Comment by cs702
1 year ago
Paper:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1
Abstract:
> The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, which has more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by low per capita incomes and a short life expectancy. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
Nice work. It just won a 2024 Ig Nobel Prize. Well-deserved, I'd say:
So there's this short little book "Food rules" by Michael Pollan. Not much content but seems like the author went through a lot of research. He comes to conclusion based on this tons of data that all we really know for sure is that people living in these blue regions are living much longer and it seems to be related to what they eat. That it is basically the only solid and stable data point we have. Welp. (I'm overstating it a bit, but not by that much)
The one thing that this paper does is demolish the claim that people living in these blue regions are living much longer than average.
I think a lot of commenters either didn't read the abstract or assumed from its tone that it was supportive of the idea of blue zones.
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keeping in mind that they live in countries with higher life expectancy than most countries anyway. Indeed they may not even be outliers within those countries.
Except, it misses the point and doesn't really do that while being persuasive.
According to the Blue Zone researchers, some of the Blue Zones are disappearing because the generations that came after the oldest live differently and much shorter. By differently, their eating, body movement, and other characteristics are different. Looking at the whole population doesn't segment for differences between generation. So, nuance is lost.
In some areas, like the Blue Zone in the US other research is finding the people who live there are healthier than the surrounding populations. Then you have to ask, what area do you average over for your measurement and statistics?
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Not exactly. It establishes that error rates are high in those areas, demolishing the centarian numbers. It doesn't give much investigation into the averages at all. Where it does, it seems to compare adjusted numbers of one data set with unadjusted numbers of another. If you really want to get into the averages, you'd have to determine error rates and adjustments for each specific area, probably by jurisdiction or record keeper, and then compare them. The problem is, nobody is going through that process for the entire world so we just use the face value numbers until we want disprove a specific area and then compare the adjusted numbers against unadjusted numbers. The data is too massive to rigorously investigate. But this whole effort is moot. What tangible benefit comes from disproving blue zone data? These population level studies aren't meant to provide answers. They're meant to provide new variables. Each of the blue zone longevity recommendations have their own studies to either prove (food stuff) or disprove (drinking wine daily) them.
So yeah, it's great the errors in the data have been called out it's a bit surprising that the author interviewed is so angry in the article. I guess it's fitting that he got the Ig nobel, since this correction doesn't have any applicable impact to end result, which were additonal studies investigating the individual suggestions/variables, such as specific dietary practices.
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That's my point.
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Ozempic is showing that life expectancy is mostly avoiding obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, but not a specific magic food. It is just calories, vitamins and minerals.
No as Ozempic mimics the reaction of the body to certain classes of food such as fibre and probiotics.
For most people if they eat more fibre and probiotics we would not need Ozempic.
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Title says "New research" but this paper was posted 5 years ago, on July 16, 2019.
Here's a tweet from the same year referencing it: https://x.com/Mangan150/status/1159074479194066944
A while back I dug into the research of this author and I was not impressed. Some examples of things that caught me poor and leading...
* The Blue Zones claim that most places that list many centurions are false due to bad record keeping. Only a few places have good enough records that are trustworthy. In this authors research he called out places that were not blue zones as examples of bad data against Blue Zones.
* In Okinawa the Blue Zones claim that only the oldest generation fits the Blue Zone model. That more recent generations eat poorly and have bad health. That this Blue Zone is going away. This researcher has focused on the more recent food and health of younger generations to discount it being a Blue Zone for that oldest generation.
* In the US he fails to find fault in record keeping (last I dug into it) with the only location that is considered a Blue Zone. Instead he focuses on generalities.
There are more examples like this.
This all seems disingenuous. It's not to agree with Blue Zones but rather to look at his arguments against those put forward for Blue Zones.
I keep thinking of the phrase "Lies, Damn Lines, and Statistics"
Yes, I did a bit of investigation and I commented on it the few times this article made the rounds on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20633769
I don't think it is just bad statistics, it is very poor data extractions.
Just an example:
"Like the ‘blue zone’ islands of Sardinia and Ikaria, Okinawa also represents the shortest-lived and second-poorest region of a rich high-welfare state"
Sardinia[1], at 83.8, had in 2018 one of the EU highest life expectancies, certainly higher than the rest of Italy (83.4). Like the rest of Italy it was badly hit by COVID in 2020. Life expectancy at 55 is 30.6 vs 30.1 for the rest of Italy. I don't know how to match it with their Figure 2 that shows the all Sardinian provinces being extreme outliers in negative other than they completely misinterpreted the data. Also the same graph shows 7 blue dots for Sardinian provinces, historically Sardinia had only 4 provinces and has had 8 only for a short period in the mid 2000s.
[edit: The newer version of the paper[2] is different and doesn't have figure 2]
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/demo_r_mlifex... (Sardegna In the table).
[2] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
Figure 2 is now Figures S2 and S3 in the newer paper. Table S1 is also relevant: all four Sardinian provinces that appear in that table have existed only from 2005 to 2016. The other 4 historical provinces do not appear. I can't help but think that they didn't somehow account for that and it messed up their data.
Although the fact that those four provinces stick out as extreme outliers in their graph should have clued them that something was wrong.
It is definitely a bit fishy.
I am sure there are other places with bad record keeping which were not included in the study to deflate the pvalues of book keeping.