Real Explanation of 'Longevity' Is Often a Letdown

Certain regions of the world are known as "blue zones" because of their long-lived inhabitants. Is it the diet? The climate? The good vibes? Turns out, it might simply be lousy record-keeping or outright fraud, reports NPR. The story cites the work of Saul Justin Newman, a research fellow at Oxford who's the author of a new preprint study that may puncture some holes in longevity myths. Newman looked at UN data from more than 230 nations and found some telltale problems. "The best predictor of where 100-year-olds are within Okinawa [Japan] is places that have had their cities bombed by the Americans, burning the birth records," he says. "So the more bombing you have, the more 100-year-olds you have."

In other nations, such as Costa Rica, a large number of centenarians turned out to be lying in their national census. Similarly, "at least 72% of the centenarians in Greece disappeared when they did an audit," Newman says. He tells the New York Times that his own research has turned up similar anomalies. "I discovered that the oldest man in the world had three birthdays and no birth certificate," he says of Japan's Jiroemon Kimura, who was purported to be 116 when he died. Newman also asserts that at least some of the centenarians exist on paper but are, in fact, dead, perhaps because their survivors want to keep the pension checks rolling in. "Very easy thing to get away with," he tells NPR.

The Oxford researcher conducted a similar study in 2019, but he says it's been largely ignored because it suggests that much longevity research is, in fact, "bunk." Last month, Newman gained a degree of recognition as the recipient of an Ig Nobel award. The awards often go to goofy-sounding projects, but the Times notes that their main goal, in the words of their founder, is to honor "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." In accepting his award, Newman offered a poem instead of a speech:

• "The secrets fell over like a lover in clover when I checked the government books. The blue zones are poor, the records no more, the 100-year-olds are all crooks. The secret, it seems, to live out your dreams and make sure you keep living, not dying, is to move where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying."

(More longevity stories.)