Also grandpa has 7 siblings, with his older sister already being 100. Interestingly their own parents didn't live nearly that long.
My paternal grandmother on the other hand died one week before turning 97 and only after that it was revealed that she actually lied about her age, claiming to be six years younger, so as to not cause a scandal when my grandparents announced their marriage.
The common theme among them is that they are/were all active working manually and would neither drink nor smoke, but that's no revelation.
Interestingly, their next door neighbour is also still among us and the general pattern was that people in that block would start passing away starting from the lowest floors.
It's a small thing, but I can see how it works - living on the third floor I see that my joints are better lubricated than back when I was living on the ground floor, so taking long walks is also no issue.
For your theory to believably explain this, wouldn't everybody have to be the same age to start off with on all the floors? Which seems improbable?
I would love to see a study on the effects of taking the stairs on expected life span!
It seems such a small thing but the health benefits likely add up.
All of the folks in my family who lives to their late 90s with a long “healthspan” drank or smoked excessively. The generation after them, their children, who did are either dead or on their way to an early grave.
I haven’t really been able to figure that one out.
Other aspects of our modern environment are probably playing a role, too, of course.
We generally think in terms of life expectancy, but that's only really useful on a population level. On an individual level, it's much more useful to think about the probability of dying - you aren't running down a clock, you're constantly rolling cosmic dice to see whether you get hit by a semi truck or develop pancreatic cancer.
Before the age of 40, you've got less than a 1% chance of dying in any given year. By 60 that probability increases to about 5% and by 80 to about 25%. Some young people will just have rotten luck and roll 1 on a d100, while some people will repeatedly roll a d4 and manage to dodge the 1. Obviously those probabilities are highly modifiable by many factors, but some people will get unreasonably lucky or miserably unlucky regardless of the underlying probabilities.
Just a hypothetical of course, I obviously know nothing at all about your family!
Could it be that older people were less likely to be able to avoid physical work (even their chores were far more of a workout), were relatively more religious and conservative than current generations, and grew up with fewer processed foods and more home cooking by stay-at-home moms? What I mean by this is are you just describing people who were born in the 1930s? The fact that the ones that are left are mostly typical would be expected.
> keep using your brain actively into your 80's and 90's.
This could be seen as a symptom of aging well, rather than a cause. People whose brains don't work well aren't studied as examples of aging well.
The person I know who most fits this description is my dad, he had a swimmer's body in his 60s, worked out every morning since high school, has kept a dead center BMI his entire life, has never done a drug and probably only had a sip or two of beer, always had a gym guy diet that has gradually become more vegan, and was a math major and computer programmer, plays chess etc..
He's totally falling apart in his late 70s and becoming very frail. Seems like he's having nerve and neurological issues, and having problems with his connective tissue and with arthritis in his hands and knees. I don't know how you eat, work out, and think yourself into avoiding that. Half of his joint problems are caused from having been athletic, just like my super-athletic Army grandpa, whose knees would bend backwards for the last years of his life from football when he was young.
Protestantism isn't a law of nature. You aren't automatically rewarded for sacrifice and suffering, at least while you're alive.
People born in the 1930's were 30 in the 1960's, and if you think that means a lot of religious/social conservatism, you probably don't know much about American history. Most of these people adopted more conservative ideals later in life, which happens to literally every generation.
By the way, it sounds like the people who you are talking about have a history of very much overworking their bodies to the point of injury, and that is also pretty clearly bad for you. I don't think you are guaranteed to live a long time if you take care of yourself, but I think it's pretty clearly true that you will maximize your chances if you do.
> Protestantism isn't a law of nature. You aren't automatically rewarded for sacrifice and suffering, at least while you're alive.
The happiest and healthiest 90-year-old I know does 2 hours a day of work meticulously maintaining his trees and eats whatever he wants. He happens to want healthy things, though, and enjoys the trees. You don't have to suffer to be healthy.
Just walk into any sort of care facility for the elderly to understand that bias.
Understanding how body degenerates with age and injuries, especially joints and connective tissue. Workouts great for 20 years old are sometimes pretty bad for 40+. Don't stress heart too much, just enough, for long periods.
Plenty of weightlifters who have messed up their shoulders, spines, knees etc. although at their peak they lifted impressive weights and looked accordingly. Guess what, this adds 0 in longevity, whatever effect was there is 100% gone in 5-10 years from all tissues and bones as cells fully renew, and messing up core of your movement can easily negatively impair lifespan.
Similarly, my grandfather was docker, and then a very active gardener walking to his allotment a few times day, a good few miles round-trip, and lived into his 90s as well.
They were all what might be 'underweight' by the BMI measurements these days. War diets, perhaps, but they were both healthy and fit. Not sure I buy the restricted diet idea for longevity though.
