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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

My maternal grandparents are in their mid 90s and we know that to be true, because aside from the church records, they both have decent memories of the time before WW2 and the event itself. Oddly specific things at that, like prices of goods and salaries from the time.

Also grandpa has 7 siblings, with his older sister already being 100. Interestingly their own parents didn't live nearly that long.

My paternal grandmother on the other hand died one week before turning 97 and only after that it was revealed that she actually lied about her age, claiming to be six years younger, so as to not cause a scandal when my grandparents announced their marriage.

The common theme among them is that they are/were all active working manually and would neither drink nor smoke, but that's no revelation.

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As I watch people around me reach their senior years, it increasingly seems like life is "use it or lose it" with your body and brain function. If you really want to extend your "healthspan" it seems the correct solution is to do full-body work-outs a lot, eat a really clean diet, avoid drugs, and keep using your brain actively into your 80's and 90's.

Well yes, but you need to be smart about it, just like about everything else in life. People read full body workout and start some super intense training regimen which for some may be great, and for others it may be too much. Instead its more like some gardening efforts - every day a bit, not too much. My late grandparents are an example - obviously no smoking and absolute minimum alcohol and 0 other drugs ever, regular good sleep, and garden (plus a bit of nature which was just walks or foraging mushrooms).

Understanding how body degenerates with age and injuries, especially joints and connective tissue. Workouts great for 20 years old are sometimes pretty bad for 40+. Don't stress heart too much, just enough, for long periods.

Plenty of weightlifters who have messed up their shoulders, spines, knees etc. although at their peak they lifted impressive weights and looked accordingly. Guess what, this adds 0 in longevity, whatever effect was there is 100% gone in 5-10 years from all tissues and bones as cells fully renew, and messing up core of your movement can easily negatively impair lifespan.

It does appear from my anecdata that large amounts of mild exercise actually seem to be better, like yoga, golf, mild hikes, or yard work/gardening. Manual labor of various kinds fits this pattern, too.

> If you really want to extend your "healthspan" it seems the correct solution is to do full-body work-outs a lot, eat a really clean diet, avoid drugs, and keep using your brain actively into your 80's and 90's.

All of the folks in my family who lives to their late 90s with a long “healthspan” drank or smoked excessively. The generation after them, their children, who did are either dead or on their way to an early grave.

I haven’t really been able to figure that one out.

I'll give you my theory: Modern processed foods.

One possibility is survivorship bias. You never met the smokers and heavy drinkers from the first generation who died young, but you did meet those who got lucky on their dice rolls. In the generation after them you knew both groups and the actual survivorship ratios become more apparent.

Other aspects of our modern environment are probably playing a role, too, of course.

Blame stress

Yes, the alcoholic from their 20s to 80s (approx 1/2 a plastic bottle of vodka a day) was one of the least stressed people in the family. They were also the healthiest in their 90s compared to the smokers.

I wonder if the standards for “drinking excessively” could have changed over time, or the way we drink could have changed? Or possibly, say, people in the silent generation (just for example) might have mostly just had alcohol and cigarettes, while those in the boomer and gen-x generation might have also had a higher chance to find their way to party drugs.

Just a hypothetical of course, I obviously know nothing at all about your family!

Several of my friends who died in COVID heart attacks were super fit and very careful with eating. One was a pretty militant vegan. Yet they died in their 40s and 50s.

Veganism is awful for you.

you can be careful with eating (vegan) while not eating healthy at all as it’s mostly ideology

Eating vegan isn't usually very healthy. Easy to be deficient in a lot of things. Easy to lack the right macro and micronutrient balance.

It would be the same as only eating meat - human bodies are adopted to eat omnivorously, so deviating from that is more likely to lead to some ill outcome.

selection bias. also survival of the fittest.

There's an enormous amount of dumb luck in lifespan.

We generally think in terms of life expectancy, but that's only really useful on a population level. On an individual level, it's much more useful to think about the probability of dying - you aren't running down a clock, you're constantly rolling cosmic dice to see whether you get hit by a semi truck or develop pancreatic cancer.

Before the age of 40, you've got less than a 1% chance of dying in any given year. By 60 that probability increases to about 5% and by 80 to about 25%. Some young people will just have rotten luck and roll 1 on a d100, while some people will repeatedly roll a d4 and manage to dodge the 1. Obviously those probabilities are highly modifiable by many factors, but some people will get unreasonably lucky or miserably unlucky regardless of the underlying probabilities.

While I agree with the dice concept I believe general health has a lot to with what die you use to make your roll.

