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.

Just to clarify:

Across different species, there's no correlation.

Within the same species though, there is correlation.

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."

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.

[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'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.

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.

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

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.

Is this true across all cultures?

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).

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

super interesting