I cringed when reading the HN comments to this article. Seriously folks, this article isn't about how to get to the fountain of youth. It's also not about quick fixes, so unfortunately if you want to get to the good stuff, you're actually going to have to read the entire 7 pages. Trust me, if you have an open mind, its worth the read.
It's enlightening for me to read accounts about how others live their lives and derive happiness from simple pleasures. Breathing fresh air, enjoying the company of others, eating food that you've grown. This is such a stark contrast to the lifestyle I have lived for the past 28 years. I've worked at software companies for the past 5 years and have spent most of my waking life in front of a computer screen. Even though I am happy, I do admit that I wonder if life is supposed to be more than this. And here we have incredible proof of someone who had broken out of their Comfort Zone, possibly had to give up many of their "luxuries", and changed their life completely.
The point of this story isn't that this man beat cancer and lived to be a centenarian, its that by changing his life he dramatically improved his happiness and began to take advantage of all the things we take for granted.
I read the article per physcab’s suggestion (and because I was curious why a story about Greek centenarians could generate so much lively discussion on HN). Good read indeed, thanks!
I think it's easy to be dismissive when the topic of discussion has little to do with our own lifestyles, at least not on the surface. Old people on Greek isles and fountains of youth are light-years away from stuff that concerns your typically young and techie HN reader. (I'm generalizing, you guys can attack me if you must.) So it would seem that the only intelligent commentary one can make on such a subject is to question the author's scientific approach and to take apart his analysis -- how else could a 20-something programmer/entrepreneur partake in this discussion, right?
But dig a little deeper and you'll find some interesting parallels that maybe most HN readers can relate to and think about. A couple of things that the author and his interviewees said jumped out at me: (1) developing an ecosystem that fosters healthful and satisfactory lifestyles, and (2) adapting work schedules so you can work into the night even when you don’t feel productive during the day.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? A bit like startup culture? Ok, nobody wants their employees hanging out and milking goats all day (unless that’s your industry) and Silicon Valley will never be as stress-free and laidback as Ikaria (I doubt we would want it to be) but the article does inspire some ideas about what makes people tick and what makes people happy -- and those people could be your employees and your users.
Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies.
Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidants have a net negative effect on long term health. But there's money to be made keeping up the lie:
Lastly, beware of pseudo-pop-science that opens with one person's story. People manage to survive cancer without treatment all over the world; one story is not remarkable and tells us nothing. In general the whole blue zones thing has little to no value in any serious consideration of health and longevity: it's about on the same level of credibility as diet fads.
If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically.
Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source of ideas for things to investigate further?
The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The "U R a fag"s get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the "comments" link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page.
I'm not commenting on this article specifically (not least because I haven't read it), but there are plenty of articles that deserve little more than "middlebrow dismissal".
Very likely one could find plenty of more interesting things to say about those articles. One can find interesting things to say about anything. But if an article is about an attention-grabbing subject, is superficially plausible, but is just plain unsound in the sort of way the grandparent of this comment is alleging, the "middlebrow dismissal" -- predictable as it is for the cognoscenti -- may still be the most useful thing there is to say about it, and a comment thread that didn't have "please note, this is probably wrong in the usual way" near the top of it would be a bad and misleading one.
If HN is worse off for being full of middlebrow dismissals, the real problem may not be the middlebrow dismissals but the articles that provoke them.
I've noticed this too. It's a vicious hit-and-run attack on a thread's discussion that presumes only the empirical viewpoint is worth considering. It often trainwrecks the thread into intellectual pissing contests, rather than discussing subjects with fellow human beings.
Removing karma entirely might help. Too many people treat it as a vanity metric, and game it.
In all honesty, if this is what bugs you the most about HN comments, then that mostly means that HN is doing remarkably well, given its population increase.
2 years ago, many HNers were predicting that HN's growth would inevitably turn it into yet another Reddit or 4chan. Instead, the consistent top comment is what you call the "middlebrow dismissal". Really, that's not so bad, compared to the top comment on $ANY_OTHER_SITE,_REALLY. Just scroll down to the next!
(that said, I found your complaint insightful: in fact, I realise now that I've been guilty of the odd middlebrow dismissal myself)
Could anyone with access to HN comments voting data execute something similar to the SQL query below and evaluate the results?
The idea is to use past voting correlation with other users to sort the comments.
declare @userId int;
select @userId = UserId
from users
where Username = 'pg';
/* Let's calculate expert table first. We will use it to rate comments later. */
select
v2.UserId,
sum(v1.Score * v2.Score) as VotingCorrelation
into #expert
from CommentVotingLog v1
inner join CommentVotingLog v2
on v2.CommentId = v1.CommentId
where v1.UserId = @userId
group by v2.UserId;
/* Now we can rate comments against #expert table: */
select
c.CommentText,
(select sum(v.Score * e.VotingCorrelation)
from CommentVotingLog v
inner join #expert e
on e.UserId = v.UserId
where v.CommentId = c.CommentId
) as Rating
from Comment c
where c.ArticleId = 4692598 -- or another article that's discussed
order by Rating desc;
I assume CommentVotingLog table has CommentId, UserId of the voter, and Score that voter gave to the comment: +1 for upvote or -1 for downvote)
I also assume that CommentVotingLog table has at least one record for every comment -- the author of that comment gives Score = +1 to that comment.
These queries don't have "freshness" adjustment (older comments had higher change to get upvoted, so their rating should be somewhat downgraded).
I'm always conflicted about interesting comments which link to something I read and learn from, but which are needlessly insulting. The grandparent linked to FightingAging.com and I read the article and clicked on some of the links and found it informative, though not convincing. But I cringe when he says, "Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense."
So do I upvote because I learned something from his comment, or downvote because his tone degrades the quality of discourse on Hacker News? Clearly pg says "downvote", and I often do, but I'm always on the fence about it.
Solution: Get rid of voting. Order the comments randomly.
I've never understood the point behind anonymous voting.^1 What value does it add?
1. But some people, think of them what you will, have tried to use voting as a way to be more convincing when pandering to advertisers, e.g., Facebook "Likes".
Assuming we were the intelligent, high brow readers you would hope would be reading your forum, then wouldn't we be smart enough to see that voting adds nothing, except a source of amusement (as the silliest comments or those from random members with "high karma" rise to the top)? Intelligent people do not need a "karma system". They can take in all available information and separate the wheat from the chaf on their own. (No need for someone else, someone else's algorithm, to manipulate the order of comments.)
How about a "middlebrow dismissal" link to complement the flag link?
Of course, it doesn't need to be called "middlebrow dismissal" but there is nothing better for determining if something is or isn't middlebrow dismissal than users.
