Comment by maartenscholl
1 year ago
I don't think that is right. In the Blue Zones marketing material, they characterise Loma Linda's 9000 Adventists, who make up 40% of the population, as living a decade longer on average. That is the claim being investigated. This claim is hard to reconcile with the CDC's official numbers which show a typical life expectancy for the entire area, unless living next to Adventists somehow lowers the life expectancy for the remaining 60% of the population, which would be far more interesting.
> they characterise Loma Linda's 9000 Adventists, who make up 40% of the population, as living a decade longer on average
> This claim is hard to reconcile with the CDC's official numbers which show a typical life expectancy for the entire area
Buettner's focus was on the outliers. Loma Linda is a longevity hotspot, and the question is why.
He found the long-living outliers practiced certain behaviors that they associated with Adventism, like vegetarianism.
Not all Adventists practice those behaviors. About half of Adventists eat meat, for example.
But the long-living outliers were Adventist and practiced the behaviors that he highlighted. So that was his takeaway.
Sure Buettner does focus on the older people of the community by interviewing them, but that does not generalise to the claim of the book (or the website to this day) that this community has a high life expectancy, which is shown to be false by the corrected statistics. This is known as a "population fallacy".
By focusing on the older people only in such a small population, he is introducing selection bias and survivorship bias. Moreover, he did not control or compare studies. I believe there are more than one Adventist community in the US, yet those are not Blue Zones somehow?
Why are Adventists or vegetarians outside of Loma Linda not super centarians, why the Loma Linda boundary?