A major component of that for my grandparents is that they live four floors up without an elevator.

Interestingly, their next door neighbour is also still among us and the general pattern was that people in that block would start passing away starting from the lowest floors.

It's a small thing, but I can see how it works - living on the third floor I see that my joints are better lubricated than back when I was living on the ground floor, so taking long walks is also no issue.

With respect to four floor walkup, by this logic, excepting other factors which might negate it, you would expect there to be a preponderance of exceptionally aged people in New York.

It appears that living in New York shortens your lifespan quite significantly (possibly due to air pollution). Income-adjusted, New Yorkers die a few years too young, and there is a higher incidence of cancer than other places.

https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/vs/2015sum.pdf

Too many BECs?

That document doesn’t seem to compare things to national rates, but to my knowledge the NYC life expectancy is above NY state’s, which itself is significantly above the national average. The densest parts of Manhattan, which also have some of the most air pollution (but high incomes) have the highest life expectancies.

With a brief googling it looks like cancer incidence is in line with national averages, but mortality is lower. Significant racial and socioeconomic disparities impact both averages.

When you adjust for income, NYC does pretty poorly. Non-income-adjusted, one of the richest places on the planet is in line with its surroundings, yes.

Your source doesn't support that (no comparison with other places), and other sources don't seem to back it up. See the "Local Life Expectancies by Income" chart here: https://www.healthinequality.org/. It seems generally that high income people have comparable life expectancies across the country, whereas there is much higher variability among lower incomes.

Not if the benefits of stairs are outweighed by the dangers of pollution (both air and noise).

The first thing to come to my mind is water flows down and mold/mildew would be more present in lower floors. Air pollution is a killer.

These aging stories are like a Rorschach test for whatever “science” a person already believes in.

Can you go into more details on what you are trying to point out here? I am not sure what stories you are referring to, nor do I fully understand the rest of your sentence.

People see some stupid anecdote and then share the theory that fits whatever they believe to be true no matter how nonsensical it is.

If I told you the people on the north side of my grandma’s nursing home died before the people who lived on the south side, you’d have some theory about sunlight exposure and excessive mold growth on the north side of the building. Air pollution kills!

But then it turns out the north side is just where they put the sicker people.

I see. You dislike anecdotes and conjecture in general or just in this circumstance?

I don’t dislike them, I think it’s really funny.

> the general pattern was that people in that block would start passing away starting from the lowest floors

For your theory to believably explain this, wouldn't everybody have to be the same age to start off with on all the floors? Which seems improbable?

The Principle of Charity would suggest that the grandparent comment was not trying to control for age differences, but was sharing an anecdote that many folks in the grandparent’s neighborhood were of similar age, leading to a hypothesis, and draw what conclusions you will.

I interpreted that to mean, walk more floors, get more exercise, live longer, which aligns with conventional scientific wisdom.

That's an interesting principle* and I totally get it, but I'm not 100% sure it applies here?

This is a comment section on an article about scientific data quality, and I'm pointing out a potentially confounding issue with the anecdata? Another valid challenge would be "wouldn't people with more health issues choose to live on lower floors, and logically be expected to pass away sooner?"

It's possible I've been reading too many Data Colada posts, but I saw the OP got back to me with a plausible explanation that enriched my worldview, so I'm going to take it that the OP didn't find offense in my response.

* One immediate problem I see with that principle is that it can quickly become circular. For example, an easy criticism of anybody attempting to reference it, as you did here, is to ask: did you apply the principle to my comment? And in turn, you could say the same of mine!

Funny you should say that, because it was indeed a whole district built from scratch by communists after the war to house people working in the local steelmill and indeed everyone there was initially roughly the same age.

In that case - interesting!

> A major component of that for my grandparents is that they live four floors up without an elevator.

I would love to see a study on the effects of taking the stairs on expected life span!

It seems such a small thing but the health benefits likely add up.

Hong Kong would be an excellent place to do such a study!

My grandmother would walk 4-5 miles to visit us, well into her 80s, and the route included a rather substantial hill. She lived into her 90s.

Similarly, my grandfather was docker, and then a very active gardener walking to his allotment a few times day, a good few miles round-trip, and lived into his 90s as well.

They were all what might be 'underweight' by the BMI measurements these days. War diets, perhaps, but they were both healthy and fit. Not sure I buy the restricted diet idea for longevity though.

