What do the oldest people on Earth have in common? They are probably lying.
A researcher in England has identified a bureaucratic fatal flaw in the world’s “blue zones” – areas that are considered home to most of the planet’s population. with the greatest longevity,
Five areas where a large portion of the population is 100 or older are Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Kiria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California – all have little else in common except super seniors.
Namely, poor record keeping and age data that is “really useless to a shocking degree,” says Saul Justin Newman of University College London. told Agence France-Presse,
The term “Blue Zone” first came from explorer Dan Buettner. In the early 2000s, he traveled around the world to the best blue lifestyle areas to find the key to a long, happy and healthy life.
However, Newman sarcastically argues that the key to longevity is to “go where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying.”
He took the example of Japan’s oldest living person, Sogen Kato, who lived to be 111 – or so the government thought.
When officials visited Kato on his birthday in 2010, he mummified remains found And it turned out that he probably died in 1978.
Kato was one of the 82% of Japanese centenarians, some 230,000 people, who were reported dead or missing.
Newman’s findings are not limited to Japan. 2008 research in Costa Rica found that, according to the last census data, 42% of the country’s centenarians were dishonest about their age.
He also revealed from 2012 data that 72% of Greece’s population over 100 years old was either dead or not real.
“They only survive on pension day,” Newman said.
Even America’s blue zone only Loma Linda, California – a town southwest of San Bernardino – may be far-fetched. Buettner confessed to the new york times His editor pressured the traveler to “discover America’s Blue Zones.”
Newman, whose work is peer-reviewed, was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize – a spoof of the prestigious award – for his research challenging the Blue Zones.
Awards Page Notes They found that those areas “also correspond to areas with lower incomes, lower literacy rates, higher crime rates and shorter life spans.”
In rebuttal, Blue Zones Researchers called Newman’s work “Ethically and pedagogically irresponsible.”
Instead, he claimed that his team “carefully confirmed all ages.”
However, Newman points to a systemic problem with his practice from the beginning.
“If you start with the birth certificate, it’s wrong, it gets copied into everything else and you get completely inconsistent, completely inaccurate records,” he said.
Age researcher Steve Horvath, who is creating his own fraud-proof age-measurement system called Methylation Clock, told AFP that Newman’s data “appears to be both rigorous and solid.”