On the other hand, my paternal grandmother had a severe sweet tooth, and passed away from a heart condition. Her diabetes kept her very inactive for the most part, but even at 80, she could do a LOT of activities independently with little help. Passed away at 84.
My maternal grandfather was very active in his 70s, but he became sedentary and reclusive (partly because of my caretaker uncle who is an asshole, coupled with messy infamily fighting). Passed away at 82, after his second(!) heart attack.
My maternal grandmother is still alive and kicking ass, travelling the world over. Again, asshole uncle causes her a lot of tension , but her daughters have tried to keep her separated from him, so stress levels are low. For the record, she could travel from India to the US alone at her age.
Use it or lose it.
To reach next 1000 years, you need to do:
(1) Information theoretic presevation, IE body imaging, cryo, and proper archival / storage.
(2) Behavioural emulation, IE a virtual replicant that roughly makes same decisions far enough for you to identify with it and trust it will carry on your pursuits, even though it will be at least for the beginning slower than the meat was. Behavioural emulation is much less difficult and much more computationally efficient than whole brain emulation.
Many humans would say they want someone to be there taking care of their kids, if nothing else. But there is nothing really pioneering this. I hope the separate developments in neuroimaging, qualia research will eventually converge.
The simulant may be Me (as in another version of me) but it's not me (the consciousness I experience inside my body). Therefore, it's life extension for me, but for everyone's benefit but mine. That doesn't help the selfish ego inside me that wants to live forever.
That just does not scratch the eternal life itch, I'm afraid.
TL;DR Let your rational brain decide what it wants, try to cope with the rest from there.
Not sure if it will ever satisfy the desire to lenghten human lifespan though. Just as a thought experiment imagine that we have this tech. You have your perfect replica. It responds exactly like you would and no one else, not even you can tell its responses apart from yours. Once you have that, and attained “immortality” as such, do you mind if someone shoots you in the head? The real you i mean. After all you are immortal. Your behaviouraly emulated clone will keep doing what you do, loving your wife, taking care of your kids, supporting the causes you support etc.
For me the answer is that I would absolutely not let my real body killed just because i have my behavioural clone. Which to me implies that at least for me it is not a true continuation of my life. More like having a living will, or a son who is way too similar to me, but still not me.
Basically I would not reach 1000 years. This thing created in my image would.
I agree that at point behavioural replication is possible, AI probably also will be. Harsh.
Now the point you ended your reply in is a very common response. Many follow the same direction of thought. I think that to think one should not get a behavioural replica because you don't think it would be you is a non-sequitur however; if the behavioural replica continues to advance your interests, is it not the rational thing to do?
Moreover, if you said "no, it doesnt matter, I'll be dead" you would be following a strategy that'd lead to huge loss if it turned out you actually never died.
Didn’t say that. Do get one if you can afford it. It would be usefull for all kind of things. But continuation of my life it is not. Simply it does not solve the longevity extension problem from my perspective.
Actually, how would that sort of "immortality" even be fundamentally different from the traditional way of becoming "immortal" - by having your children or contemporaries carry on your estate in your name, according to their interpretation of "what you would have wanted"?
I suspect aside from lifestyle changes and drugs targeting those affected pathways, gene and "epigene" editing is the thing that will result in longer lifespans. But genetic and epigenetic editing targeting random accumulated mutations with age, not necessarily those at birth.
The phenomenon in the linked piece is important because it throws a monkey wrench into a lot of stuff. I'm skeptical of biological measures of aging because of the widespread idea that people can be biologically older or younger than chronological age. I think it's going to take some large population with good, verifiable, maintained records at birth, which will take some time to establish.
That ship has sailed.
It's not making an argument, it's describing. And describing is not taking action.
[edit] about describing truth or evidences: we need that. Of course it all depends on how you present the truth, whether you are actually doing pseudoscience or not, whether you are manipulating concepts that are actually scientific or not, and whether you are conflating correlation with causation or not.
> Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.
The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.
The government realizes this and regularly scrubs the voter rolls of dead people. Yet certain news organizations will report this as if it is a scandal. "Thousands of dead people were set to vote until their plan was foiled by the governors office". Tell me when dead people are voting in numbers, not that people die while still being on the rolls.
Turns out it was a sokushinbutsu, a self-mummifying monk who practiced extreme fasting, dietary restriction and dehydration until, emaciated and desiccated, their body died in a meditative state. Such monks were thought not to be dead but rather to have ascended to a higher plane of understanding. Their corpses would be dressed in fine clothes and venerated almost like gods. If you complete a shrine in Breath of the Wild and reach the mummified monk at the end, those monks were inspired by sokushinbutsu.
