 years old. There wasn't.
I also don't think there was, its more of a scifi kind of musing.
Possibly a parallel in New Orleans? Anne Rice documents unusual individuals that can live well into the hundreds of years.
In some ancient cultures around that region, stating that someone was hundreds of years old was a sign of respect for their wisdom, authority, and line. The numbers weren't meant to be taken literally.
The whole Blue Zone thing cracks me up. They think everyone will live longer on a plant based diet? Tell that to the Inuit and Sami who have genetically adapted after generations of eating very few, if any, plants.
If they Blue Zones do exists, they exist because people are eating their traditional genetic diet.
And if they eat plants, what plants? Should someone of Irish decent eat wheat even though they are more likely to have Celiac?
I have Sami heritage. I was also a Vegan at one time. A healthy Vegan. The plant based diet was literally killing me with hyperglycemia and immune issues. These people who think there is one true diet are dangerous adn do not know the first thing about nutritional genetics.
>These people who think there is one true diet are dangerous
In my observation (after examining anecdotes, and accounting for flawed anecdotes) everyone without exception does well on an animal based diet. It's when it comes to plants there are enormous variations.
For all the nutrition wars raging these days about plant based vs animal etc I really agree with you. Modern transportation of the industrial age shuffled humans around the globe everywhere. Prior to this distinct groups were adapting in distinct biomes for thousands upon thousands of generations. Some were pure carnivore, some were high carb almost all plants, some in between.
If you search for a nutritional genomics, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. There are plenty of researchers who are trying to do the hard work or telling people how important genetics is to our personalized health. The University of North Carolina at Kannapolis has a very good program.
Right, the hype is nuts. My read is regardless of the flaws in demographic data, one observation does seem told hold up: if you go somewhere that's been slower to adapt modernity, and introduce western levels of inactivity and hyperprocessed food, you get all the same maladies.
Which I think is a good sign? It suggests you don't need island magic, you don't need to settle these purist debates or figure out The Answer™. The only thing that matters is addressing the two really bad things that are obviously pathogenic.
And then we can argue about moderate drinking until the end of time.
I live in a community that was part of the Blue Zones project, that has cultural ties to one of the original Blue Zones geographies. While I think there is something to the general idea - eat well, limit stress, have a sense of community, keep moving physically - it was always clear that there was a lot of pseudoscience going on. The videos put out by the project in particular (I think maybe it was a Netflix program for a while?) had a lot of unsubstantiated but authoritative sounding statements. Regardless, I felt like the overall message was positive and got people thinking about how they were living. That said, there was a merchandise angle on it, and thinking back there are ideas we've talked about as a community that Blue Zones could have stewarded - but they would have been outside their established game plan.
Interview with the author from an Irish national radio station here: https://www.goloudplayer.com/episodes/what-are-blue-zones-an...
Starts at 1:10, also the radio slot is a light hearted one, not serious scientific discussion.
Yay that there's research into adding nuance to results.
Science should sharpen science.
Deep down we know how we should eat and live. Society and the economy, though has different plans.
Anecdata, but the plural of anecdote is data:
If you go to Hawaii where there are japanese-style graves with YOB and YOD inscribed, the centenarians all seem to have Okinawan names (and there are quite a few).
> drinking 1-2 glasses of wine per day
> the astounding thing is that one of the guidelines is that you should drink every day at twice the NHS heavy drinking guidelines. That is a recipe for alcoholism.
Say what? The article implies that 1 glass of wine every day or two (i.e., half of 1–2 per day) is heavy. That seems frankly insane to me.
Are you saying that defining half of 7-14 (or 3.5.7) drinks per week as heavy seems insane to you?
Current science proposes that even 2 drinks a week significantly increases cancer rate, and is the current suggested limit for health - I suspect it would be lower but for reactions like you're having. It seems likely that double or triple that is indeed unsafe.
Media is very careful not to shame their readers: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alcohol-cancer-risk-what-to-kno...
