New research says "blue zones" can be explained by flawed data

This is a big thing that I didn't seen in the paper this article is based on. It seemed like the author was comparing adjusted numbers from the blue zone with unadjusted numbers from non-blue zones. Without comprehensive investigation of error rates and even different error mechanisms by locale, it seems like a poor comparison to make. Comparing life expectancies is better than comparing outlier centarian numbers, but you are right that it depends on what other areas we are using as the baseline or average (and I take it a step farther by saying it depends on what error adjustments need to be made to both data sets).

The whole blue zone idea is a bit misapplied though. These population studies find new variables to look at. Then you have targeted studies to investigate thos variables. Discrediting the centarian numbers doesn't discredit the findings on stuff like a mederteranian diet having better health outcomes than the standard western diet, etc.

You are, of course, free to speculate that there are other issues related to longevity than those considered in the study in question, but even if these suppositions are correct, in no way would this justify saying the paper being discussed here misses the point. The point is that the blue zones study is too flawed to support any definite position, which includes both its own conclusions and the more nuanced issues about which you speculate.

- There's strong incentives to misreport in these areas (the compelling example from Sardinia was that the person is alive for the purposes of pension fraud, but really dead)

- People who are incentivized to report people being older than they are will do so

And the inductive case relies on data, which is presumed to be totally flawed because of the misaligned incentives.

Of course they would say that. But if these zones are simultaneously recording births better and reducing welfare fraud, and if 80%+ of the centenarians either had no birth certificate or were actually dead, I'm going to need more than "but they're also changing lifestyles" as an explanation.

We're talking here about unusually long life, not just "he's still going strong at 85" long. No one here is arguing that people who are active and eat right don't have a longer healthspan, but that's a concept that's provable without the so-called Blue Zones.

This presupposes that the previous generation was in fact living longer, which the linked study showed is not the case at all.

We know we need certain essential nutrients to prevent deficiencies, an energy intake surplus causes weight gain, and a few substances like trans fat are problematic. Beyond that, people seem to be making claims and recommendations not backed by hard evidence and frequently confuse correlation with causation.

Ozempic exists because Americans are addicted to hypercaloric hyper delicious "food" that was engineered by the big tobacco companies that used their excess cash to buy food companies in the 80's. They then applied their research on making tobacco addictive to make food addictive.

Modern American food is literally the new tobacco.

Ozempic disrupts hunger signals. Fiber does that to a certain extent ("increases feelings of satiety"). I haven't seen anything about probiotics doing that, but I think probiotics are bunk and tend not to read about them.

That's my point -- the region's average lifespan is irrelevant. It's only relevant given the misconception that Loma Linda itself has some special properties of rejuvenation.

But that doesn't mean it's not a longevity hotspot. Even if the average lifespan there were lower than normal -- say a large number of unhealthy people lived there -- it still wouldn't negate that, if an abnormally high number of healthy centenarians also live there.

> This claim is hard to reconcile with the CDC's official numbers which show a typical life expectancy for the entire area

Buettner's focus was on the outliers. Loma Linda is a longevity hotspot, and the question is why.

He found the long-living outliers practiced certain behaviors that they associated with Adventism, like vegetarianism.

Not all Adventists practice those behaviors. About half of Adventists eat meat, for example.

But the long-living outliers were Adventist and practiced the behaviors that he highlighted. So that was his takeaway.

> A slice of carrot looks much like the pupil, iris, and radiating lines of the human eye. Of course, science has demonstrated that carrots improve eye function.

Seriously?

The glass of wine recommendation has had many studies done and the results are conflicting.

The eating guidelines like heavy in plants, mederteranian, eating to 80% full all have multiple studies showing benefits over the typical western diet and especially the typical American diet. It's a no brainer that if you want to live a long life you have a better chance of doing that if you have a reduced risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, etc.

> Advancing age is the most important risk factor for cancer overall and for many individual cancer types. The incidence rates for cancer overall climb steadily as age increases, from fewer than 25 cases per 100,000 people in age groups under age 20, to about 350 per 100,000 people among those aged 45–49, to more than 1,000 per 100,000 people in age groups 60 years and older.

[0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...

Some of them do, but those are filtered to the most healthy if the lot. It's not really surprising that if you lose the sickly ones while they're infants the ones who make it to adulthood are less likely to get sick.

This is further confounded when you have generations that have lived longer, as we do in the first world, because now not only do the sickly ones live long enough to get modern diseases, they also live long enough to reproduce and pass on the previously-non-viable genes. So generation after generation gets added that would never have survived without modern medicine.

I consider it to be a good thing that we can optimize our evolution for different traits now besides raw survivability, but it does mean that we should expect our disease numbers to be higher.

Except the Amish have access to modern medicine and there are modern studies investigating their population level disease rates.

I didn't see that claim in the article. What I did see is that the data on centarians was shown to be invalid. It's certainly possible that the overall life expectancy stats could be distorted. In most cases (excluding Okinawa), I doubt that the mistakes or fraud are that rampant. The problem with the blue zone studies is that they explicitly focused on outliers from the beginning. Any mistakes or fraud become a big impact in a small population like that. If you use population level life expectancy, the impact should become much smaller, or at the very least any systemic fraud and mistakes should become readily visible and be able to be corrected in the numbers if further studies are done to measure it.

The article is very emotional and seems to mischaracterize some things, such as claiming that every blue zone must fit each piece of the suggestions. The idea of drinking every day is probably not a good suggestion as there is some research contesting the benefits of a glass of wine a day. But let's take Okinawa as an example. It's uncontested that the records have problems, it's trending in the wrong direction (younger generations, probably better records), and it doesn't fit all the practices (eg religion). But does this invalidate the longevity recommendation of eating to 80% full that comes out of the blue zone recommendation? No. There are independent studies showing the benefits of this practice to reduce cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, and obesity.

So even if the blue zone centarian data is wrong (it is), that doesn't say anything about the suggested practices. Those have always needed their own studies to validate the suggested practices anyways. Fot example, there are numerous studies on the mederteranian diet that shows it is beneficial compared to a typical western diet and especially compared to the typical American diet.

I think maybe you moved the goalposts here.