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The Men Who Live Forever

menshealth.com

62 pointschaostheory26 comments

Not a good article. I have been around the Tarahumara. The women are friendly but very shy, the men are not to be seen when outsiders are around. My guide told me that they have a 50% infant mortality.

However, their history is very cool: when the Spaniards were enslaving everyone they could catch in northern Mexico for a short and harsh life in silver mines, the Tarahumara did not like what they saw, and headed for remote areas.

"My guide told me that they have a 50% infant mortality."

This would explain "the secret of longevity and perpetual health" - quite literal survivorship bias.

A survivorship bias would not explain the effects of the diet and exercise regimen on the author, a seemingly average American male of Irish-Italian descent.

This is orthogonal.

One guy getting in a better shape after diet and exercise is quite expected.

Whole society being virtually free of big bad diseases is, on the other hand, extraordinary claim:

"When it comes to the top 10 health risks facing American men, the Tarahumara are practically immortal: Their incidence rate is at or near zero in just about every category, including diabetes, vascular disease, and colorectal cancer."

This sounds quite dishonest if what mark_l_watson said indeed holds. You could then equally say:

"When it comes to #1 health risk facing Tarahumara men, Americans are practically immortal: almost all their babies survive."

A man being able to run a super-marathon through a desert within months of switching to their diet and exercise regimen is hardly orthogonal. =)

From http://www.lehigh.edu/~dmd1/art.html (just somebody's term paper I found on Google):

The Tarahumara are not very hygienic to even modern day indigenous standards. They are not very cleanly and the washing of their clothes is usually either an annual or semiannual tradition. The Tarahumara have no regular sleeping habits and simply go to sleep whenever and wherever they are tired and feel that they need rest. The practice of childbirth is also distinct to the Tarahumara. When a woman feels that it is about time for her to deliver the baby she will go off by herself into the wilderness, brace herself between two small trees and attempts to have the baby safely. There is a very high infant mortality rate among the Tarahumara. This fact is counterbalanced by the fact that there is also a very high birth rate. The average Tarahumara woman gives birth to about ten babies hoping that three or four will survive into adulthood. Adulthood is usually short for the Tarahumara with the average life expectancy being forty-five (Lutz 50). These factors are believed to help the Tarahumara survive as a race.

Perhaps the reason they have low incidence of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease is that these ailments often set in after the age of 45?

It depends on how they computed average life expectancy. Due to high infant mortality, life expectancy of survivors can be in fact much higher.

"Life expectancy is heavily dependent on the criteria used to select the group. For example, in countries with high infant mortality rates, the life expectancy at birth is highly sensitive to the rate of death in the first few years of life. In these cases, another measure such as life expectancy at age 5 (e5) can be used to exclude the effects of infant mortality to provide a simple measure of overall mortality rates other than in early childhood."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

If you are correct then the previous quote saying a woman would give birth on average 10 times, expecting 3 or 4 to survive, then wouldn't the e5 be around 90? That's far better than in almost all developed countries...

I know of no research linking survival of un-aided birthing and a lack of neo-natal care to immunity from heart disease in old age. This isn't survivorship bias. It's a separate issue.

I'm not aware of any such research either, yet the possibility that people which would later in life develop serious illnesses have higher chances to die as infants in harsh conditions does seem like a plausible explanation of apparent better health of the surviving population.

The Tarahumara of Mexico have been getting a lot of play recently specifically because of a book called Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall (http://www.amazon.com/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest...).

The Tarahumara people have been known in the elite runner/super athlete circles for a few decades yet but it seems that since the book came out everyone has been searching for their own experience with them. They are also somewhat responsible for the recent barefoot running phenomenon.

I was wondering what started this particular health fad.

Given that there's some legitimate cultural anecdote and biological history behind it, maybe it'll actually work.

I think this was the original barefoot post on hacker news:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1170253/The-...

This article IS that book -- I just finished reading it. This article is ripped word-for-word from several sections of that book, with a little stitching together. It's an entertaining book, if a bit rambling.

A bit wordy I think. Summary: Run (with low-padding shoes). Eat better.

i found the narrative essential to the information he was conveying. it was a story of evolution rather than a fact sheet.

a fact sheet would have been more interesting to read

I disagree -- and I'm troubled that people seem to assert that just because you can say something quickly, means you should be compelled to pare down your ideas into CliffsNotes. The readers lose out on the richness of the ideas being conveyed.

Sometimes novels should've been essays. Why must essays always become tweets?

It's not that essays should be tweets, it's that I and a lot of other people here prefer a particular style of writing. Think of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", a fact heavy almost detail free style.

But most people prefer a longer story based style and I suspect most people on HN today are of that type.

"... But none of that wisdom has prepared me for this. Eric warned me that running low on water during a 12-hour run in 85° heat would be crucial, and now, with my pee the color of convenience-store coffee, I know I'm too dehydrated to finish. ..."

Not very bright. Dehydration means approx. 10% loss of performance and potential for damage. Isotonics work well in this situation. But 12 hours of water. You cant carry it. It has to be a refill about every 2Hrs.

Why does this article have that title and then give no discussion on that point?

The whole concept is pretty ridiculous that they have discovered this healthy people that must be healthy because they eat corn and run marathons. All indigenous people were relatively free of diseases of civilization pre-contact (which basically includes all of our medical problems) and would appear remarkably healthy if they survived to old age. This is about the only culture that runs marathons.

In yesterday's NYT: Vigor Quest

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/magazine/17antiaging-t.htm...

It's pretty obvious we are doing things backward. We eat crap and compensate with synthetic vitamins. We exercise little and compensate with few hours per week on a machine.

Since I've reduced - not suppressed - meat and sugar, walk one hour a day, and spend time contemplating I've witnessed significant improvement of my well being.

If you want some peer-reviewed background on why it's smart to cut out sugar and the foods to which it's added by manufacturers, do take a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM This is one of the best nutritional videos I've ever seen. There's a chunk of biochemistry in the middle but it's worth watching to the end! Don't miss it and add years to your life.

I'd also add this one by Gary Taubes doing a lecture at the Stevens Institute of Technology "Big Fat Lies": http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149#

Was that journalism or an ad for Nike shoes?

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