Never take health tips from oldest people, say scientists
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's quite unintuitive but us mere mortals are not experts in our own health/longevity.
We know our own bodies better than anybody else experimentally speaking, but we don't know shit about how it works for the most part and we know even less how others work.
Unless it's your area of expertise of course, but then I hope you'll avoid spreading unproven advice.
In fact, the unhealthy habits that Farragher says are common among most old people are in fact not common lifelong habits of centenarians, according to Longo.
If Faragher is aware of the contradiction then he should state on what evidence and research he is disputing Longo's findings.
Based on his research, Longo's recommendation is basically:
Eat vegetables, complex carbs and whole grains most of the time, fish ocassionally, meat very rarely unless over 65, and fast some of the time.
Longo in fact claims that these are supported--along with epistmilogical and clinical studies-- by centarian studies which are literally first-hand detailed interviews with 100+ year-old people.
Farragher's incomplete explanation of survivorship bias also seems to have confused other commentators in this thread.
> In fact, the unhealthy habits that Farragher says are common among most old people are in fact not common lifelong habits of centenarians, according to Longo.
I don't know, but this is certainly not the main point of the article.
I suppose you are taking issues with the two following quotes:
> What you see with most centenarians most of the time – and these are generalisations – is that they don’t take much exercise.
That's where he says "most". Do you have a source to contradict this?
> Quite often, their diets are rather unhealthy
Do you have a source to contradict this? Note that "quite often" is not quite precise, and doesn't mean "most".
Anyway, it takes only some centenarians to have unhealthy habits for the point to still stand. When receiving advice from a centenarian, you don't really know that you are not speaking to one of those. I would even argue that it's not even necessary, because as I developed in another reply to you, nobody actually knows what allowed them to live long. They might as well have some specific genes allowing them to do all sorts of things that would be unhealthy for many people but that have no serious consequences for them.
>Do you have a source to contradict this?
My claim, as I hoped was fairly clear in my comment, was that Valter Longo, an expert with similar crendentials presumably, presents a contradicting view to the source being cited in the article. As I stated in my comment, Longo claims that the healthy diet he prescribes is supported by centenarian studies -- ie supported by interviews with very old people about their diets and way of living. Now if you want me to literally cite Longo's work in detail despite your lack of citations supporting Farragher's position, I only can at the moment point you to Longo's book: The Longevity Diet. I am recalling all this from memory, so I apologize for not providing word-for-word citations. I can only remind you have not done so as well.
>I don't understand how your comment answers mine
Your comment had this phrase:
>Unless it's your area of expertise of course, but then I hope you'll avoid spreading unproven advice.
I was pointing to the irony that the expert quoted in the article was possibly saying something that was itself disputed by other experts in his field.
In fact just a few hours ago, someone shared this article on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353957
The claim in this article is that many of those old people with bad health habits were most likely frauds, and that experts who relied on government statistics, and who didn't bother talking to these people and checking whether these people were actually alive, came to the wrong conclusion. It well be that Longo's research is also affected, but the Farragher quote cited in the article matches the supposed bad habits attributed to those fraudulent (?) Blue Zone inhabitants.
moral of the story: before jumping on an expert's bandwagon, check with other experts.*
No problem with this. To be clear it wasn't a reproach. The name of a book is already something.
> I can only remind you have not done so as well.
Sure, but I don't think I stated much, so I have not much to source.
> Longo claims that the healthy diet he prescribes is supported by centenarian studies -- ie supported by interviews with very old people about their diets and way of living
But that's fine. From what you say he studied his stuff, and yes, one can do that by conducting interviews. Just not from one single random person or a few random people. You take a larger sample, control for biases, all that jazz.
I think I've just understood our main source of disagreement. It seems you took Farragher's position of not taking advice from old people as meaning you can't learn from them, full stop. To me, it means "given one random old person giving health advice, you can't take the advice". I've certainly seen videos of old people with what seemed terrible advice or habits so those statements in the article didn't make me blink for a second.
But if you conduct research and this research includes interviewing a sample of old people, that's very different. I even think you probably can't avoid interviewing a statistically significant sample of people (including some who "made it" to a century) to conduct such research.