TBH, the flag link could be more powerful/useful by asking people to explain why they are flagging something. Later on you can release the categorized flagged post dataset for others to train an algorithm against. If someone is willing to spend the time to click on flag, they are demonstrating that they care about post/comment quality and that is itself a good indicator that they'd be willing to spend the time to tell you exactly why they are flagging something.
"If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically."
3 years ago, HN was great. Amazing in fact. What's changed in 3 years? Certainly not the system. The user base has changed, grown, degenerated into stereotypes and punch lines. There is an old saying that I believe succinctly explains what has happened: Garbage in, garbage out.
I keep seeing people writing about wanting to "improve HN." Every time I see this I think, are these people mad? It's dead Jim. He's been dead. We can all sit here and prod his body and make recommendations for how best to make his arm into a grappling hook or some such nonsense, but at the end of the day, the patient is STILL dead.
If there is one thing I would do to improve HN, it would be to write the death certificate and move on to finding or creating the next HN.
Also, I thought the article was excellent, albeit long.
> Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies.
You may have read a different article. As this article noted before even the first of so many page breaks:
"And in Loma Linda, Calif., we identified a population of Seventh-day Adventists in which most of the adherents’ life expectancy exceeded the American average by about a decade."
A full decade, within the same American safety net, is a tremendous difference. Born SDA myself, I can tell you that Loma Linda is not a hotbed of exercise and caloric restriction. (And the benefits are not localized to Loma Linda; the researchers hit upon SDAs there because the concentration in Loma Linda was high enough to show up on zip based data).
You say that anything other than these two makes a difference takes a mountain of evidence to overcome, well, we have that evidence. SDAs are generally just as sedentary and eat just as much as the average non SDA next door.
What SDAs in Loma Linda do differently: don't drink, don't smoke, take 24 hours away from stress each week, and to a large extent, avoid meat with an otherwise normal diet of grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and dairy.
So does it apply to all SDA's or just in Loma Linda. This reminds me of the best schools being small schools example, where governments tried to make schools smaller, ignoring the fact that the worst schools were small schools. How do you separate the data from the variance with such small groups?
Admittedly lack of smoking and reduced stressed are well studied factors: avoiding red meat can help, although entirely non-meat diets commonly hurt from inadequate amounts of iron and in some cases protein. Drinking in moderation can have health benefits however, so it seems strange to list it first, even though binging and alcoholism is terrible for life expectancy.
I actually tend to disagree with PG slightly (here comes massive downvotes). I find a lot of the moderate: gather more data approaches are in response to one or more wild leaps unsupported by data often on a single anecdote. We leap to causes quickly and badly. Testing our hypothesis with good data or at least many anecdotes (those of customers) is a great thing for start-ups. Being skeptical of conclusions from a single anecdote is useful: if you want to leap to those conlusions you'd do well to add other data or background supporting them.
Imagine you have a randomly distributed age population. When you break it into groups (especially small groups), you will ALWAYS find a group with the largest average lifespan. Depending on what your average group size is, their lifespan can easily be several standard deviations higher than the overall average.
"Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome."
Not accurate. Smoking takes about 10 years off life expectancy, which is thought to be the reason why hispanics have a longer life expectancy than non-hispanic whites in the US. Mental illness takes another 10 - 15 years off life expectancy. Being religious adds a couple years to life expectancy, as does social belongingness in general.
The research I've read seemed conclusive that what you eat is as important or more important as how much. Intuitively it makes sense that giving you body the correct building blocks would make it healthier and that's definitely not just a function of quantity. And from what I've read the science supports it as well. Here's a relevant book about it:
> Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense.
Well, it is nonsense if you look at it as the sole source of longevity.
But get a diet rich in antioxidants. Add low saturated fat intake. Continuous, low level, healthy exercise. Plenty of fresh vegetables. Low-stress lifestyle. Sense of belonging. All that stuff. Then you reach a tipping point and things start to improve suddenly.
The secret of longevity is probably an all-of-the-above type of thing.
I agree that beneficial factors are synergistic, and that without this kind of positive synergy unusual longevity is unlikely.
The problem is that such factors are different for each individual. It is a conceit of medical research that generally positive factors can be identified easily. People are quite diverse genetically and biochemically, this is behind the argument for getting a genetic test to identify tailor made drug prescriptions. However, biochemical diversity pales in comparison with psychological diversity.
It is utter foolishness to recommend a wide circle of friends to naturally introverted people, for instance, and, in my opinion, borders on a kind of psycho-normative health fascism, let alone the constant recommendations to "believe in a higher power" to live longer.
In fact, it seems to me that a common feature of interviews with very long lived people is a touch of grouchiness and a refusal to go along with the the received wisdom.
The other problem with blue zones is, they could just be a statistical blip. It's especially bad when you try to identify things like centurions, or spontaneous remission of cancer - things which are rare are the most prone to statistical blips.
To a certain extent they can be, however generally speaking the very tops of this set tend to have both good luck, good genes and good lifestyle. It's hard to get to right near the very top of lifespan without all three, and the population from which we select centrenarians is extremely large. Statistical blips (good luck or unmeasured factors) can be relevant, even highly relevant, but unless you're overlooking very important things it's extremely unlikely to rise to the top without favorable outcomes in other factors.
So maybe we observe things that are 95% of optimal instead of the best genes in the data set. Or maybe we observe diets that have 90% of the performance of optimal diets. We still learn a hell of a lot.
By optimal I mean best-performing in terms of life expectancy from among the total data set (people) not just among centrenarians.
Could you explain what you mean by "statistical blip"? It seems odd to say that, I mean, wouldn't it imply that there's interference from improper measuring, or interference from variables gone unnoticed, or interference from variables that are irrelevant? I'm probably reading it wrong, but it seems such a bizarre thing to say.
It's possible but not so likely, the 60s was not the Middle Ages. In any case, he was clearly very sick when he returned to the island and eventually felt better, became strong and lived into his 90's. Not that that proves anything in itself. It's just a journalistic device to illustrate the point of the story which is that people on this island do live a remarkably long time and that it's worth asking why this is so.
And anecdotes about remission can be really dangerous. I've seen people who had spontaneous remission while taking some quack remedy and then parade their story around to convince people not to do evidence-based treatments.
the studies linked to there specifically address antioxidant supplements which you then change into dietary antioxidants as if they are the same thing. They are not. Supplements doing nothing is the norm. It says relatively little about the presence of the same things in a diet. Example: fiber.
> anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity
I've seen claims that having few friends shows up in mortality worse than than a pack-a-day smoking habit. Of course that's all hand-wavy statistical controls, but then again so is the stuff on exercise and calories.
