This week is Naked Capitalism’s fundraising week. We’re pleased to invite 1,271 donors to join us as they have already invested in our efforts to fight corruption and predation, especially in the financial sector. Donation pageHere’s how to donate by check, credit card, debit card, PayPal, Clover, or Wise. Why are we doing this fundraiser?, What we accomplished last yearAnd our current goal is to More original reporting.
This is Eve. Another source of media hype has been the focus on the very elderly, especially the “super-elderly” population, in the hope that they might offer clues to how ordinary people can live longer. But as is so often the case in health, the data is bad, and here it is desperately bad.
Saul Justin Newman, Research Fellow at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, University of London (UCL). conversation
From discovering how dead trout can swim to the discovery that some mammals can breathe through their butts, leading unorthodox scientists gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their 34th annual meeting. Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Not to be confused with the actual Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobel Prizes recognize scientific discoveries that “make people laugh and make them think.”
We spoke to one of this year’s winners, Saul Justin Newman, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at University College London, whose research suggests that most of the claims made about people living beyond 105 are false.
How did you find out about the award?
I called a guy from Cambridge, England, in traffic and rain. He told me about the award, and my first thought was, woman Collecting whale snot Levitating FrogI said, “I definitely want to join this club.”
How was the ceremony?
The ceremony was amazing, a little fun time in a big fancy hall, it felt like every bit of fun was being had at the most serious ceremony possible.
But is your job actually very serious?
I first became interested in this topic Exposed One Some documents Nature and Science published papers about the rapid aging of the 2010s. In general, claims about people’s lifespans are largely unfounded. I have tracked 80% of people over 110 years old worldwide (the other 20% are from countries where meaningful analysis is not possible). Of these, very few have birth certificates. There are over 500 such people in the United States, but only 7 have birth certificates. Even worse, only about 10% have death certificates.
A prime example are the Blue Zones, areas where people are believed to have an astonishingly high chance of living to 100 years old. For nearly two decades, Blue Zones have been promoted to the public. They have been the subject of numerous scientific studies and popular Netflix DocumentariesThere are also many cookbooks on the Mediterranean diet and other topics.
Okinawa in Japan is one of them. Review of the Japanese Government A 2010 survey found that 82% of people in Japan who are over 100 years old have died. The secret to living to 110 is to never file a death certificate.
The Japanese Government: The biggest nutrition study This is the worst health status in the world going back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has the worst health status in Japan, they eat the least amount of vegetables and are the biggest drinkers.
What about other locations?
The same is true for other Blue Zones: Eurostat has recorded life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian Blue Zones and the Greek island of Ikaria. I started keeping records. In 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest life expectancy in old age out of 128 European regions, Ikaria 109th. The cognitive dissonance is striking. In the case of Greeks, My guess is At least 72% of people aged 100 or over are deceased, missing or have committed pension fraud.
What do you think explains most of the incomplete data?
It all varies. In Okinawa, the best way to know where centenarians are is to look at where the archives were bombed by the U.S. military during the war. There are two reasons for that: if they die, they’ll remain in another country’s archives, where their death wasn’t confirmed. Or, if they survive, they’ll end up with an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works by a different calendar, and gets their age wrong.
According to the Greek minister in charge of distributing pensions, more than 9,000 people over the age of 100 have died and are still receiving pensions at the same time. In ItalyIn 1997, it was found that around 30,000 “living” pensioners had died.
Areas where people are most likely to live to 100-110 also have the highest pressure and worst records for committing pension fraud. For example, the best place in England to live to 105 is Tower Hamlets, where there are more people aged 105 than in all the wealthiest areas of England combined. This is followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. But these places It has the lowest population of people over 90 and is rated the worst place in the UK to be an elderly person.
The world’s oldest man, John Tinniswood, is estimated to be 112 years old and comes from a very rough area of Liverpool. The simplest explanation would be that someone wrote down his age incorrectly at some point.
But most people never forget their age…
You’ll be amazed. UK Biobank DataEven middle-aged people often can’t remember how old they are, or when they had their children. Similar statistics exist in the United States.
What does this mean for human longevity?
This question is so obscured by fraud, error, and wishful thinking that we don’t know. The obvious way to resolve this question is to involve physicists in developing an undocumented method of measuring human age, which can then be used to construct a standard that can help measure human age.
Life expectancy data is used to predict future life expectancies, which is then used to determine pension rates for everyone. We’re talking trillions of dollars of pension money. If the data is wrong, the predictions are wrong. And we’re allocating the wrong amount to hospital planning to care for the elderly in the future. Insurance premiums are based on this data.
What are your guesses about the true lifespan of humans?
Longevity is likely linked to wealth: wealthy people exercise more, have less stress, and eat healthier diets. Preprint Analyzing UN mortality data for the past 72 years. According to the UN, the places with the highest mortality rates, consistently reaching 100, are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which has no government), and Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were completely invalidated as legal documents in 2010 due to rampant pension fraud. This data is totally corrupt.
Do you think the Ig Nobel Prize will make your science be taken more seriously?
I hope so, but even if it isn’t, at least the public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit cranky and defensive. If they won’t admit they were wrong while I’m still alive, I’ll just have to find someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.
