I lived in Loma Linda, California for about 6 weeks in the late 1980’s before another company offered me a job in La Jolla for a big pay increase. I quickly decamped for a couple of years of sun & fun at the beach. I wonder how much that 6 weeks of residence in Loma Linda added to my longevity?
intercst
Here’s a TED talk I stumbled across a few years ago. I think you have to do a few more things than eating like an Adventist to get the extra years😉
VeeEnn,
That was excellent. Thanks. I will share that elsewhere.
Well, I’ve been trying to emulate what the successful folk do in the Centenarian Decathlon stakes (per Peter Attia) … minus the “choosing the right parents” bit, seeing as it’s a bit late for that … but have had a bit of a rethink of late. During our stay in England, there were a few short news items on the TV reporting on the imminent release of the Stones’ new album.
Jay-zus …have you seen Keith Richards lately?!?
One question I’ve asked myself about the Blue Zones concept is do these regions still exist? This whole idea came about and received attention in the early aughts … meaning the centenarians who were the backbone of the studies were born in the early 1900s, give or take and questionable records of births etc notwithstanding . Apart from the Loma Linda Adventists, all the other Blue Zone regions were pretty much isolated communities that the 20th century was passing by…with lifestyle very much dictated by circumstances and not choice.
It’d be interesting to see if the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren (and so on) are achieving the same degree of health and well-being without significant medical intervention that those first study subjects displayed.
Health depends mostly on diet, eat crap → die sooner.
The Captain
Indeed … and that’s useful insight for folk who do eat crap or have done at some point in their life. However, even folk who’re Righteous Eaters and all round Good Custodians of their body get sick and can die prematurely. A fact that’s often crowded out of the narrative by the Bad Habits tendencies of so many over the past few decades…but can still get a bit of a look in with these various Centenarian type studies.
I suspect, for instance, that there has been historically very little by way of Type 1 diabetes in these isolated Blue Zone communities…or little by way of the handful of monogenic examples of Familial Hypercholesterolemia…until their remoteness became history. For the simple reason that premature death was inevitable without the sort of extensive medical intervention available elsewhere
The oldest English woman alive? Yes.
In case you want music that completely sucks?
Unfortunately, the data on people living to an unusually old age is deeply flawed. I tracked down data on 80 percent of the world’s people 110 or older and found that in many cases their advanced age is highly improbable. The errors in the data were striking.
The oldest man ever recorded, Jiroemon Kimura from Japan, has three birthdays: One is fudged, one is a typo, and one is supposedly true…Jeanne Calment, supposedly the oldest woman who ever lived, smoked for about 100 years. She burned many of her personal papers when she moved into a nursing home. When it came time to validate her case, demographers argued that she was well known enough in her town that it would have been hard for her case to be one of stolen identity. And when it came to the smoking, the demographers said she “possibly did not inhale at all.” Like many others, her case is questionable…
Errors and anomalies do not stop at individual cases; they permeate extreme-age research. Many of the world’s oldest people are reported to be alive on paper long after they died. The first man to “survive” past 110 actually died at 65, and nobody noticed the mistake for a century.
DB2
