A study by Dr Saul Justin Newman (Centre for Longitudinal Studies) has won the first-ever Ig Nobel award in Demography at this year’s 34th Ig Nobel Prizes. His work reveals fundamental flaws in the data about the world’s oldest people and patterns of extreme longevity.
This shit is WILD. Turns out the phenomenon of “Blue Zones,” where people have exceptionally long lifespans, are not real and it’s just people committing pension fraud.
Upcoming Gladwell book: How the mediterranean diet makes people commit pension fraud.
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An indirect task of my father’s job involved annuity fraud. Sometimes, he would just email his coworkers like, “we’re paying this 105-year-old man, which the actuarial tables say is verging on impossible, yet I can’t find any local news article about his 100th birthday. Has anyone looked into this?”
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sweet potatoes, daily exercise, decades of lying to the federal government. got it.
A blue zone is a region in the world where people are claimed to have exceptionally long lives beyond the age of 80 due to a lifestyle combining physical activity, low stress, rich social interactions, a local whole-foods diet, and low disease incidence. Examples of blue zones include Okinawa Prefecture, Japan; Nuoro Province, Sardinia, Italy; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; and Icaria, Greece. The name “blue zones” derived simply during the original survey by scientists, who “used a blue pen on a map to mark the villages with long-lived population.”
The term “blue zones” is also used in marketing to promote a healthy lifestyle during aging. The concept of blue zones with longevity, however, has been challenged by the absence of scientific proof, and by the substantial decline of life expectancy during the 21st century in one of the first proposed blue zones, Okinawa.
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Wikipedia
Hehehe this got me good