It made me think about the claims of extreme longevity, especially from the Far East, and how many of those might just be due to flexibility about the definition of "death".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tinniswood https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-68741070
The hypothesis Newman is implicitly presenting in TFA is that Tinniswood is indeed very old, but — instead of being born in 1912, married at age 30, and now age 112 — perhaps he was really born in 1917, married at 25, and now 107. Or any other massaging of the numbers. Really the only way to distinguish among these hypotheses is to have some sort of documentary evidence — birth certificate, marriage certificate, employment records, etc.
Newman's point is that "supercentenarian" populations are disproportionately correlated with bad recordkeeping (presumably even when you control for the observation that century-old records are likely worse-kept than newer records, although I don't think Newman directly says that). And also with pension fraud. He writes: ( https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3.full )
> The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. [...] In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age [...] supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five [...] 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.
Now, maybe there's no evidence that John Tinniswood is lying about his age (consciously or unknowingly), and maybe "the rough parts of Liverpool" have great recordkeeping, and maybe Tinniswood isn't even from the roughest part of Liverpool — sure, I think Newman's argument is specifically weak on concrete evidence for any of those claims, which means Tinniswood might be a terrible individual example for him to have picked. But then you should object to those claims. Don't jump all the way to an obviously false response like "Tinniswood isn't even from Liverpool!"
I'm curious why the census isn't presented as evidence of location. UK census are very informative and the 1921 census is the most recent one available.
I'll note that a very small percentage of individuals aren't found (illegible, record loss, issue at taking) but it's exceptional.
My grandmother is well into her 90s.
They both were active throughout their lives, always in the fields.y grandmother goes to bed when the soon after the sun goes down. She insists on not having any electricity.
That's what, 9 years old?
> If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.
https://www.amazon.com/Fear-Food-History-Worry-about/dp/0226...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerontology_Research_Group
"The Cornerstone of Peace at the Peace Memorial Park in Itoman lists 149,193 persons from Okinawa – approximately one quarter of the civilian population – were either killed or committed suicide during the Battle of Okinawa and the Pacific War."
How can anyone stupid enough to think that the people of Okinawa have had a healthy lifestyle over the past century? The subtle statistical effects of any dietary or lifestyle prefererences would be completely swamped by the effects of the above.
A glorified shitpost. I love it.
There was an article/blog post on HN not too long ago of a chap who realized Blue Zones are a farce and it’s underreported deaths instead.
To folks linking pop-sci books, you may want to think twice.
From articles linked, most other area candidates are long dead, pension fraud, in low income areas, also affecting some areas in the U.S., but mostly relating to records keeping.
Meanwhile:
“In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. ... Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA ... 82% of supercentenarian records from the USA predate state-wide birth certification.”
However, in the research graphics, Loma Linda is not on the map depicting concentrations in midwest. There are these mentions, however:
“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 lifespan (27th-75th percentile; Fig S6)”, “The two remaining blue zones, Loma Linda and the Nicoya Peninsula, are considered exceptional due to their high average longevity rather than the presence of the oldest-old.”, and “However, when assessed independently by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) the five small-area survey tracts covering Loma Linda instead have an average life expectancy of 76 to 81 years: the 27th to 75th percentiles of US life expectancy (Fig S6). This means, at best, the independent CDC estimates rank Loma Linda as the 16,101st most long-lived neighborhood in the USA (Fig. S6; S1 code). As such, it is again unclear why the lifespan of this community has been considered remarkable.”
Till now, this area stood out as an odd duck among the blue zones, being an otherwise regular U.S. suburb, just high prevalence of longevity among the vegetarian health conscious non-smoker non-drinker types. Most of the other zones attribute health to hills and seafood, while now seeming poverty and pension fraud related.
Long before the study and term became popularized, it was noted that among one community in and around this CA area (including great grandmothers or aunts that had moved to mountain communities in other parts of CA), seemingly unusual numbers of women among extended family and friends' extended family lived over 100. Though less so since 2010s, as though most were of generations from 1860s - 1900s.
Incidentally, the directly known individuals who passed on in '80s or '90s did have birth certificates and carefully documented genealogies dating back to 1400s - 1600s or so.
Putting two and two together, while Loma Linda is not mentioned other than these quotes, it seems the suggestion here is that these western-most U.S. clusters could be late 1800s births in areas not yet organized for birth certificates and records keeping, still around to be noticed in the 1970s to 2010s.
TL;DR:
This makes it seem as though someone trying to make a case for the longevity of a small set of people misunderstood or overlooked the error rates at play and didn't dig further, allowing them to make a case for a zone-wide phenomenon.
It would be so cool and wonderful to believe that this researcher's current employer (University College London's Social Research Institute, Centre for Longitudinal Studies) was a bastion of truth and honesty in scientific research...
Anybody know what the reality is?
