Related, perhaps?
The secret to living to 110? Bad record-keeping, says Ig Nobel Prize winner.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2024/12/25/lifestyle/lifes...
The secret to living to 110? Bad record-keeping, says Ig Nobel Prize winner.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2024/12/25/lifestyle/lifes...
That, but also various factors during one's life - most importantly, ample and healthy food (especially during fetal growth, childhood and youth), a lack of exposure to known damaging factors for physical and mental health (smog, noise, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs), and a lack of wars and other forms of violence.
The top killers in the Western world are cardiovascular diseases (strongly linked to food) and cancers (strongly linked, again, to food but also to drugs). A safe working culture (both in business and in private) is also a good thing to have - the typical lackluster attitude towards workplace safety is a top cause of workplace accidents both fatal and non-fatal but serious.
I can tell you very easily why Japanese live longer than Americans, since I have spent abundant time in Japan.
It is unreal how much a good diet and walking everyday will change your entire life.
Car culture makes Americans fat and lazy. 40% of US adults are obese. 80% are overweight.
Walking and good food, yeah, that helps. But trains introduce short sprints into everyday life. It starts with "He's too late, he's never gonna catch it... well I'll be damned, he did it." and pretty soon, you're saying "We can catch it, just run!" Everyone on the train has a shopping bag, because trains don't have huge trunks like a car. You want groceries? Carry it. Good exercise. Trains also remove the road rage from your life, the daily stress of defensive driving in a fast moving freeway full of other angry drivers. Trains eliminate the premature death caused by road accidents which not only lower life expectancy directly, but indirectly as bread winners are taken from families. The car exhaust is gone too. Trains reshape how towns are built, with higher density and less parking. More walking! Everything mushrooms out from the decision to travel with trains. It's little wonder why Japan has the lowest obesity rate in the world.
If you'd like a more direct comparison to Japan, try Hong Kong, another place where I have spent a fair amount of time riding the trains. They also have world leading life expectancy.
The Japanese retirement attitude is "I've worked my ass off all my life. Contributing to the society all my life. Finally I have some time to spend on my hobbies! I should be active!" and they pick up quite active hobbies: if you go hiking mountains you'll see many old retired people with serious gears. Also still trains.
Contrast it to ime, western retirement which is more "finally I can relax" and people become sedentary. Hanging around in parks, cafe, or focus more on socializing and diet. And starts to rely more on cars and other senior services.
My father spends all day watching football or horses and has visibly started going senile.
This is apparently weird even to Chinese people; an image of ramen with rice and roast dumplings on sides amounts to a ragebait to them(as well as to experts in cardiovascular systems), while it's nothing more than a common lunch menu to students and young workers in Japan.
But I digress - my point is, the real traditional Japanese meal is more like half a football worth of rice with vegetable flavored salt, quite unlike idealized modern interpretations thereof.
It is true that rice was always the prestige food consumed by the upper classes, and the peasantry ate rice too, but it was only one of the five staples (gokoku) and was often extended with other grains (mugigohan etc).
In contrast, people in East Asia started cultivating rice 9,000 years ago, and modern Japanese are probably mostly descended from these early rice farmers (who started out in China, then spread to Korea and then Japan) with a substantial contribution from another population called Jomon, which were already in Japan when the heavily-rice-dependent people started to arrive in Japan about 2,300 years ago and who lived mostly by hunting and gathering.
This is relevant because some people here are advocating for everyone to adopt a Japanese-like diet, which might not turn out so well for you unless most your ancestors have 8,000 or 9,000 years of experience getting most of their calories from grains.
This parallels China, where the warm, wet south is rice country but the colder, drier north grows other grains. The five grains (gokoku) idea is itself originally Chinese:
Ancel Keys and his work on diet and longevity is pertinent to this article. He discovered that the people that lived the longest had a low saturated fat plant-based diet. This was to be found in the 'blue zones' around the world. This does not mean exclusively vegan, but getting that way.
Keys had to make some recommendations to the U.S. government and he went for the Mediterranean Diet rather than what they were eating in Okinawa. This was because the Second World War was fresh in people's memories at the time and telling Americans to eat like Japanese people was not going to be well-received advice at the time.
The Japanese diet has changed since the post-war years with the processed foods, animal products and saturated fats rather than what you might call a peasant diet. It is also the same with the Mediterranean Diet, which is not 'pizza, pasta, red wine and meat from imprisoned animals'.
