It seems every time I listen to The Studies Show that I want to post something on it, without giving away too much information and infringing on their product. This week they talk about Blue Zones, where entire areas have an unusual percentage of people living to be 100. The short version is that they don't exist, none of them, and in fact some have lower life expectancies. So the directions to eat walnuts, eat more fish (or less fish), drink only water, drink mostly wine, eat frequently with your extended family, or find meditative alone time are mostly just made up ideas that people like and think will work, and get a contract with Netflix to make a documentary about it.
They speak very highly of a paper by Saul Newman which discovers patterns highly suggestive of clerical error and pension fraud. "The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian (110+) records."
His recommendation for long life? Don't have a birth certificate, don't have a death certificate, and you can be any age you like.
2 comments:
I just started it, and my guess was it would be attributable to genetics more than anything else. This is much more interesting. And hilarious.
Most write-ups of cluster phenomena are weakly researched and weakly argued, mere cherry-picking.
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