TIL that even if you study longevity for 10+ years, you're never allowed to share anecdotes (or god forbid, close with a joke) ever again unless you're prepared to be crucified by twentysomething pseudo-experts in Silicon Valley.
I think this is how every expert in a non-CS/IT field feels about HN commentary on their field. 95% of what I read about aviation/aerospace here makes me cringe. It's like hearing my parents talk about computers, but with 10x more self-assurance.
I hate this kind of reporting. I read through the entire first page without the slightest clue as to what the article is actually about -- I'm pretty sure it's not all just for one guy's life story.
But by that point I was tired of reading, and quit.
Cut it out with the pathos and human interest, and get some of the real point in there quicker.
Don't worry, 57 blogs will distill it down to the core 5 points and post them in a bulleted list with a link-bait title by Friday. But writing is much more than 'get to the point as fast as possible'. These kind of stories are far more interesting than the quick summary articles found on most shitty websites. If you don't like the style, then don't click through to the New Yorker, New York Times, etc.
While slowing down IS great, I do sympathize with the desire to get my information without "human interest" and the infotainment slant that tends to skew pertinent facts.
This sort of thinking is actually a large part of the piece.. I'd highly recommend giving it an honest and unaffected read, it's thought-provoking stuff
It's not that I'm mister "New-York-City always pushing to not waste a minute". My complaint is primarily that the structure pretends to be human-centered, in fact it's nothing but a formula.
Modern news reporting dictates that the journalist kick off with something personally identifiable, and only then ease into the facts. The reasons for this are obvious, I think: readers are more likely to connect with, and thus read, a story that they find strikes a chord with them personally; so let's try to cast about with some pathos, and maybe we'll hit some notes in that chord.
But just as with seeing reported gore or pr0n on reddit, repetition of the same formula over time loses its valence with the reader.
I'm tired of that formula in article after article. I want the journalists to find new ways to accomplish it.
It's not this article specifically; this is just one example. It struck me at this time, though, because it's pretty long, and I got through a pretty good chunk of it without a single direct reference to the article's thesis, so it was quite egregious.
I completely agree. If I follow an interesting link, read an interesting opening paragraph or two, and then hit a paragraph that completely changes the subject with something like "Paul Steve, a little hobbit of a man, sits before me sipping a glass of warm tea as he gazes out across the morning Texas plains", then I scroll way down to verify the page 1/10 before getting the hell out of Dodge.
I was the complete opposite. I found the story compelling and interesting from the get go. Had they opened with stats from a study, I probably would have stopped there. The personal story hooked me.
I'm not sure why are you saying it's unclear what the article is about, IMO the headline elegantly explains the subject and basic idea, while also giving some notion about the style. I was turned off by the anecdata that the article begins with, but I didn't expect hard science anyway. Having finished it, I find it interesting and well-written. =)
I read through the entire first page without the slightest clue as to what the article is actually about
The last paragraph on the front page tells you exactly what the article is about. Opening with an human anecdote is a common trope in long-form journalism, because that's what a majority of people want before they will put in the time to read several thousand words about mortality statistics.
Disclaimer: Greek islander.
Their diet is not that different from many other Greek islands. What I find different is the total lack of stress. It's not that people wake up late. It's that they are worry free. You go to a cafeteria sit and wait and noboby comes. You get up go inside and ask for a coffee and they show you the coffee pot. Or they smile and tell you that you are free to make it yourself. They will probably not move a finger. Then you leave the money on the table and leave. When the article says they wake up late, there are no shops in the morning. They are open when the owner feels like it, and the system works quite well since everybody else knows it... Doors in villages are unlocked. Funerals and marriages of the locals are a special occasion but people don't dress up that much. Everything is serene and simple. Comming from Athens this is very very frustrating at the beggining but I grew to like it. The place is very different from anything else I have seen.
I wonder if this article has some sort of selection bias. After all, communities that have the lowest and highest rates of cancer in the US are small towns of <100 people.
It's easy to find several small towns in the US where people have unusually high longevity. After all, you have many to choose from.
What's more curious is to make a hypothesis around diet and exercise, and then show causality across all similar islands in Greece.
There's also crazily high variation in rare events, like living past 100 or surviving "incurable" cancer. But those are the things which people are interested in.
Stories like this are a little dangerous when taken at face value. Americans sometimes get diagnosed with cancer and then have spontaneous remission too. We don't know anything concrete about this guy's case. It's also not a good idea to say that a Mediterranean diet is ideal for anyone that doesn't have a Mediterranean ancestry. Greeks have been eating the same sorts of foods for a long time and are most likely more adapted to them than I would be. My hypothesis is that any society that doesn't drink sugary drinks, eats enough fat (olive oil, goat cheese in this case), doesn't often overeat, and gets plenty of exercise should have a healthy population.
The point that interested me most was how instead of a quick fix or a band-aid approach the whole being healthy is interwoven in their lifestyle. They don't exercise to reduce a few kilos, rather it is impossible for them to not exercise because there isn't any other way of getting around. Same with food, they're not trying to eat healthy like us but the food they know to cook is just healthy.. it's not as a quick-fix to reduce weight.
This point is interesting to me because I was recently reading a book called 8 Weeks To Optimum Health and the author (Andrew Weil i think) mentions that it is good to add a little turmeric to your diet. Now having been lived in India all my life, we all have been eating turmeric all our lives without ever giving much thought to it. It's not something we do to remain healthy, but rather something without which you can't food here. I don't remember not eating it for the last 30 years. Unfortunately, we counter-balance it with fried samosas, etc but still the point to take is when a society as a whole develops good habits it often becomes way too easy for everyone to follow through without missing a day of that (for decades).
I come from a near by island and I had heard some of the facts about people in Ikaria before reading this article (eg that they do not wake up ealy) as well as some more that I did not see mentioned in the article (eg I have been told that they do not lock their stores, they just leave them open in case anyone needs something).
I would really*very much AND strongly like to give a hint to all those who are skeptical about this article that they should consider that a vastly different way of their life can very well exist. You do not HAVE to be a well educated smart hard working entrepreneur to exist on earth. People existed well before that and will do for some more time (if our "civilized" "modern" world does not succeed in destroying our planet.
I would also like to point out that the western world (especially the "civilized" world) has actually failed in the FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN NEEDS, ie food and sleep. Having lived in a place where organic food was the only food I am sick and tired of seeing people eating "healthy" food which in fact is nothing more than a company's new product.
Guess I'm a cynic because that occurred to me too.
