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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

• kolinko 14y ago
  Not to mention the fact, that the man could've been simply misdiagnosed. It was 60s after all...
  • GiraffeNecktie 14y ago
    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.
    • mistercow 14y ago
      >It's possible but not so likely There are a lot of people, so it's pretty likely that a handful will be misdiagnosed with terminal illnesses, but never find out they were misdiagnosed. Those handful are the ones you'll hear about. After all, you aren't going to read the amazing story of the guy who was given nine months to live, and then died nine months later.
      • Symmetry 14y ago
        But on the other hand, if someone is diagnosed with a terminal disease and somehow has a very unlikely recovery that's also disporportionatly likely to make the news. Though we shouldn't dwell too much on the quality of the diagnosis, the fact that we have news organizations filtering our data should make us skeptical about the link between the island and his apparent recovery.
    • mikeash 14y ago
      The odds of a random person being misdiagnosed are quite low. The odds of a person diagnosed with a terminal disease who goes into spontaneous remission having been previously misdiagnosed are quite a lot higher.
  • brianmtully 14y ago
    I agree. I thought it was obvious from the first part of the article that the man was misdiagnosed.
  • arbuge 14y ago
    It was 1976 and he claims 9 other doctors confirmed the diagnosis.
    • stephengillie 14y ago
      He probably told each successive doctor that n-1 doctors diagnosed him this way. The last 3 may have just agreed with the first 6 without performing much diagnosis.
  • tambourine_man 14y ago
    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.
    • robrenaud 14y ago
      He also recalls being 5 years older than his birth certificate says.
      • tambourine_man 14y ago
        That's not uncommon on less urbanized parts of the world. But yeah, we can't tell for sure.
        • dsego 14y ago
          Yup, my mother doesn't now her real birthday, and she was born in '57 in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
    • reinhardt 14y ago
      The verdicts of 10 doctors of the same field, in the same era about the same patient are not exactly independent variables.
      • beagle3 14y ago
        This cannot be stressed strongly enough, and yet is completely ignored (or worse, actively contested) by just about everyone. Most people assume that something that has passed a "peer review" process has been reviewed independently by several people, and is thus more likely to be true. While the people do not collaborate, this is NOT independence in the statistical sense, and thus the likelihood of being is not as high as one would expect. And the many examples of 50-year old accepted wisdom being utterly wrong (e.g. about eggs, cholesterol, salt, monetary easing, saturated fat, ...) seem to fall on deaf ears. At least from my experience.
• pedrocr 14y ago
  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/0670021644/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351085991&sr=8-1&keywords=cancer+schreiber http://www.amazon.com/Anticancer-New-Way-Life-Edition/dp/067...
• wisty 14y ago
  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.
  • bitwize 14y ago
    I think you mean centenarians. Centurions were Roman foot soldiers.
    • loeg 14y ago
      Still, statistically unlikely ;)
    • nasmorn 14y ago
      Centurions were the petty officers of the legion. There was one for every manipel or about 80 legionaires.
  • pourush 14y ago
    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.
    • SapphireSun 14y ago
      It could be a sample size effect. There are all these old people there, but how many? It may have nothing to do with the island, they may all have just been lucky and had a streak of heads in the coin flip game. This is especially likely since the researchers are looking all over the world for these small pockets of longevity. Why don't you ever hear about these things in larger areas? Certainly different countries have very different lifestyles. What's different is that bigger regions have a smaller chance of a freak streak of long lived individuals as a proportion of the population (though as an absolute value, you'll probably find more). I suspect "blue zones" will regress to the mean after these individuals in the study die, but you can never be sure. If they don't, maybe the islands do have an effect (or maybe they started to attract immigrant older people seeking longevity).
• Alex3917 14y ago
  "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.
  • squidsoup 14y ago
    > Mental illness takes another 10 - 15 years off life expectancy "Mental illness" is a pretty broad category. Can you offer a source for this?
    • lostlogin 14y ago
      Have been thinking about this and wondered about suicide. Assuming you count 100% of suicides as relating to mental health related deaths (which I personally don't), it wouldnt take too many young people taking their lives to lower the population average lifespan. However alone suicide wouldn't take that many years off the average.
• mamoswined 14y ago
  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.
• pg 14y ago
  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.
  • pmelendez 14y ago
    > "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.
    • pg 14y ago
      You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. If anyone wants to try to train a filter to detect this sort of comment, I'd be very interested to see the result.
      • hntester123 14y ago
        >You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. Wouldn't that require real AI though? I thought for a minute that NLP (Natural Language Processing, not the other meaning(s) of the acronym) might help, but then thought that it may not work for cases where the comment is quoting another comment. Note: I'm not at all an expert in any of those fields, just interested.
        • adimitrov 14y ago
• pmelendez 14y ago
  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"
• Terretta 14y ago
  > 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.
  • TimPC 14y ago
    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.
• Florin_Andrei 14y ago
  > 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.
  • nacker 14y ago
    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.
• rubashov 14y ago
  > 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.
• nazgulnarsil 14y ago
  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.