World's oldest person Emma Morano dies at 117
bbc.com
bbc.com
Yes, my great grandmother died at 101, smoked until 90, and generally didn't have much positive to say in her final years (she may have been suffering from dementia or other old age related disease).
I agree, advice from the long lived doesn't seem particularly useful when compared to scientific study
That's a mighty fast conclusion there, young shot! Given that historically, "most of the people were wrong most of the time", combined with the fact that most centenarians seem to live and advise entirely against widespread modern beliefs about mental nutritional medicinal and social health, all leads to the very real possibility that they're in fact inadvertently on to something.. =)
Daniel Kahneman has a similar sentiment about successful people turned self help gurus.
1. Have good genes.
2. Don't have bad genes.
If I can do it, everybody can!
Calorie restriction is really interesting
I'm curious how someone with a constant diet of something like eggs and biscuits for 5+ years fares regarding severe deficiencies in truly necessary vitamins and minerals. I do think the body is a miraculous machine that will successfully adapt to many diets that experts would otherwise claim as being dangerously deficient.
I'm more interested in when various athletic old people are going to die. Ernestine Shepherd, or Charles Eugster, or any of these ancient japanese bodybuilders.
Don't forget, old people have issues with chewing etc.
I'd say good olive oil is the answer! And no fast food?
We'll see, personally I think its a big mystery... life that is.
The poster could easily be correct.
"But it was also down to a rather unusual diet of three eggs - two raw - each day for more than 90 years."
I'm not sure how else to interpret this statement.
It was a regime she took up as a young woman, after the doctor diagnosed her with anaemia shortly after World War One. She had cut down to just two eggs a day, and a few biscuits recently. Her doctor of 27 years, Carlo Bava, had told AFP news agency that she rarely ate vegetables or fruit. "When I met her, she ate three eggs per day, two raw in the morning and then an omelette at noon, and chicken at dinner."
I did misquote the number of eggs, but not the fact that she had cut down on the amount she was eating.
I think posters above are not supposing that caloric restriction could have helped at random. Rather, they have read about it helping with longevity -- unlike odd numbers of food.
Thanks for your comment.
If you're female it looks like the oldest living person title is typically held for around a year[1]. Lets say that means 120 currently living people can hold the title, that gives you a 1 in 29 million[2] chance. Which feels far more likely than I would have intuitively guessed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people#Chronological_li... [2] Or half the odds of a given ticket winning the lottery
One of my ancestors comes from a Italian mountain village near Lago di Garda. Those villages are very poor, but also fascinating. They did a study on longevity and health - in which they found that farmers whos field would run up the mountain and down the mountain lived longer then farmers who fields did not have such height difference.
Stalin - 20,000,000 http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Stalin
Hitler - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_enumerat...
Trump?
Yea, I'm sure she thinks Trump is as bad as the 20th century's most brutal dictators.
I'm sure she doesn't think the millennial's who think this are embarrassingly and shamefully naive and exaggerating, if the word exaggerating even captures the absurdity well enough.
Humans do that - they look at the world and see patterns all the time. Some people are worse at it than others.
And that the prescriptions they advocate would cause a whole lot of suffering especially for the poorest people.
When I'm replying to someone, I very often look at their other comments. It gives me more context about who they are, how they think, and more often than not leads me to other interesting articles. It's an exercise I recommend.
Part of the reason discourse on this website is considered so much better than reddit is that it's generally considered poor form to dig through users past comments.
Not to mention being kind of pathetic
Today you can take a tour to see "The Killing Tree", an actual tree that kids heads were smashed against. There is a movie called "The Killing Fields" that does a decent job of conveying the suffering under Pol Pot. Pol Pot was so horrible that even the Vietnamese communists were disgusted enough to invade.
Not many left I guess...
EDIT: Stolen from some uncle comment which I have also plussed.
sorry for the black humour
It's even crazier to speculate what it will look like in 117 more.
Looking at https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html it's around 0.72 years.
Public record of age: https://www.ratsit.se/18990601-Saro_Dursun_Vasteras/qEQWdEbn...
Well, no... She was alive during it, but remember they didn't have television back then. ;)
edit: "She was officially the last person born in the 1800s still living"
nm, we are fresh out
Running around analyzing the genetics of supercentenarians isn't really all that useful from the point of view of making people live longer. Doubling a tiny chance is still a tiny chance, and their longevity has a lot more to do with randomness than with anything else.
Perhaps more interesting is asking why these people die, what are the causes. Different ages are characterized by a different prevalence of disease; cancer hits a maximum mortality rate and then fades as a major cause in the oldest old, for example. From the few autopsies performed, supercentenarians appear to predominantly die of senile systemic amyloidosis, a clogging of the cardiovascular system with misfolded transthyretin that appears to play a lesser role in heart failure in younger old age.
If we want to ask why human life span seems to have a rough upper limit (though 50%+ yearly mortality for any combination of causes is going to look a lot like a hard limit when stretched over 20 years), then this form of amyloidosis seems to be one of the places to look.
Interestingly, this form of amyloidosis has an inherited version that shows up in young people, so despite the institutional reluctance to work on medicine to treat the causes of aging, there are actually a number of therapies in development and trials, some of which can selectively remove this form of amyloid. At some point the research community will wake up to this form of amyloid being a contributing cause of heart failure (a process underway judging by recent papers on the topic), at which point we might well see a leap in the observed upper limit to human life in the decades following more widespread use.
Looking at the top 43 oldest people alive [1] I can see that 20 of them are from Japan. That's almost 50%! While not conclusive proof, I think it at the very least heavily suggests that living long isn't about random chance. Whatever is going on in Japan seems to be working very well.
--
Take Switzerland for example. It also has a high standard of living, and ranks #2 just after Japan in average life expectancy. [1] Yet there's not a single Swiss person in that top 43 oldest people list. Of course Switzerland has a much smaller population (8M) than Japan (127M). However we can use a combination of countries. Let's take the top 10 countries by average life expectancy. The first is Japan with its 127M people, and the other 9 (Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, Spain, Iceland, Italy, Israel, Sweden, France) have a combined population of 227M people. Yet even with almost double the population, in regards to the top 43 oldest people, this combination only gives us 6 entries (France 3, Italy 2, Spain 1) against Japan's 20.
A high standard of living certainly has an effect, but I feel it barely scratches the surface of the full answer.
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...