It's easy to imagine. You've got six months to live. You move to a place where you won't run into people you know. You reconnect with relatives and childhood friends. You realize you could transfer your identity to a brother or friend and hand off your pension/social-security. Or avoid inheritance tax. Your wife and parents agree.
You die and are buried overlooking the blue Mediterranean. There's a small ceremony. The sun is shining. Life goes on.
I spend every Saturday afternoon, and most Sunday afternoons, taking 2-3 hour naps. They are great for decompressing and relaxing. I actually enjoy them a lot more than the normal sleeps I get at night. There's something very satisfying about waking up and finding out that it's still the same day!
On a related note, most of my friends who complain about being "stressed out" never spend their weekends actually relaxing. Instead, they rush from one activity/event to another, drive from location to location. Then when the weekend is over they say in dismay, "I can't believe it's Monday already." My guess is that if they spent their weekend being laid back, the weekend would feel a lot longer and they would be re-energized before the next week starts.
Another health factor at work might be the unprocessed nature of the food they
consume: as Trichopoulou observed, because islanders eat greens from their gardens
and fields, they consume fewer pesticides and more nutrients. She estimated that the
Ikarian diet, compared with the standard American diet, might yield up to four
additional years of life expectancy.
Oh boy, 4 years.
Eureka. You've done it. You've found the secret to eternal life.
She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100
that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly,
and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with
“good duration” and “achievement.”
If you had asked me the same question in middle school, I would have said that I was having all sorts of sex too.
Although unemployment is high — perhaps as high as 40 percent — most
everyone has access to a family garden and livestock, Parikos told me.
People who work might have several jobs. Someone involved in tourism,
for example, might also be a painter or an
electrician or have a store.
This is a common pattern in the very poor. When you don't have any savings, you can't afford any interruptions in your income stream. Consequently, they're forced to be jacks of all trade, master of none. This makes it impossible to specialize in any one field, and lack of income means they can't make any capital investments.
"When everyone knows everyone else’s business, you get a feeling of
connection and security. The lack of privacy is actually good, because
it puts a check on people who don’t want to be caught or who do
something to embarrass their family."
I'd hate to be homosexual here, or be a member of any kind of minority group.
Anyway, the effect is almost certainly due to a "small study effect" sampling bias. In a tiny population (one island) a handful of exceptions (164 people over 90) massively affects the average lifespan. There's no randomization or blinding at all: observational studies like these are exquisitely sensitive to methodology errors, especially when examining small effects.
I wish someone like Bill Gates would stop doing sisyphean third world do-gooder junk and fund some long term, large controlled studies on humans instead. It seems to me that to do actual science on human health you need space program like money. So instead we get all this observational garbage.
Really interesting to see this here on my first morning after beginning my segmented sleep experiment. I took a quarter pill of melatonin yesterday around 6pm and slept from 6:30 till 8:30, then quickly fell asleep again till 11:30. I then failed to fall asleep at 2:30am after a wonderful mellow productive night programming session, and had to skip the second sleep.
During the morning I found, completely by chance, some articles on a fasting diet from the mark's daily apple blog. And I had been without eating since first falling asleep (and still am), so I eagerly gobbled it up as validation on all those breakfasts I have skipped.
And finally I talked with my roomate about living long as related to these little body hacking experiments.
Maybe it's just my Mediterranean upbringing talking but I think I'll stick with healthy food, good wine, 8 hours sleep, and surrounding myself with people I like.
Nontraditional sleep patterns are a common fad here at HN; though you've been around to probably see one or two of those and are probably trolling to catch people like me, so ... I'll just shut up now.
Everyone seems to be trying to get the quick answer to longevity from this article. The message I took home is that there _is_ no quick answer. No-one really knows why these people live longer.
What they do know is that they lead a completely different kind of lifestyle from us. The whole community is relaxed and randomly happen to have a diet and exercise patterns which may contribute to longevity.
Unfortunately it seems that while we're living busy and stressful lifestyles this kind of longevity is out of reach for us.
While reading the story of this man that cures his cancer without resorting to modern medecine is endearing. I cannot stop thinking about Steve Jobs that tried to cure himself of cancer without modern medicine and of the fatal consequences of his actions.
I heard tell or a similar tale in he Med. where he natural hot springs were a trace radioactive. It was thus hypothesized that this small, consistent dose was partially responsible for the almost zero rate of cancer on the island.
It is not that much about diet, it is about having less stress and worries of all kinds, and have good habits, such as mixing periods of physical activity and with total rest (taking naps).
It is not like staying all the time in a passive stress (or depression) - having a high level of stress hormones without any physical activities.
And the last but not least, there are emotion contagiousness - one can see it a subway. "Toxic people" is very real thing.
Then comes the media with its pressure about sex (which is about youth and health) and wealth (which is a weak substitute for the two former), and these material pseudo-achievements that one must accomplish.
All these factors together, plus many more - such as drinking water, air, soil in which vegetables and grapes grown, contributes to longevity, of course. But it seems like there is no one which makes it all - no shortcut, no way to buy it.
I believe it is much more about the state of the mind, which influence everything, including inner bodily processes and rhythms. Mind is first, environment is second, adversaries is third. ''Hell is other people'', you know.)
In addition to what the article says, this particular island sure has a very healthy way of living overall, not necessarily in the medical sense.
Shops and offices open at noon, and people generally wake up late. They do stay up late at night.
In general, they don't follow a particular timetable, they go as they feel. They are mostly joyous and celebrating, with what we would call a "cafe culture" (only the are as likely to party with hard grappa-like liquors).
Their culture as relates to time is something that's unlike even nearby islands. This "on demand" thing? They are not for it.
Living in a wonderful land surrounded by wonderful, swimmable sea, doesn't hurt either.
I cringed when reading the HN comments to this article. Seriously folks, this article isn't about how to get to the fountain of youth. It's also not about quick fixes, so unfortunately if you want to get to the good stuff, you're actually going to have to read the entire 7 pages. Trust me, if you have an open mind, its worth the read.
It's enlightening for me to read accounts about how others live their lives and derive happiness from simple pleasures. Breathing fresh air, enjoying the company of others, eating food that you've grown. This is such a stark contrast to the lifestyle I have lived for the past 28 years. I've worked at software companies for the past 5 years and have spent most of my waking life in front of a computer screen. Even though I am happy, I do admit that I wonder if life is supposed to be more than this. And here we have incredible proof of someone who had broken out of their Comfort Zone, possibly had to give up many of their "luxuries", and changed their life completely.
The point of this story isn't that this man beat cancer and lived to be a centenarian, its that by changing his life he dramatically improved his happiness and began to take advantage of all the things we take for granted.