> the Farragher quote cited in the article matches the supposed bad habits attributed to those fraudulent (?) Blue Zone inhabitants
I don't think so, and this seems to be the second source of our disagreements. The Guardian link you give says that Blue Zone inhabitants don't seek exercise specifically, because they, in fact, live in a way that naturally exercises their body:
> Remarkably inactive. They didn’t tend to be heavy exercisers, or even to exercise at all. Instead, these people tended to garden, knead dough, and use tools, because movement was a part of their daily lives rather than something they sought out.
This is a very weird way of presenting things by the way. Gardening, kneading dough and using tools are totally physical exercise and the contrary of being "inactive". If you garden all day it doesn't matter one bit that you don't do your biweekly jogging. So the quote from Farragher and this description agree: those people apparently live long because they do indeed physically exercise a lot. The healthy diet is also there:
> Plant-based. Apparently 95% of 100-year-olds eat only plant-based diets, with a heavy emphasis on being bean-based. It never was clarified if this is why they lived so long or a consequence of being so old, but that’s neither here nor there.
I will refrain from commenting that too much, being highly biased here. My diet is plant-based with a healthy amount of beans, so of course it pleases me to read this. Note the "never clarified" warning though.
Now, again: them leaving a long live doesn't mean that everything they do works toward this matter of fact. They are not gods. The bit about wine for instance seems a bit shady to me, scientific results tends to tell that "No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health" [1]. It could very well be that those people would live even longer without the wine. Or not. We don't know everything of course.
[1] https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
Diet, exercise and good sleep, keys to longevity.
Popping pills key to early death.
Authority figure mad about someone ignoring their authority, is so old, it's stuff for fairy tales.
How about science podcasters advertising supplements?
So simple. Why didn't I think of this earlier
Branyas believed her longevity stemmed from “order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity and staying away from toxic people”
Sounds like solid advice to me.
[scientist] Sinclair said [..] improvements in vaccines for flu and shingles, statins, and other medications would help increase life expectancy among older people. [...] he said governments also needed to take action to help individuals to make healthier choices.
Sorry, I think I prefer the advice from the old person.
You can't take advice from old people on how to live old because they don't know themselves how they managed it. And there's the survivor bias. And that would be anecdotal.
Only the scientific method and solid studies can give us insight on what makes us live longer.
Advice you quoted seems harmless, and is seducing, but we don't know if this is what allowed this long life. Her advice tends towards avoiding stress and we know that stress is to be avoided, so that might (and probably is) good advice, but we know that from scientific studies and you will need to adapt the advice to you, taking in account what stresses you and what relaxes you.
Some old people have been drinking a glass of wine a day or smoking a lot and that somehow didn't kill them, they might even believe that it helped them stay alive longer, and there's probably even some truth in this because they might have enjoyed it and we also know that being happier helps you live longer, but that might still be terrible advice that has all the chances to harm you. It might have even harmed them, maybe they would live even longer without the smoking and the drinking.
Everybody is different and some good advice for one person might not apply to another. An old person might know what's good for them, but that may not apply to you. Only solid scientific studies will help us know what tends to work for many/most people.
I disagree. You can definitely look at oldest people and ask them how they're different from their peers who died younger. You will get examples of choices that they made which lead to their longevity. Maybe they ate better, exercised better, slept more, didn't sweat the small stuff... or maybe they chose to get every single available vaccine to ensure against illness. Of course, they may also have "better" genes.
> there's the survivor bias
Well, yeah. Many people want to live "longer" - as in out survive everyone else.
> Of course, they may also have "better" genes.
That's part of the issue: they might have something different from you such that their advice may not apply to you. And since they have an exceptionally long life, they might not be like the majority. But you are likely to be like the majority (you probably don't know yet. If you knew you might not even need advice in the first place).
But we don't hear much about stuff to avoid from people who died younger. Not that those people also know about a number of data point of 1 anyway. That's why we need rigorous studies.
Isn't that precisely the reason why you would want to ask old people, because the survivor bias has eliminated people with habits that were not conducive to a long life?
Quoting Wikipedia [1]
> Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not.