> do full-body work-outs a lot, eat a really clean diet, avoid drugs

Could it be that older people were less likely to be able to avoid physical work (even their chores were far more of a workout), were relatively more religious and conservative than current generations, and grew up with fewer processed foods and more home cooking by stay-at-home moms? What I mean by this is are you just describing people who were born in the 1930s? The fact that the ones that are left are mostly typical would be expected.

> keep using your brain actively into your 80's and 90's.

This could be seen as a symptom of aging well, rather than a cause. People whose brains don't work well aren't studied as examples of aging well.

The person I know who most fits this description is my dad, he had a swimmer's body in his 60s, worked out every morning since high school, has kept a dead center BMI his entire life, has never done a drug and probably only had a sip or two of beer, always had a gym guy diet that has gradually become more vegan, and was a math major and computer programmer, plays chess etc..

He's totally falling apart in his late 70s and becoming very frail. Seems like he's having nerve and neurological issues, and having problems with his connective tissue and with arthritis in his hands and knees. I don't know how you eat, work out, and think yourself into avoiding that. Half of his joint problems are caused from having been athletic, just like my super-athletic Army grandpa, whose knees would bend backwards for the last years of his life from football when he was young.

Protestantism isn't a law of nature. You aren't automatically rewarded for sacrifice and suffering, at least while you're alive.

It's always funny how people are eager to cite the good examples in their life, but totally forget the family that died early.

Just walk into any sort of care facility for the elderly to understand that bias.

If more people did this maybe everyone could tone it down a bit and go back to, “we don’t quite yet know” rather than having every one of these threads filled with “survivorship bias!!” nonsense.

People mistake probability for certainty too readily. If you show me someone who is 400 lbs at 29 and someone who is 150 lbs at the same age, I would take an even-odds bet on the 150 lb person dying later. I think you would, too. I could be wrong, and there's a lot of uncertainty there, but that doesn't mean that there's absolutely no link between health and lifespan.

Of course there is, but there's a huge amount of noise too. Signal below the noise floor can't be eyeballed.

Now that I have the opportunity, note how I omitted my paternal grandfather.

He was a surgeon and died aged 59. Kidney failure was the direct cause IIRC, but in reality a career of stressful overwork.

They named one particularly short street in one small city after him in honour of his achievements in setting up healthcare infrastructure directly after WW2.

> What I mean by this is are you just describing people who were born in the 1930s? The fact that the ones that are left are mostly typical would be expected.

People born in the 1930's were 30 in the 1960's, and if you think that means a lot of religious/social conservatism, you probably don't know much about American history. Most of these people adopted more conservative ideals later in life, which happens to literally every generation.

By the way, it sounds like the people who you are talking about have a history of very much overworking their bodies to the point of injury, and that is also pretty clearly bad for you. I don't think you are guaranteed to live a long time if you take care of yourself, but I think it's pretty clearly true that you will maximize your chances if you do.

> Protestantism isn't a law of nature. You aren't automatically rewarded for sacrifice and suffering, at least while you're alive.

The happiest and healthiest 90-year-old I know does 2 hours a day of work meticulously maintaining his trees and eats whatever he wants. He happens to want healthy things, though, and enjoys the trees. You don't have to suffer to be healthy.

Cocaine is a cardiovascular workout in of itself.

Oh wow, finally an exercise regimen for us lazy people!

Very true. My paternal grandfather lived well into his nineties, even as a smoker, as he was very active well into his 80s. Even when he touched 90, he could still pretty much walk around in his forest land to explore his property.

On the other hand, my paternal grandmother had a severe sweet tooth, and passed away from a heart condition. Her diabetes kept her very inactive for the most part, but even at 80, she could do a LOT of activities independently with little help. Passed away at 84.

My maternal grandfather was very active in his 70s, but he became sedentary and reclusive (partly because of my caretaker uncle who is an asshole, coupled with messy infamily fighting). Passed away at 82, after his second(!) heart attack.

My maternal grandmother is still alive and kicking ass, travelling the world over. Again, asshole uncle causes her a lot of tension , but her daughters have tried to keep her separated from him, so stress levels are low. For the record, she could travel from India to the US alone at her age.

Use it or lose it.

Does their activity support healthiness, or does their healthiness support activity?

Re: using your brain -- I've noticed that a lot of well-known US television news commentators seem to work in some capacity and be sharp well into their 80's. It seems like the fact that they are constantly plugged into current events keeps them going.

Another common theme I would add is that they didn't have a fatal accident. If you are unlucky you can live as healthy as you want and not have any genes that make you more likely to have a specific disease and still die young. :/

Sounds like the Howard Families

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

Great anecdata!

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