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Comment by tolstoshev | Hacker News Reader

My bet is blue zones are just places where they don't have good longevity records so you get a bunch of fake centenarians. That turned out to be the case in Japan: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071 and I think also in Greece.

People were just keeping dead relatives "alive" for the social security or rent control.

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Spending a lot of time in greece in rural areas in the 90ies in my teens. Quite a lot of older greek did not even know or care about their birthday, as it was not celebrated. Name day was the big thing.

And I loved the stories when the government introduced a new land registry (based on reality) and the chaos the ensured, as suddenly lot of land was owned 2 or more times, officially unknown villages were officially discovered ...

I would definitely question the validity of the historic birth register, a lot.

The researchers questioned these details, too. Any place labeled a blue zone has to have excellent records they could trace. One of the blue zones is in California. It’s worth looking at their process

Half the residents of that town are 7th Day Adventists according to Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loma_Linda,_California

Blue zones could simply be a result of The modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifiable_areal_unit_proble...

7th Day Adventists have food and lifestyle differences from the surrounding population. They are the ones living longer. There have been a bunch of ongoing long term studies on them.

One of the findings is that diet matters. They’ve looked at diet differences and certain characteristics show up for people who live longer and have more good years. Those same things show up in the other blue zones.

I guess as time progresses, centenarians will come from cohorts with records that can be better trusted. This will confirm or invalidate the blue zone findings.

It’s not necessarily so easy.

I’m reminded of the Okinawan case, where postwar rule by the US introduced younger cohorts to much unhealthier eating habits.

> Name day was the big thing.

For anyone curious:

> In Christianity, a name day is a tradition in many countries of Europe and the Americas, among other parts of Christendom.[1] It consists of celebrating a day of the year that is associated with one's baptismal name, which is normatively that of a biblical character or other saint.[2] […]

> The custom originated with the Christian calendar of saints: believers named after a saint would celebrate that saint's feast day. Within Christianity, name days have greater resonance in areas where the Christian denominations of Catholicism, Lutheranism and Orthodoxy predominate.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day

Some French I knew followed this and received gifts(IIRC) --or at least they referenced these things as the source of their names --they did not ignore their actual birthdays though.

Indeed. I had no idea it was so exotic. It’s kinda of a old people thing. It’s associated with your name a specific saint for it. ( multiple saint are named James or John or Anthony, your name day is specifically for one of them. Anthony of Assisi is not the same day as Anthony of Padou and so on on so forth.)

You usually get a card from your religious grandma and a 20$ bill.

having spent a good part of my life with Greek relatives, I beg to differ.

Birthdays might not be accurate due to difficulties in registering births, civil wars and fascist coups (they burnt every record so that people from, for example, Macedonia had to take Greek names) but the difference from on paper age and actual age is on average a few months off (plus or minus, so they balance in the end).

They also care a lot about celebrating birthdays with very big family gatherings.

On other note: if we believe that somewhere they kept false records of births, what should make us believe that in other parts of the World they kept perfect records?

What should make us think that birth records in Azerbaijan, Colombia, Ohio or Fiji are more accurate?

> And I loved the stories when the government introduced a new land registry (based on reality) and the chaos the ensured

Could you provide some links expanding on this? Or a phrase to Google? Sounds fascinating.

a quick google showed this

https://www.elra.eu/the-present-landscape-of-land-registrati...

The traditional land registry was from 1853 which seems was just a good enough description of what one owns.

In 1995 a land cadastre was created and it came into law in 1998 to replace the old system. A land survey was started to move presume land ownership from the old into the new system. This land survery / chaos was definitely still going on end of the 2000 years in Crete.

I have read the same thing about Greece's Ikaria island centenarians.

As an anecdote my grandfather born in remote mountain village in mainland Greece in the 1900 was actually registered by his father having been born in 1906 as to avoid being drafted as long as possible to fight in the multiple wars fought at the time. So birth records and certificates from that time are not really trustworthy.

I knew someone who came over with "the boat people" from Vietnam when he was six or seven; but his parents adjusted his birthday so he would start kindergarten instead - and he still didn't know for sure his actual birthday day.

