'The secret to living to 110 was, don't register your

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Okinawa, Japan is popular for having among the greatest concentrations of over-100s on the planet.
(Image credit: philipjbigg/ Alamy Stock Photo)

From the swimming routines of dead trout to the discovery that some mammals can breathe through their behinds, a group of leading leftfield researchers have actually been taking their bows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 34th yearly Ig Nobel Prize event. Not to be puzzled with the real Nobel rewards, the Ig Nobels acknowledge clinical discoveries that”make individuals laugh, then believe.”

We caught up with one of this year’s winners, Saul Justin Newman, a senior research fellow at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies. His research finds that most of the claims about people living over 105 are wrong.

Table of Contents

How did you find out about your award?

I picked up the phone after slogging through traffic and rain to a bloke from Cambridge in the UK. He told me about this prize and the first thing I thought of was the lady who collected snot off of whales and the levitating frog. I said, “definitely I wish to remain in this club.”

What was the ceremony like?

The ceremony was wonderful. It’s a bit of fun in a big fancy hall. It’s like you take the most serious ceremony possible and make fun of every aspect of it.

But your work is really exceptionally severe?

I began getting thinking about this subject when I exposed a number of documents in Nature and Science about severe aging in the 2010s. In basic, the claims about the length of time individuals are living primarily do not accumulate. I’ve found 80% of individuals aged over 110 on the planet (the other 20% are from nations you can’t meaningfully evaluate). Of those, practically none have a birth certificate. In the United States there are over 500 of these individuals; 7 have a birth certificate. Even even worse, just about 10% have a death certificate.

The embodiment of this is blue zoneswhich are areas where individuals apparently reach age 100 at an impressive rate. For practically 20 years, they have actually been marketed to the general public. They’re the topic of lots of clinical work, a popular Netflix documentarylots of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet plan, and so on.

Related: Does the Mediterranean diet plan lower dementia threat? 20-year research study hints no

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Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.

The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.

What about other locations?

The exact same opts for all the other blue zones. Eurostat tracks life span in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece. When the company very first began keeping records in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st greatest old-age life span in Europe out of 128 areas, and Ikaria was 109th. It’s incredible the cognitive harshness going on. With the Greeks, by my quotes a minimum of 72% of centenarians were dead, missing out on or basically pension-fraud cases.

Sardinia is another location whose durability information is extremely doubtful. (Image credit: David Burton/ Alamy Stock Photo)

what-do-you-think-explains-most-of-the-faulty-data-3″>What do you think explains most of the faulty data?

It varies. In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.

According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.

Regions where people most often reach 100 to 110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.

The oldest man in the world, John Tinniswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool. The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.

But many people do not lose count of their age …

You would be impressed. Taking a look at the UK Biobank informationeven individuals in mid-life regularly do not keep in mind how old they are, or how old they were when they had their kids. There are comparable statistics from the United States.

Life span goes to the heart of the worldwide economy. (Image credit: simona pilolla 2 through Shutterstock)

what-does-this-all-mean-for-human-longevity-3″>What does this all mean for human longevity?

The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know. The clear way out of this is to involve physicists to develop a measure of human age that doesn’t depend on documents. We can then use that to build metrics that help us measure human ages.

Longevity data are used for projections of future lifespans, and those are used to set everyone’s pension rate. You’re talking about trillions of dollars of pension money. If the data is junk then so are those projections. It also means we’re allocating the wrong amounts of money to plan hospitals to take care of old people in the future. Your insurance premiums are based on this stuff.

What’s your best guess about true human longevity?

Longevity is very likely tied to wealth. Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well. I just put out a preprint analysing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality. The places consistently reaching 100 at the highest rates according to the UN are Thailand, Malawi, Western Sahara (which doesn’t have a government) and Puerto Rico, where birth certificates were cancelled completely as a legal document in 2010 because they were so full of pension fraud. This data is just rotten from the inside out.

Do you believe the Ig Nobel will get your science taken more seriously?

I hope so. Even if not, at least the basic public will laugh and believe about it, even if the clinical neighborhood is still a bit irritable and protective. If they do not acknowledge their mistakes in my life time, I think I’ll simply get somebody to pretend I’m still alive up until that modifications.

This edited post is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Check out the initial post

Saul Newman is an interdisciplinary scholar with an extremely broad background. His current work consists of very first- and sole-author publications covering plant science (Nature Plants), demography (Science Advances), and environment modification (Nature Climate Change). Upcoming research study checks out a prospective drug-based modifier of human aging, and extremely disruptive research study on the dependability of human old-age information. His research study has actually been included thoroughly in worldwide news outlets consisting of The Economist, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Newsweek, and Forbes publication.