THE GUARDIAN – Some people do enjoy very long lives.
The world’s “blue zones” (regions identified as having populations who live healthier and longer lives than others) – which include Sardinia in Italy, Okinawa in Japan and Ikaria in Greece – have spawned an industry of lifestyle interventions, supplements and cookbooks.
But a study by Saul Newman from University College London, which is now being peer reviewed, suggests much data on human centenarians is bogus.
“I tracked down 80% of the people in the world who were older than 110,” says Newman, who found almost none of them had a birth certificate. “It’s a statistical garbage pile.”
Alarm bells have been ringing for a while. In 2010, a Japanese government review discovered 230,000 of the country’s centenarians were missing – presumably dead.
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And Newman says data suggests that some 72% of Greek centenarians are dead or missing, but their relatives haven’t declared as much, possibly to keep collecting their pensions.
Newman believes this is why blue zones appear in poor, rural areas, places where there’s substandard record-keeping and pressure to commit pension fraud.
In the UK, the relatively poor London borough of Tower Hamlets has the highest proportion of 105-year-olds in the country, despite having a lower-than-average life expectancy overall. And longevity is linked to wealth – the countries in the world with the highest average life expectancy are rich ones.
“The old-age suicide rate in Okinawa is the fourth highest in Japan. They have twice the poverty rate of any other prefect. They’re last in Japan for vegetable consumption,” says Newman.
“If you pretend that everything’s great in Okinawa, you are leaving those people behind – you’re exploiting them to sell cookbooks.”
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“He’s right,” says Nir Barzilai, a longevity researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who has studied Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians in the US and their families. “It’s a real problem … ”