How do you go and register a 7 year old as having been born a few days ago?

I don't think you bring the kid with you.

Or bring another kid with you. In a small village, the gene pool is pretty shallow and it’s not hard to look like anyone’s child.

It’s not like they’re going to waste money on photographing every person in a tiny village either.

I'm guessing that paper records were not especially rigorous in Greece in the early 1900s.

With the help of a bribe.

Things in common across most blue zones: middle latitudes, near a coastline, consistent weather, mild diet with plenty of fish, poor record keeping...

I assume your comment is semi-tongue-in-cheek, but Loma Linda's the counter to several of those points.

Loma Linda's core contributing factors seem to be:

* High incidence of vegetarianism

* High incidence of non-smokers and non-drinkers

* Strong religious / social community

* Access to great healthcare

All while having birth records that are just about as accurate as anyplace else in the United States.

But it conforms to many of the others... it's only 20 miles inland from the pacific, and has an (albeit warmer than normal) Mediterranean climate... "winter" lows are rarely below the mid 40s.

I grew up in the Loma Linda area as a Seventh-day Adventist (though my family left Adventism when I was a teenager after reading some books that explained why some of its core teachings are unbiblical). My grandparents all lived past 90, and my great-grandfather died at 100.

Epidemiologically speaking, I think SDAs in general live longer because they don't smoke, don't drink, and don't eat meat -- and have a religious community in which doing so is against God's law. It also doesn't hurt that they keep Sabbath, which means everyone who doesn't work in healthcare or emergency services has a mandatory day off, no work allowed.

Smog in the whole Inland Empire area is still pretty bad, especially in the summer. It gets pretty hot in the summer, not very cold in the winter - a lot like LA, but hotter :)

Which makes sense, if you assume that any given cohort will have some percentage hit 100 years; and then the cohorts that somehow have people removed "early" will have lower percentages.

For example, the cohort that includes people sent to WWII will have many that died in that war, even if they would have hit 100 otherwise.

And a group that "outlaws" some of the major causes of premature death (alcohol, smoking) would then have more cross the line.

Loma Linda is more like 60 miles from the pacific.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Loma+Linda,+CA/Huntington+Be...

Also smaller stature. Large and tall people have more cells, and higher chance of cancer.

Interesting correlation: Eating more meat seems to cause people to grow larger, but there is no strong evidence that being physically larger has intrinsic benefits outside of physical strength (which is arguably not very important). You do however need to eat more, you're more likely to get cancer, heart disease, suffer from chronic inflammation, etc.

Interestingly, statistics about growing larger are often used to support more meat eating by meat advocates. There is a lot of talk about protein quality, and the implication is that smaller people are disadvantaged – as though they must be growing less by all measures, not just stature. It isn't so clear that this is true though, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest we shouldn't strive to grow larger (either in stature or in lean mass).

I'm not saying there is a certain truth in there at all. I do find the correlations fascinating though. It defies a lot of what I understood about nutrition for most of my life so it's definitely something I'd like to see more data on. I'm open to a meat-based diet being superior overall (or any tasty diet, really).

My health-obsessed doctor friend told me that muscle mass is a good predictor for health in later life, which was surprising to me (I thought fitness, heart/lung etc was the thing). I wouldn't dismiss it. :)

[relative] Muscle mass has a very strong correlation with healthy habits.

You just don't see a lot of sedentary people with poor nutrition who have a high muscle mass index.

It makes me think of all those reports that claim that having a single glass of wine per day makes you healthier.

It's probably the case that people who have just one glass of wine are drinking socially, and therefore have friends, and having friends is an indicator of having status and health. The alcohol itself is poison but one glass is more than offset by otherwise living a good life.

Oh they studied this! It's because if you're the kind of person who can afford a glass of wine every day, you're also the kind of person who can afford health care. In USA at least.

Here's the best source I can find right now:

> The study authors write that “the observed cardiac benefits of alcohol have been hypothesized to be the product of residual confounding because of favorable lifestyle, socioeconomic, and behavioral factors that tend to coincide with modest alcohol intake.”

https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/health-benefits-alcohol-st...