I read the article per physcab’s suggestion (and because I was curious why a story about Greek centenarians could generate so much lively discussion on HN). Good read indeed, thanks!
I think it's easy to be dismissive when the topic of discussion has little to do with our own lifestyles, at least not on the surface. Old people on Greek isles and fountains of youth are light-years away from stuff that concerns your typically young and techie HN reader. (I'm generalizing, you guys can attack me if you must.) So it would seem that the only intelligent commentary one can make on such a subject is to question the author's scientific approach and to take apart his analysis -- how else could a 20-something programmer/entrepreneur partake in this discussion, right?
But dig a little deeper and you'll find some interesting parallels that maybe most HN readers can relate to and think about. A couple of things that the author and his interviewees said jumped out at me: (1) developing an ecosystem that fosters healthful and satisfactory lifestyles, and (2) adapting work schedules so you can work into the night even when you don’t feel productive during the day.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? A bit like startup culture? Ok, nobody wants their employees hanging out and milking goats all day (unless that’s your industry) and Silicon Valley will never be as stress-free and laidback as Ikaria (I doubt we would want it to be) but the article does inspire some ideas about what makes people tick and what makes people happy -- and those people could be your employees and your users.
Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies.
Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidants have a net negative effect on long term health. But there's money to be made keeping up the lie:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/03/attempting-to-add...
Lastly, beware of pseudo-pop-science that opens with one person's story. People manage to survive cancer without treatment all over the world; one story is not remarkable and tells us nothing. In general the whole blue zones thing has little to no value in any serious consideration of health and longevity: it's about on the same level of credibility as diet fads.
If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically.
Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source of ideas for things to investigate further?
The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The "U R a fag"s get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the "comments" link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page.
I'm not commenting on this article specifically (not least because I haven't read it), but there are plenty of articles that deserve little more than "middlebrow dismissal".
Very likely one could find plenty of more interesting things to say about those articles. One can find interesting things to say about anything. But if an article is about an attention-grabbing subject, is superficially plausible, but is just plain unsound in the sort of way the grandparent of this comment is alleging, the "middlebrow dismissal" -- predictable as it is for the cognoscenti -- may still be the most useful thing there is to say about it, and a comment thread that didn't have "please note, this is probably wrong in the usual way" near the top of it would be a bad and misleading one.
If HN is worse off for being full of middlebrow dismissals, the real problem may not be the middlebrow dismissals but the articles that provoke them.
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It's been a while since I've coined a new term on HN, but I think now is as appropriate a time as ever:
cargo cult skepticism.
edit: ~10 previous results on Google. :-/
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I've noticed this too. It's a vicious hit-and-run attack on a thread's discussion that presumes only the empirical viewpoint is worth considering. It often trainwrecks the thread into intellectual pissing contests, rather than discussing subjects with fellow human beings.
Removing karma entirely might help. Too many people treat it as a vanity metric, and game it.
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In all honesty, if this is what bugs you the most about HN comments, then that mostly means that HN is doing remarkably well, given its population increase.
2 years ago, many HNers were predicting that HN's growth would inevitably turn it into yet another Reddit or 4chan. Instead, the consistent top comment is what you call the "middlebrow dismissal". Really, that's not so bad, compared to the top comment on $ANY_OTHER_SITE,_REALLY. Just scroll down to the next!
(that said, I found your complaint insightful: in fact, I realise now that I've been guilty of the odd middlebrow dismissal myself)
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> "If there is one thing I wish I could do to improve HN it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically."
Do you have some data that we could use to play with? That sounds like a nice problem to solve.
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Could anyone with access to HN comments voting data execute something similar to the SQL query below and evaluate the results?
The idea is to use past voting correlation with other users to sort the comments.
I assume CommentVotingLog table has CommentId, UserId of the voter, and Score that voter gave to the comment: +1 for upvote or -1 for downvote)
I also assume that CommentVotingLog table has at least one record for every comment -- the author of that comment gives Score = +1 to that comment.
These queries don't have "freshness" adjustment (older comments had higher change to get upvoted, so their rating should be somewhat downgraded).
I'm always conflicted about interesting comments which link to something I read and learn from, but which are needlessly insulting. The grandparent linked to FightingAging.com and I read the article and clicked on some of the links and found it informative, though not convincing. But I cringe when he says, "Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense."
So do I upvote because I learned something from his comment, or downvote because his tone degrades the quality of discourse on Hacker News? Clearly pg says "downvote", and I often do, but I'm always on the fence about it.
Solution: Get rid of voting. Order the comments randomly.
I've never understood the point behind anonymous voting.^1 What value does it add?
1. But some people, think of them what you will, have tried to use voting as a way to be more convincing when pandering to advertisers, e.g., Facebook "Likes".
Assuming we were the intelligent, high brow readers you would hope would be reading your forum, then wouldn't we be smart enough to see that voting adds nothing, except a source of amusement (as the silliest comments or those from random members with "high karma" rise to the top)? Intelligent people do not need a "karma system". They can take in all available information and separate the wheat from the chaf on their own. (No need for someone else, someone else's algorithm, to manipulate the order of comments.)
How about a "middlebrow dismissal" link to complement the flag link?
Of course, it doesn't need to be called "middlebrow dismissal" but there is nothing better for determining if something is or isn't middlebrow dismissal than users.
TBH, the flag link could be more powerful/useful by asking people to explain why they are flagging something. Later on you can release the categorized flagged post dataset for others to train an algorithm against. If someone is willing to spend the time to click on flag, they are demonstrating that they care about post/comment quality and that is itself a good indicator that they'd be willing to spend the time to tell you exactly why they are flagging something.
"If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically."
3 years ago, HN was great. Amazing in fact. What's changed in 3 years? Certainly not the system. The user base has changed, grown, degenerated into stereotypes and punch lines. There is an old saying that I believe succinctly explains what has happened: Garbage in, garbage out.
I keep seeing people writing about wanting to "improve HN." Every time I see this I think, are these people mad? It's dead Jim. He's been dead. We can all sit here and prod his body and make recommendations for how best to make his arm into a grappling hook or some such nonsense, but at the end of the day, the patient is STILL dead.
If there is one thing I would do to improve HN, it would be to write the death certificate and move on to finding or creating the next HN.
Also, I thought the article was excellent, albeit long.
> Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies.
You may have read a different article. As this article noted before even the first of so many page breaks:
"And in Loma Linda, Calif., we identified a population of Seventh-day Adventists in which most of the adherents’ life expectancy exceeded the American average by about a decade."
A full decade, within the same American safety net, is a tremendous difference. Born SDA myself, I can tell you that Loma Linda is not a hotbed of exercise and caloric restriction. (And the benefits are not localized to Loma Linda; the researchers hit upon SDAs there because the concentration in Loma Linda was high enough to show up on zip based data).
