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 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.
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.
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?
I interpreted that to mean, walk more floors, get more exercise, live longer, which aligns with conventional scientific wisdom.
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!
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.
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.
Other aspects of our modern environment are probably playing a role, too, of course.
Just a hypothetical of course, I obviously know nothing at all about your family!
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.
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.
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.
Just walk into any sort of care facility for the elderly to understand that bias.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.