It's harder to keep muscles as you grow old. More muscles is indication of good metabolism, which correlates with good health (less chance of getting metabolic syndrome etc, somewhat relevant: https://betterbodychemistry.com/obesity/metabolic-syndrome-m...)

Muscle mass in that equation would be relative to stature, so being smaller wouldn’t be a disadvantage in that regard.

In my comment above I didn’t mean to suggest strength is useless or irrelevant so much as that scaling it up by a few percent doesn’t appear to confer meaningful benefits. Someone 5’6” is probably strong enough to do everything someone 6’ can do in every day life, even without modern technology. You can generally scale down what you need to, and for exceptional things, you can likely recruit and partner to solve the problem or apply intelligent solutions.

I’m open to being wrong. Like I was saying, this is just based on correlations I’ve been reading about lately and far from peer reviewed study results.

No man would choose to be 5’6 in America. Anyone under 6’ knows how difficult it is to date, especially online.

Of course. I’m speaking from a biological rather than cultural perspective (as much as you can separate the two, at least). I’m more so interested in what supports longevity as opposed to what supports dating prospects.

I suppose my question is, all other things being equal, would we be healthier if we were of smaller stature? Some data indicate this might be the case, and that’s interesting to me. I suppose my upbringing and culture encourage a “bigger is better” mentality.

A lot of data indicate this could simply be a case of people growing larger because they have access to more food. Genes express, people grow, but the main issue isn’t stature so much as having so much food readily available after they finish growing. Perhaps we eat too much and stature has little to do with it; it’s just a byproduct of access to calorie and protein rich food.

Except body builders tend to not live very long.

Separating the effects of steroids and other growth hormones vs. just having a lot of muscle seems difficult.

My general understanding is that overweight is overweight is overweight, it's hard on your body when excessive, even if it's muscle.

It appears that consuming a lot of protein in and of itself (assuming you’re not yet 65) is correlated with much worse health and mortality outcomes: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/protein...

How is physical strength unimportant? Stronger people are harder to kill (h/t Rippetoe) and improved strength also helps to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome and neck/back pain for those of us at a computer all day.

I can't think of much a human can accomplish with exceptional strength that will aid them in normal day to day life (generally speaking). There are exceptions, but those exceptions would apply only to rare circumstances. Sort of like, say you're going to be murdered by some totally jacked guy, hypothetically, and all you have to defend yourself is your bare hands. Okay great, it would be nice to be ridiculously strong. But how often does that happen to you? Or anyone?

Most predators will kill us even if we're ridiculously ripped, so that's not important either. In most cases, intelligence seems a lot more useful for avoiding or navigating these situations.

There's also a lot to be said for having moderate strength in a wide range of motion. That can matter a lot in a much broader variety of situations where physical strength matters, and it's far more realistic to attain and sustain.

Avoiding carpal tunnel doesn't require special levels of strength so much as normal fitness. It requires regular movement and preventing weaknesses. I'm not saying we should all vegetate at a computer, I'm saying that the evidence seems good that being 5% larger/stronger (or whatever the figure was) is not particularly helpful, and instead potentially harmful.

For example, regular yoga will probably resolve most (not all) people's mobility and repetitive stress issues. They will not need to be large or strong for this to work.

Speaking as a fellow Starting Strength fan: this is only true in the modern era to the extent that being healthy is better than being unhealthy.

If you look at the top X causes of death in humans, very very few of them could have been avoided "if only the deceased were stronger."

Falling and then breaking bones or getting ill otherwise is a common cause of death, and muscle mass and fitness helps avoid it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5899404/

Although it would help if they were stronger, this isn't the result of them needing to begin a Starting Strength program. My original point was more so that stature and muscle mass might not benefit you beyond a certain point – I don't doubt at all that being fit is still tremendously beneficial.

It's also pure speculation. I read about this stuff for fun and I know just about nothing about anything. Maybe being larger really is a net positive and I just need to be pointed to the right data.