You say that anything other than these two makes a difference takes a mountain of evidence to overcome, well, we have that evidence. SDAs are generally just as sedentary and eat just as much as the average non SDA next door.
What SDAs in Loma Linda do differently: don't drink, don't smoke, take 24 hours away from stress each week, and to a large extent, avoid meat with an otherwise normal diet of grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and dairy.
So does it apply to all SDA's or just in Loma Linda. This reminds me of the best schools being small schools example, where governments tried to make schools smaller, ignoring the fact that the worst schools were small schools. How do you separate the data from the variance with such small groups?
Admittedly lack of smoking and reduced stressed are well studied factors: avoiding red meat can help, although entirely non-meat diets commonly hurt from inadequate amounts of iron and in some cases protein. Drinking in moderation can have health benefits however, so it seems strange to list it first, even though binging and alcoholism is terrible for life expectancy.
I actually tend to disagree with PG slightly (here comes massive downvotes). I find a lot of the moderate: gather more data approaches are in response to one or more wild leaps unsupported by data often on a single anecdote. We leap to causes quickly and badly. Testing our hypothesis with good data or at least many anecdotes (those of customers) is a great thing for start-ups. Being skeptical of conclusions from a single anecdote is useful: if you want to leap to those conlusions you'd do well to add other data or background supporting them.
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Imagine you have a randomly distributed age population. When you break it into groups (especially small groups), you will ALWAYS find a group with the largest average lifespan. Depending on what your average group size is, their lifespan can easily be several standard deviations higher than the overall average.
"Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome."
Not accurate. Smoking takes about 10 years off life expectancy, which is thought to be the reason why hispanics have a longer life expectancy than non-hispanic whites in the US. Mental illness takes another 10 - 15 years off life expectancy. Being religious adds a couple years to life expectancy, as does social belongingness in general.
> Mental illness takes another 10 - 15 years off life expectancy
"Mental illness" is a pretty broad category. Can you offer a source for this?
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The research I've read seemed conclusive that what you eat is as important or more important as how much. Intuitively it makes sense that giving you body the correct building blocks would make it healthier and that's definitely not just a function of quantity. And from what I've read the science supports it as well. Here's a relevant book about it:
http://www.amazon.com/Anticancer-New-Way-Life-Edition/dp/067...
> Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense.
Well, it is nonsense if you look at it as the sole source of longevity.
But get a diet rich in antioxidants. Add low saturated fat intake. Continuous, low level, healthy exercise. Plenty of fresh vegetables. Low-stress lifestyle. Sense of belonging. All that stuff. Then you reach a tipping point and things start to improve suddenly.
The secret of longevity is probably an all-of-the-above type of thing.
I agree that beneficial factors are synergistic, and that without this kind of positive synergy unusual longevity is unlikely.
The problem is that such factors are different for each individual. It is a conceit of medical research that generally positive factors can be identified easily. People are quite diverse genetically and biochemically, this is behind the argument for getting a genetic test to identify tailor made drug prescriptions. However, biochemical diversity pales in comparison with psychological diversity.
It is utter foolishness to recommend a wide circle of friends to naturally introverted people, for instance, and, in my opinion, borders on a kind of psycho-normative health fascism, let alone the constant recommendations to "believe in a higher power" to live longer.
In fact, it seems to me that a common feature of interviews with very long lived people is a touch of grouchiness and a refusal to go along with the the received wisdom.
The other problem with blue zones is, they could just be a statistical blip. It's especially bad when you try to identify things like centurions, or spontaneous remission of cancer - things which are rare are the most prone to statistical blips.
I think you mean centenarians. Centurions were Roman foot soldiers.
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To a certain extent they can be, however generally speaking the very tops of this set tend to have both good luck, good genes and good lifestyle. It's hard to get to right near the very top of lifespan without all three, and the population from which we select centrenarians is extremely large. Statistical blips (good luck or unmeasured factors) can be relevant, even highly relevant, but unless you're overlooking very important things it's extremely unlikely to rise to the top without favorable outcomes in other factors.
So maybe we observe things that are 95% of optimal instead of the best genes in the data set. Or maybe we observe diets that have 90% of the performance of optimal diets. We still learn a hell of a lot.
By optimal I mean best-performing in terms of life expectancy from among the total data set (people) not just among centrenarians.
Could you explain what you mean by "statistical blip"? It seems odd to say that, I mean, wouldn't it imply that there's interference from improper measuring, or interference from variables gone unnoticed, or interference from variables that are irrelevant? I'm probably reading it wrong, but it seems such a bizarre thing to say.
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Not to mention the fact, that the man could've been simply misdiagnosed. It was 60s after all...
It's possible but not so likely, the 60s was not the Middle Ages. In any case, he was clearly very sick when he returned to the island and eventually felt better, became strong and lived into his 90's. Not that that proves anything in itself. It's just a journalistic device to illustrate the point of the story which is that people on this island do live a remarkably long time and that it's worth asking why this is so.
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It's always possible of course, but from the article:
As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis.
So if true, chances of a misdiagnosis are pretty slim.
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It was 1976 and he claims 9 other doctors confirmed the diagnosis.
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I agree. I thought it was obvious from the first part of the article that the man was misdiagnosed.
I would speculate that the main reason of his recovery was associated with life style. Sometimes we underestimate the effect of stress in our lives.
I just came back from the doctor today because a lesion on my foot and the doctor told "funny things happens on your skin because of stress"
And anecdotes about remission can be really dangerous. I've seen people who had spontaneous remission while taking some quack remedy and then parade their story around to convince people not to do evidence-based treatments.
the studies linked to there specifically address antioxidant supplements which you then change into dietary antioxidants as if they are the same thing. They are not. Supplements doing nothing is the norm. It says relatively little about the presence of the same things in a diet. Example: fiber.
> anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity
I've seen claims that having few friends shows up in mortality worse than than a pack-a-day smoking habit. Of course that's all hand-wavy statistical controls, but then again so is the stuff on exercise and calories.
TIL that even if you study longevity for 10+ years, you're never allowed to share anecdotes (or god forbid, close with a joke) ever again unless you're prepared to be crucified by twentysomething pseudo-experts in Silicon Valley.
I think this is how every expert in a non-CS/IT field feels about HN commentary on their field. 95% of what I read about aviation/aerospace here makes me cringe. It's like hearing my parents talk about computers, but with 10x more self-assurance.
Seconded. Any posts having to deal with entertainment media have proven to have armchair experts all over them, and few if any voices of reason.