According to the CDC, NIH and other respected credible, mostly objective federal health research groups have all suggested up to 2 drinks per day for men and 1 drink for women is not only safe but also beneficial, citing that moderate drinking "reduced risk of heart attack, atherosclerosis, and certain types of strokes". Obviously this would not be the case for people prone to alcoholism or some other complications or contraindications. Sources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6761695/
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/about-alcohol-use/moderate-alcoh...
More recent research has come out pretty much destroying the claim that moderate drinking "reduced risk of heart attack, atherosclerosis, and certain types of strokes". So CDC, NIH suggestions are outdated and they'll probably update it in a year or two (hopefully lol).
It's political, people react strongly to it so they can't. But the studies they used have all been shown to be nonsense. What's surprising to me is to see the gp comment when the original post is specifically addressing the data used to back the claim.
Yeesh - that has all been completely debunked, and largely addressed by the original post. The link in the comment you replied to addresses your claim specifically, as does this: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Wellness/new-research-shows-moder...
> Are you saying that defining half of 7-14 (or 3.5.7) drinks per week as heavy seems insane to you?
Yes. I assert that drinking 3½–7 drinks a week sounds moderate. One or two drinks a week is light. Heavy drinking would be something like 24 or more.
I define the heaviness of drinking by intoxication, not cancer risk.
Ah, all the definitions of heavy in this comment section other than yours seem to be about health, so I think you may have moved the goalposts there.
The original quote in the article was about alcoholism: "That is a recipe for alcoholism."
I think maybe you moved the goalposts here.
> The UK government's guidelines on how much it is safe to drink are based on numbers "plucked out of the air" by a committee that met in 1987. According to The Times newspaper, the limits are not based on any science whatsoever, rather "a feeling that you had to say something" about what would be a safe drinking level. This is all according to Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party who produced the guidelines. [1]
One might think that having admitted this Smith would be circumspect, apologetic and more careful with his claims about health in future. Of course he did the exact opposite:
> However, Mr Smith says this doesn't mean alcohol is not dangerous. He later told The Guardian that this would be a "serious misinterpretation" of his comments. He also argued that the figures were "in the right ball park", and called for heavier taxes to cut consumption
The numbers were based on no evidence but also amazingly in the right ballpark. No contradiction there if you work in public health. Sure enough, ten years later the guidance had become even more extreme [2], with men and women now becoming biologically identical and the government telling citizens that even one drop of alcohol was dangerous:
> The report recommend an upper limit of 14 units per week for both adult men and women, and then included the much-derided “no safe limits” observation.
This highly ideological guidance might have been because:
> Members of the expert group include prohibitionists and anti-alcohol campaigners
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/22/drinking_made_it_all_...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2016/01/22/stats_gurus_open_fire...
Alcohol is just as bad for you as smoking according to the data, the only safe amount is 0. Why it's not packaged with giant warning labels is another question entirely
Drinking any amount of alcohol everyday is heavy. And frankly alcoholic.
Been saying this for years. It's so obvious.
Longevity is a poor metric anyway - we need to emphasize quality * years
The two are greatly correlated, so at a population level it's a distinction without a difference. There's no population of people all living to be 100 but spending their 90s on a respirator.
The distinction matters for individual health decisions, and for comparing different interventions, where you can extend someone's life at the cost of their quality of life.
Yes, someone always says this. Health span is the term. Maybe we can all use the term and skip this discussion
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-health-span
Quality of Life Years, QALYs, is a commonly used term in epidemiology/biostatistics.
Blue Zones were supposed to be examples of that too.
In theory that is a reasonable distinction (and that type of trade-off can come up in very specific situations like treatment of terminal disease in elderly people) but in terms of lifestyle choices there is currently no known difference between lifestyle choices that increase expected longevity and lifestyle choices that increase expected quality years.
Technically speaking (the best kind of speaking) you didn’t need new research to conclude this. All you had to do was ask “is this a pop science book?” and “will I hear about it at my next family gathering from the one person who thinks of themselves as qualified on subject matter but is in fact the furthest from the truth?”
If you answer yes to both, you may safely discard the material as simply a means for the author to advance their career.
Other greatest hits from this genre: Grit, Deep Work, Why We Sleep, Thinking Fast and Slow, How Not to Die.