I'm not going to argue this with you. I'm not up for being dragged into a stupid internet fight with a random internet stranger. But this might interest you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14667430

Right, and I think an important distinction here is sheer strength from general physical fitness.

If someone is relatively weak with below average lean mass, lower than average markers of muscular strength, etc. it seems like the consensus is that they are statistically likely to die or get diseases earlier in life. On the other hand, being on the other side of that seems to yield diminishing returns. It’s great to be fit, but being abnormally strong on the other hand doesn’t appear to increase your lifespan proportionally to your strength.

It helps avoid frailty and it allows you to continue exercising well into old age, for two things. It delays the downward spiral of poor fitness and weak bones that eventually does most of us in.

That’s also an interesting anticorrelation with how we normally relate metabolism and body size; smalller organisms tend to have faster metabolisms and live shorter lives versus much larger organisms.

Maybe the key is being smaller but also having slower (or rather, “calmer”) metabolic rates.

I believe what you want to be is a small member of a large species. Large dogs live much shorter lives than small dogs. Women tend to live longer than men (height or mass probably isn't the only factor here, but this fits the general pattern so one imagines it helps). Giants -- people well over six feet -- tend to live shorter lives than people of ordinary stature. My grandmother was about five feet with a straight spine. With a curved spine in her early hundreds she was probably less than 4'6", but she was still there. She had about two giant lifetimes. If you stacked her on top of herself you would have one giant (until her ever more flexible spine folded in two).

> but there is no strong evidence that being physically larger has intrinsic benefits outside of physical strength (which is arguably not very important).

Tall people get paid more.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...

Actually remember reading that a number of studies have linked short stature with heart disease. I’m not up-to-date on the latest research on this. But whether shorter or taller you do the best you can with the factors within your control - nutrition, exercise, sleep, etc. Anecdotally two friends’ fathers in elementary school died way prematurely, both quite short of stature.

In the people that use meat’s superior satiety to stay lean, you see lower inflammation, IGF-1, insulin … etc. On a purely meat diet with loads of protein, my IGF-1 was 90, a z-score of -1.

Humans are the longest living land mammals, beat only by whales. The bowhead whale is estimated to live to 200 years. And it's a huge animal.

That's an interesting point. I'm not sure how much genetic overlap we have with whales, but I suspect it's significant. I wonder what allows them to live so long without getting cancer, for example. I can see why they wouldn't get cardiovascular diseases (in humans this seems to be mostly induced by diet and sedentary lifestyle), but it seems likely that there's more to it.

African elephants do pretty well too at 55-60 years in the wild, but a fraction of that in captivity.

You forgot the mating benefit. Taller people have better chances to find mates.

Is this true across all cultures?

I have not of any culture where shorter people are more popular but who knows...

> Large and tall people have more cells, and higher chance of cancer.

I've never looked at it like that. Is it true?

It does appear to be true for humans. Though interestingly there isn't a correlation between species size and cancer risk [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox

Just to clarify:

Across different species, there's no correlation.

Within the same species though, there is correlation.

sadly data seems to indicate so. :-/

https://www.wcrf.org/why-taller-people-are-at-greater-risk-o...

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/taller-people-mor...

that conjecture is famously contradicted by elephants, and it's a topic of research why that is.

No it isn't? Elephants develop cancerous cells at the same rate per cell as every other animal, but have better biological methods of destroying them when those cells do turn cancerous.

Is there a citation for that assertion? It's possible elephants induce apoptosis for aberrant non-cancerous cells, for instance, earlier.

super interesting

> poor record keeping...

If I may posit an idea. It's not that poor record keeping leads to blue zones.

It's that not caring about the trivialities of paper pushing and imaginary rules that current Western governments use to exert their power, helps one live longer.

Now why do guys like you and me know what a land registry is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?

Sometimes people were assuming a parent's name to avoid paying inheritance tax. I remember speculation about the oldest woman in the world may have in fact been her daughter.