Also important is that most Japanese live in walkable neighbourhoods. Japan is a cycling nation so cycling happens too, not this lycra + polystyrene hat cycling from the parking lot and back to the parking lot that passes for cycling in the West, but everyday cycling on bicycles that are designed for comfort and getting about in regular clothes.
We all like our fat, sugar, salt and motor cars, however, those that were deprived from these joys due to war do well in the longevity stakes.
In Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal he mentions that research shows that long life is not particularly heritable.
While longer lives may not be directly inheritable, shorter lives absolutely can be, good genetics does play a role to living long .
Seems like something similar could still be a problem here, although it seems less likely since the number here is significantly less than article I've linked.
Were you there when they were born, so that you can verify their true age?
On my mother's side, I was a little boy when I met my great-great grandmother who was already 90, and witnessed her living to, guess what, nearing that other age mentioned. And, again, there are records and photos going way back to when she was born.
At an old people's home nearby I got to know a gentleman for some years, he died this year at 99. Again there are records in numerous places documenting his age and where and when he was born (and he grew up nearby my grandfather's place). And at that same old people's home there's a vital lady who's 105, and, again, unless you believe all public documents and church records are fake, she's as real as it gets. She has a daughter who visits, she's in her seventies. That daughter has children of her own, and her children also have children.
It's when you get to all the 115-120 year olds in remote regions you start to see the fakes. And it's not difficult to spot when you look, the statistics are all skewed - unlike in places like most of Japan, just to get back to the original story.
My grandmother never knew her birthday, or her birth year. We just estimated, even though she was very much real.
Meanwhile he has an older sister who, while bedridden, is very much alive at 100.
I suppose the necessary medical breakthroughs happened in the second half of the 20th century, as no one, including the people in question, anticipated they would live this long. Grandma even stated in her will that my second oldest cousin would inherit the apartment - supposedly to have "a better start in life when she grows up". That was 30 years ago and my cousin's oldest child should be in high school now right now.
Is this some kind of new math? 100 and 110 are within 10% of each other, which seems very much in the same ballpark to me.
Ie if you live to 100, you do not have 10% chance of living to 110.
Eg this study says:
"Three percent of females and 1% of males in the 2019 birth cohort, given age-specific mortality rates in that year, are projected to survive to 100 years old. Only 0.4% of females and 0.09% of males will survive to 105 years which is 10 times rarer than survival to 100. Survival to 110 years is 150 times rarer for females and 333 times rarer for males (0.02% for females, 0.003% for males) than living to 100. "
2^10 = three orders of magnitude difference in survival
Obligatory mention of how genetics and early nurture and environment cannot be separated in research: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/looking-in-the-cultu...
In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, England, and France, which have more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by poverty, low per capita incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, fewer 90+ year olds, and residence in remote, overseas, and colonial territories. In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age. Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
For example, Costa Rica, 42% of the centenarians in Costa Rica turned out to be lying about their age after the study was conducted. And once you corrected those errors, they went from world leading to, quote, near the bottom of the pack, in terms of late life expectancy. And so the question I have for those researchers is how do you explain that, for example, 82% of Japanese centenarians were missing or dead in your sample? And this wasn't discovered by demographers. This was discovered by the government of Japan.
[1] https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/09/25/the-secret-to-a-l...
While there are a few people who seemed to be nearly immortal, as in "being around since forever", like the Queen Of England or recently deceased https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Iliescu ... they didn't actually push past 100.
With all the care and life standard, seems to be a hard limit in our genes, so until something is done about that, better get realistic expectations.
He smoked only during WW2, was an army corp of engineers colonel when he retired from the military, came from a dirt farm in Michigan, engineered all kinds of civil and military projects. In the end, he still managed to engineer a smile. He absolutely loved maps/atlases/GIS.
I knew a woman that had 101 years when she died. She was vital until 99 or so, not even wearing glasses. She had a very hard life, including the fact that both her husband, only son died. So, I guess, luck is out of question for this case.
Its anybodies guess why she was living that long. Genetics for sure do not exist in vacuum and environment may activate or do nothing to your genes. You can also brute force specific genetic dissorders by taking copious amounts of vitamins.
People do live past 100.
Look at a chart of how old people are when they die and you’ll see a consistent distribution with a downward curve. There really are people in the tail of that curve.
There is no hard cutoff in the body that can precisely track time passed over 36,500 days and then shut it all down.
Many others lived past 100.
Last Civil War veteran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Woolson another example.
After an hour in any town and I'd seen more 95+yos walking about than 10 years in Britain. And the number of times I saw 4 generations of men from one family in the bathhouse!
Hoping I live to something something something.