For example, you'll hear the advice from the 1% of people who survived drinking every day and who might even think it was good for them, and not the warning from the 99% for whom it didn't work, or worse, who died from it. Unfortunately, you are 99% more likely to be like these 99% than like that 1%. (Numbers totally made up).
Intuition gets in the way with this kind of stuff. It's all too easy to be willing to take advice from old people who appear wise to us for all sorts of cultural reasons, but they are most probably not experts in this stuff and they actually most likeky really don't know better. They have a number of data point equal to 1. Our intuition makes it quite hard to understand this, even for people with scientific / statistics background, but all this stuff we know from this background doesn't stop applying when it comes to old people.
It doesn't mean it's not enjoyable or interesting to get an old person's view on this, but one should not forget to apply critical thinking.
Let's use an example to understand.
Let's say that 30% of the population fifty years ago drank and smoked, and 10% did neither. Say that if you drink and smoked, then your chances of living to a hundred years is 1%, but if you do neither then it is 10%.
In that scenario, how likely is it that when you ask a centenarian they will be drinkers and smokers vs abstaining from both? How does it compare to the general population? Would you live longer than the general population by following the advice of the centenarians?
Does it make sense now?
I don't know but it doesn't matter. How do you know if you are speaking to the right person? And in any case, random old people will have a datapoint of one: themselves. If you need information, take it from good studies, controlled for bias and all that. Any opinion from a single person is worthless as an advice.
Even an educated guess isn't good enough. Nobody actually knows why they're having a long life. If I eat vegetables, sleep well and exercise all my life and have a long life, I won't know if it actually helped and if I wouldn't have lived long without those things. Because I didn't try this alternative life. I can only assume it helped from studies we did on large numbers of people. Only data from a big population will help us find correlation, possibly causality (if not confounding factors).
>Would you live longer than the general population by following the advice of the centenarians?
You used a plural here. That's possible, for a significant number of centenarians, if you control for biases and memory failures. But that's what a scientific study is.
Anyway, take care. I hope that the next time somebody takes the effort to help you understand something you will be more willing to learn.
I disagree with you. It's not a question of I need to understand. It's a question of I need to be convinced you are right, which I'm not, I know what you want to say with your math but it has not changed this.
You wanted to make me say that in your example, it's unlikely one will meet an old person with bad advice, and then that this advice won't matter too much anyway, but your numbers are made up and even if they were correct, this would still barely change my mind. So, yeah, I took a shortcut because whatever the result, this would change nothing. What's more, if you want to make a point, don't make me compute, especially if you already did the computation. I don't see the point of it. I'm not at school answering to a teacher.
Moreover, if your point is that following advice from old people doesn't change things much, then what's the point of arguing for listening to old people's advice and how does it change the fact that it's bad or good advice?
Take care too.
My comparison would be: An 100+ old person says the key to their longetivity was walking a little bit every day. Then he falls on one of his walks and dies. Someone says it's ridiculous encouraging old people to walk because their bones are brittle and one fall could kill them. But all the people that were lifelong couch potatoes are already dead. ie -- wrong conclusion, old guy happened to be closer to the truth in this case.
How do you know the advice to walk from the old person is correct? Because we have studies that conclude walking everyday is good for the health and using the bones actually strengthens them (probably with caveats, where specific people in specific situations should actually not do this for some reasons), etc.
You don't know from n=1.
Sounds like pretty generic advice that I've heard from older people...basically all my life. Maybe there's some underlying truth that creates the commonality, but for the most part this is about on par with "Don't do stuff that will kill you" which is vapid and useless.
[0] See e.g. https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/69/Suppl_... for a bit of an overview
I see it as almost equivalent to saying that the key to your long-livedness was that you ate food and drank liquids. No shit sherlock, you'd have been dead a long time ago if you never ate any food or drank any liquids.
It's more like saying your longevity was because you ate lots of vegetables and walked to work every day. That is a real factor of longevity. Whether it's "good" advice is a matter of perspective, because everyone already knows they should eat vegetables and exercise and the advice won't change many people's habits, just like everyone already knows they should quit their shitty job and go to sleep at 10:30pm, but both pieces of advice are certainly actionable.