Andrei Codrescu had a monologue once, about how the world is in truth peopled by two-thousand year old men who "arrived at their great age with the aid of daily doses of yogurt, cigarettes, vodka, and dubious birth records. ... With the exception of their eyelashes, which reach to the ground, they are in very good shape."

ha, my grandpa said (this would have been mid 1980s) there were 150-year old people living in communes in russia and I asked how they lived so long and he said they ate yogurt. But I think he must have been referring to this: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/09/archives/soviet-centenari...

What does the eyelash bit mean?

To qualify as a “blue zone” they have to have good records.

Now that they know about these places, scientists have spent a fair amount of time studying and publishing about them.

Strange then that i.e.: the Okinawa Blue Zone seems to have been dissolved in modern (record keeping) times.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3362219/

In modern times it dissolved due to diet changes. Looking at the blue zone in California is one of the most enlightening because they can control for so many factors, the records are excellent, and the people seem to be generally open to being studied. There they have found how diet and lifestyle plays a huge role in longevity

In modern (record keeping) times it - might - dissolved due to diet changes.

Nobody disputed that a healthy diet is healthy. And a healthy lifestyle is healthy. Whereby lifestyle is such a broad word that its in fact meaningless.

Maybe the record keeping in Okinawa was correct.

If you look for outliers, you will find outliers.

If you look for correlation, you will find correlation.

Does not mean they are the causation for all the outliers.

So maybe Okinawa just had a lucky streak, which is now over.

The fact that these outliers share similar habits should put your concerns over "extraordinary" factors at bay.

but how many communities exist with the same behaviour/setting/factors configuration but are not an centaurian-outlier.

basic science, do not look for verification, but falsification

Well, record keeping and also an American occupation. From your link: "We believe that current loss of longevity advantage in Okinawa is a result of diet westernization"

Glad to see this up at the top. Here is another article that specifically talks about Sardinia and Okinawa, 2 of the identified "Blue Zones", and really puts it down to poor record keeping: https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-...

On the other hand, we know from other research that physical activity, social engagement, low alcohol consumption, and the Mediterranean diet are all healthy. Can it be just coincidence all 7 blue zones exhibit these things?

Or are there places with a similar diet without a history of longevity?

That's not impossible, but where are the records?

The assumption being that poor longevity records resulted in fake centenarians. But what if it resulted in missed centenarians?

On the flip side and more seriously. From your link: "Officials have found that hundreds of the missing would be at least 150 years old if still alive." That's just silly, Japan celebrates their oldest on a regular basis. The false claims would and are scrutinized, not just by Japan.

The link is from 2010. My point being yes, the absurd claims are investigated and debunked. It's a known problem.

> team of demographers, scientist and anthropologists were able to distill the evidence-based common denominators of these Blue Zones into 9 commonalities that they call the Power 9

Incredibly embarrassing for all involved if your bet is correct. None of them considered that possibility?

They apparently interviewed over 200 centenarians, and visited all the locations.

Another common reason is evading the draft during war due to old age. In my country the region with longest living people is infamous with high corruption rates and general poverty. It also has the highest natal mortality rate which might be a contributing factor too

That's an interesting potential correlation, as I'd guess some percentage of Loma Linda CA are likely to have been "conscientious objectors" like this SDA fellow the movie Hacksaw Ridge was made about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Doss

Loma Linda in California?

Apparently they did a study on this..

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/25/health/longevity-blue-zone-we...

high percentage of vegetarians, active lifestyle, religious folks, etc.

A vegetarian diet contains less Methionine. A low Methionine diet is inversely correlated with lifespan, stature, age at puberty, etc.

How many of these places could be explained by random noise?

And what steps did the study take to make sure the results aren't just random noise?

If these all are warm places, with good nature, away from nonsense of a big city - chances are people will live longer there.

Or (a more positive take), perhaps these are places where the elderly are respected, and youth is not fetishized.

My bet is you didn't gather that one of the blue zones is Loma Linda California.

So the key to living past 100 is either (a) don't drink or smoke, or (b) okay, fine, drink a couple glasses a day, but don't keep good birth records.

The other thing interesting about my family members from the Loma Linda lifestyle is they remained healthy, active, and slim, until their 3-digit expiration dates.

Most were still going on long walks in late 90s, only slowed down by vision degeneration.

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