What I read in the comments about Cancer...
Just...
Wow.
TIL if you're a twentysomething you're not allowed to have critical opinions.
It goes both ways.
Qualitative difference between expert with years of experience and twentysomethings lacking any experience justifies it not working both ways.
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Single page, for those who prefer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-...
I hate this kind of reporting. I read through the entire first page without the slightest clue as to what the article is actually about -- I'm pretty sure it's not all just for one guy's life story.
But by that point I was tired of reading, and quit.
Cut it out with the pathos and human interest, and get some of the real point in there quicker.
No.
Don't worry, 57 blogs will distill it down to the core 5 points and post them in a bulleted list with a link-bait title by Friday. But writing is much more than 'get to the point as fast as possible'. These kind of stories are far more interesting than the quick summary articles found on most shitty websites. If you don't like the style, then don't click through to the New Yorker, New York Times, etc.
> But writing is much more than 'get to the point as fast as possible'.
I agree with you, but my personal reading sweet spot is to get to the point a bit faster than the author of this piece did.
Cut it out with the pathos and human interest, and get some of the real point in there quicker.
Maybe you could slow down and read the part about how slowing down is good for you.
While slowing down IS great, I do sympathize with the desire to get my information without "human interest" and the infotainment slant that tends to skew pertinent facts.
This sort of thinking is actually a large part of the piece.. I'd highly recommend giving it an honest and unaffected read, it's thought-provoking stuff
It's not that I'm mister "New-York-City always pushing to not waste a minute". My complaint is primarily that the structure pretends to be human-centered, in fact it's nothing but a formula.
Modern news reporting dictates that the journalist kick off with something personally identifiable, and only then ease into the facts. The reasons for this are obvious, I think: readers are more likely to connect with, and thus read, a story that they find strikes a chord with them personally; so let's try to cast about with some pathos, and maybe we'll hit some notes in that chord.
But just as with seeing reported gore or pr0n on reddit, repetition of the same formula over time loses its valence with the reader.
I'm tired of that formula in article after article. I want the journalists to find new ways to accomplish it.
It's not this article specifically; this is just one example. It struck me at this time, though, because it's pretty long, and I got through a pretty good chunk of it without a single direct reference to the article's thesis, so it was quite egregious.
I completely agree. If I follow an interesting link, read an interesting opening paragraph or two, and then hit a paragraph that completely changes the subject with something like "Paul Steve, a little hobbit of a man, sits before me sipping a glass of warm tea as he gazes out across the morning Texas plains", then I scroll way down to verify the page 1/10 before getting the hell out of Dodge.
I was the complete opposite. I found the story compelling and interesting from the get go. Had they opened with stats from a study, I probably would have stopped there. The personal story hooked me.
I'm not sure why are you saying it's unclear what the article is about, IMO the headline elegantly explains the subject and basic idea, while also giving some notion about the style. I was turned off by the anecdata that the article begins with, but I didn't expect hard science anyway. Having finished it, I find it interesting and well-written. =)
I read through the entire first page without the slightest clue as to what the article is actually about
The last paragraph on the front page tells you exactly what the article is about. Opening with an human anecdote is a common trope in long-form journalism, because that's what a majority of people want before they will put in the time to read several thousand words about mortality statistics.
I guess you're the Samos type.
I usually start at the 3rd or 4th paragraph to cut through the BS. If it sounds interesting, then I'll go back and read the beginning.
Since this is a board for computer folks, this type of opinion is not surprising. :)
Disclaimer: Greek islander. Their diet is not that different from many other Greek islands. What I find different is the total lack of stress. It's not that people wake up late. It's that they are worry free. You go to a cafeteria sit and wait and noboby comes. You get up go inside and ask for a coffee and they show you the coffee pot. Or they smile and tell you that you are free to make it yourself. They will probably not move a finger. Then you leave the money on the table and leave. When the article says they wake up late, there are no shops in the morning. They are open when the owner feels like it, and the system works quite well since everybody else knows it... Doors in villages are unlocked. Funerals and marriages of the locals are a special occasion but people don't dress up that much. Everything is serene and simple. Comming from Athens this is very very frustrating at the beggining but I grew to like it. The place is very different from anything else I have seen.
I wonder if this article has some sort of selection bias. After all, communities that have the lowest and highest rates of cancer in the US are small towns of <100 people.
It's easy to find several small towns in the US where people have unusually high longevity. After all, you have many to choose from.
What's more curious is to make a hypothesis around diet and exercise, and then show causality across all similar islands in Greece.
There's also crazily high variation in rare events, like living past 100 or surviving "incurable" cancer. But those are the things which people are interested in.
That the guy survived lung cancer seems more likely a misdiagnosis or rare spontaneous remission than some kind of cause-effect.
My vote however does go for: stress level, diet, and enough physical activity. Genetics too but you can't control that.
It's not entirely clear how rare it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_remission#Frequency...
Stories like this are a little dangerous when taken at face value. Americans sometimes get diagnosed with cancer and then have spontaneous remission too. We don't know anything concrete about this guy's case. It's also not a good idea to say that a Mediterranean diet is ideal for anyone that doesn't have a Mediterranean ancestry. Greeks have been eating the same sorts of foods for a long time and are most likely more adapted to them than I would be. My hypothesis is that any society that doesn't drink sugary drinks, eats enough fat (olive oil, goat cheese in this case), doesn't often overeat, and gets plenty of exercise should have a healthy population.
The point that interested me most was how instead of a quick fix or a band-aid approach the whole being healthy is interwoven in their lifestyle. They don't exercise to reduce a few kilos, rather it is impossible for them to not exercise because there isn't any other way of getting around. Same with food, they're not trying to eat healthy like us but the food they know to cook is just healthy.. it's not as a quick-fix to reduce weight.
This point is interesting to me because I was recently reading a book called 8 Weeks To Optimum Health and the author (Andrew Weil i think) mentions that it is good to add a little turmeric to your diet. Now having been lived in India all my life, we all have been eating turmeric all our lives without ever giving much thought to it. It's not something we do to remain healthy, but rather something without which you can't food here. I don't remember not eating it for the last 30 years. Unfortunately, we counter-balance it with fried samosas, etc but still the point to take is when a society as a whole develops good habits it often becomes way too easy for everyone to follow through without missing a day of that (for decades).
I come from a near by island and I had heard some of the facts about people in Ikaria before reading this article (eg that they do not wake up ealy) as well as some more that I did not see mentioned in the article (eg I have been told that they do not lock their stores, they just leave them open in case anyone needs something).
