… pension fraud.
A recent study revealed that many supercentanarians are actually the 80-90–year-old adult children of a deceased parent who have assumed the decedant’s identity to scam additional pension benefits.
Are Supercentenarian Claims Based on Age Exaggeration? - Blue Zones
intercst
I heard that story on Slate Money or another podcast a few weeks ago. Shoddy record keeping like inaccurate birth dates may be as much to blame as fraud.
This idea has been floated since the Blue Zones was first coined as a phrase in the very early aughts…most likely as some sort of push back against the folk who made such a fuss about the notion (journalists like Dan Buettner and magazines like Nat Geo spring to mind)
I suspect the reality lies somewhere between the two. For sure, there are likely far more nuanced explanations of longevity than the single component/Blue Zone diet promoters would have us believe. However, fraud on such a large scale, but in isolated communities is equally as implausible.
Additionally, the “research” that questions this idea of pockets of very old oldsters is in the form of a pre print…so not even an idea whose time has come. It’s not even necessary for rudimentary editioral review and preliminary publication any longer for the banner headlines of Science By Press Release to grab attention.
There were stories about small villages in Italy where people rarely died. They lived to 100+ while pension checks were coming in every month. Turns out that it was quite common for families to “delay” reports of death to enjoy those pension checks for a bit longer (sometimes decades longer). And there were a few individual stories from Japan, but those were one-off cases. I also doubt it can happen on a large scale in any modernized country anymore.
There are also examples of longevity in isolated communities that have been investigated closely and an underlying genetic quirk of “inbreeding” that led to it (just like plenty of negatives).
Check out the discovery of ApoA-1Milano by researchers decades before the moniker Blue Zones was thunk up (I discovered that on that AbFab series “The Cholesterol Plays” by TMF poster edmiller back on the Foolish Collective board in Days of Yore). Or the discovery of the significance of the PCSK9 protein (and subsequent development of PCSK9 inhibitors) I first heard of this on Peter Attia’s site. It’s a shame that the old boards are inaccessible. I wonder if that was listed in edmiller’s list of things to keep an eye on for investment purposes.