I would really*very much AND strongly like to give a hint to all those who are skeptical about this article that they should consider that a vastly different way of their life can very well exist. You do not HAVE to be a well educated smart hard working entrepreneur to exist on earth. People existed well before that and will do for some more time (if our "civilized" "modern" world does not succeed in destroying our planet.
I would also like to point out that the western world (especially the "civilized" world) has actually failed in the FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN NEEDS, ie food and sleep. Having lived in a place where organic food was the only food I am sick and tired of seeing people eating "healthy" food which in fact is nothing more than a company's new product.
The easiest way to live past 100? Use your father's birth certificate.
Guess I'm a cynic because that occurred to me too.
It's easy to imagine. You've got six months to live. You move to a place where you won't run into people you know. You reconnect with relatives and childhood friends. You realize you could transfer your identity to a brother or friend and hand off your pension/social-security. Or avoid inheritance tax. Your wife and parents agree.
You die and are buried overlooking the blue Mediterranean. There's a small ceremony. The sun is shining. Life goes on.
Dan Buettner also held a presentation at TED in 2009 called "How to live to be 100+":
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100....
This reminds me of something I've noticed lately.
I spend every Saturday afternoon, and most Sunday afternoons, taking 2-3 hour naps. They are great for decompressing and relaxing. I actually enjoy them a lot more than the normal sleeps I get at night. There's something very satisfying about waking up and finding out that it's still the same day!
On a related note, most of my friends who complain about being "stressed out" never spend their weekends actually relaxing. Instead, they rush from one activity/event to another, drive from location to location. Then when the weekend is over they say in dismay, "I can't believe it's Monday already." My guess is that if they spent their weekend being laid back, the weekend would feel a lot longer and they would be re-energized before the next week starts.
Oh boy, 4 years.
Eureka. You've done it. You've found the secret to eternal life.
If you had asked me the same question in middle school, I would have said that I was having all sorts of sex too.
This is a common pattern in the very poor. When you don't have any savings, you can't afford any interruptions in your income stream. Consequently, they're forced to be jacks of all trade, master of none. This makes it impossible to specialize in any one field, and lack of income means they can't make any capital investments.
I'd hate to be homosexual here, or be a member of any kind of minority group.
Anyway, the effect is almost certainly due to a "small study effect" sampling bias. In a tiny population (one island) a handful of exceptions (164 people over 90) massively affects the average lifespan. There's no randomization or blinding at all: observational studies like these are exquisitely sensitive to methodology errors, especially when examining small effects.
I wish someone like Bill Gates would stop doing sisyphean third world do-gooder junk and fund some long term, large controlled studies on humans instead. It seems to me that to do actual science on human health you need space program like money. So instead we get all this observational garbage.
Really interesting to see this here on my first morning after beginning my segmented sleep experiment. I took a quarter pill of melatonin yesterday around 6pm and slept from 6:30 till 8:30, then quickly fell asleep again till 11:30. I then failed to fall asleep at 2:30am after a wonderful mellow productive night programming session, and had to skip the second sleep.
During the morning I found, completely by chance, some articles on a fasting diet from the mark's daily apple blog. And I had been without eating since first falling asleep (and still am), so I eagerly gobbled it up as validation on all those breakfasts I have skipped.
And finally I talked with my roomate about living long as related to these little body hacking experiments.
Segmented sleep? Melatonin?
Maybe it's just my Mediterranean upbringing talking but I think I'll stick with healthy food, good wine, 8 hours sleep, and surrounding myself with people I like.
Nontraditional sleep patterns are a common fad here at HN; though you've been around to probably see one or two of those and are probably trolling to catch people like me, so ... I'll just shut up now.
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Stop worrying so much about it if you don't want to age fast
would anybody like to give a TL;DR synopsis?
1. Random anecdote.
2. Lots of exercise and healthy food and many friends even for very old people, on average results in a long life.
3. Joke about the guy from the anecdote, apparently all his American doctors died, while he is in his 90s on his little Greek island.
> would anybody like to give a TL;DR synopsis?
It says: The TLDR lifestyle kills you.
If we assume the article is true, people for whom it would have most utility would be least likely to have patience to read it.
Precisely. What is the hurry with everyone?
We’re all gonna die. Let’s be cool to each other and try to enjoy the ride.
Oh, time for my nap!
Eat less meat. Exercise. Take plenty of naps. And have lots of social interaction.
The Standard American Diet causes illness and disease.
Everyone seems to be trying to get the quick answer to longevity from this article. The message I took home is that there _is_ no quick answer. No-one really knows why these people live longer.
What they do know is that they lead a completely different kind of lifestyle from us. The whole community is relaxed and randomly happen to have a diet and exercise patterns which may contribute to longevity.
Unfortunately it seems that while we're living busy and stressful lifestyles this kind of longevity is out of reach for us.
If nothing else, the article made me want to eat some Mediterranean food.
While reading the story of this man that cures his cancer without resorting to modern medecine is endearing. I cannot stop thinking about Steve Jobs that tried to cure himself of cancer without modern medicine and of the fatal consequences of his actions.
I heard tell or a similar tale in he Med. where he natural hot springs were a trace radioactive. It was thus hypothesized that this small, consistent dose was partially responsible for the almost zero rate of cancer on the island.
It might be BS, it might not be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
It is not that much about diet, it is about having less stress and worries of all kinds, and have good habits, such as mixing periods of physical activity and with total rest (taking naps).
It is not like staying all the time in a passive stress (or depression) - having a high level of stress hormones without any physical activities.
And the last but not least, there are emotion contagiousness - one can see it a subway. "Toxic people" is very real thing.
Then comes the media with its pressure about sex (which is about youth and health) and wealth (which is a weak substitute for the two former), and these material pseudo-achievements that one must accomplish.
All these factors together, plus many more - such as drinking water, air, soil in which vegetables and grapes grown, contributes to longevity, of course. But it seems like there is no one which makes it all - no shortcut, no way to buy it.
I believe it is much more about the state of the mind, which influence everything, including inner bodily processes and rhythms. Mind is first, environment is second, adversaries is third. ''Hell is other people'', you know.)
The real magic to this island is the Zen its residents practice without trying.
In addition to what the article says, this particular island sure has a very healthy way of living overall, not necessarily in the medical sense.
Shops and offices open at noon, and people generally wake up late. They do stay up late at night.
In general, they don't follow a particular timetable, they go as they feel. They are mostly joyous and celebrating, with what we would call a "cafe culture" (only the are as likely to party with hard grappa-like liquors).
Their culture as relates to time is something that's unlike even nearby islands. This "on demand" thing? They are not for it.
Living in a wonderful land surrounded by wonderful, swimmable sea, doesn't hurt either.