12 ms·

The Longevity Experiment

40 points by limist 17y ago

From National Geographic, Dan Buettner's search for the fountain of youth among the longest-lifespan cultures of the world.

grandalf 17y ago
I highly recommend The China Study for a more detailed, epidemiological study of nutrition.
- kingkongrevenge 17y ago
  It's pretty well dismantled. http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html http://www.thegreatcholesterolcon.com/The_China_Study.html http://www.thegreatcholesterolcon.com/The_China_Study.html
  - grandalf 17y ago
    I suppose so, if you consider some random people's blogs authoritative. I thought this was HN and not Reddit :) These are blogs written by people who are promoting a high cholesterol diet -- hmm, ever notice that there is lots of money in promoting nutrition advice that confirms to what people are currently already doing?
  - jshen 17y ago
    peer reviewed science being "dismantled" by some dude's blog. LOL
    - kingkongrevenge 17y ago
      The china study book is just "some dude's book." It is not peer reviewed. Some of the underlying study is, but most of the conclusions expressed in the book are not a product of peer review.
      - Devilboy 17y ago
        This china study 'dude' is a well respected scientist. That blog author is not.
        kingkongrevenge 17y ago
        Did you miss the part where he blatantly misrepresents research? The writer irrelevant. Utter your soothing "well respected scientist" mantra all you want. You can look at the abstracts yourself that show campbell's misrepresentations.
        jshen 17y ago
        care to give an example?
        fatdog789 17y ago
        Yes I did. Campbell did not misrepresent anything; abstracts are highly condensed summations written by someone else who may or may not have the background necessary to fully convey the underlying research. Poorly written abstracts are the leading cause of sensationalist headlines.
      - jshen 17y ago
        The "China study" referred to in the title is the China Project, a study comparing diet, lifestyle and disease chacteristics in sixty five counties in rural China in the 1970's and 1980's conducted jointly by Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. has been at the forefront of nutrition research. His legacy, the China Study, is the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Dr. Campbell is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University and Project Director of the China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project. Dr. Campbell received his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Cornell, and served as a Research Associate at MIT. He spent 10 years on the faculty of Virginia Tech’s Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition before returning to the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell in 1975 where he presently holds his Endowed Chair (now Emeritus).
- zngtk4 17y ago
  On the other hand, as I explain above, epidemiological studies are essentially useless for anything other than formulating hypotheses (see the debacle with hormone replacement therapy). It baffles me that anyone would entirely change their diet and lifestyle based on an epidemiological study.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    So how could they overlook the effects of the hormone treatment if they studied so many women? Shouldn't there be some statistical observations?
    - zngtk4 17y ago
      Absolutely, and the observations suggested that hormone treatment was possibly even beneficial. That's why it's completely true that correlation != causation. You can try to "control" for differences in the observed groups, and epidemiologists try this all the time, but unless they already understand everything involved, it's impossible to get this completely right. And sometimes the things they try to control for are themselves based on other epidemiological studies. This is the main reason we are always hearing in the press about how a "study shows that X is bad for us" then a "study shows that X is good for us". The majority of the time when there are such conflicting studies, it is the result of epidemiology or poorly controlled studies.
      - Tichy 17y ago
        So there was some other factor that by chance made the hormones benefitial for the women in the study? Or all the women somehow where more healthy than "normal" women to begin with? How does that happen? And how could one control for it, wouldn't you need thousands of identical twins?
  - grandalf 17y ago
    The evidence is not just from the epidemiological study, there have been lots of follow-up studies to examine the processes in detail. I would argue that a broad, epidemiological study is the most persuasive sort of evidence to use when considering whether to make drastic changes. Otherwise you're dealing with information like "omega 3s prevent x, y, and z" so you end up taking an Omega 3 supplement along with the dozen other supplements while eating Wendy's for lunch every day. Thinking that health can be understood on the basis of "taking supplement x is good" is the root of the current supplement gold rush (people sell tons of snake oil substances that contain "omega 3's" etc.) and a highly irrational way to behave.
emontero1 17y ago
OK, educate: I don’t want to die at 50. What do I do? The first step is to think about who you hang out with. There’s no silver bullet for longevity. I’m not gonna tell you to take a pill. If your three best friends are obese, there’s a good chance you will be. Surrounding yourself with people who don’t smoke or drink too much and who have a spiritual component in their lives has a profound impact over time. Cut out the toxic people in your life and spend time and effort augmenting your social circle with people who have the right values and a healthy lifestyle. I don't know why, but this snippet brought Robert Greene's The 48 Rules of Power to mind: "Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky" (Rule 10). Of course, Greene's approach can be interpreted as a tad Machiavellian. But the message is still the same: watch who you're hanging out with. I've noticed that many of one's peculiar behavioral habits can be directly attributed to friends and acquaintances. It's interesting to see longevity talked about in the context of the people you spend time with.
- JacobAldridge 17y ago
  My father boiled this down into an aphorism I still use and share. "You are who you hang with." I know sometimes when I'm feeling crap I look at which groups of friends I've been spending time with lately. Always scary stuff.
kingkongrevenge 17y ago
> the more meat you eat, the earlier you die Then why have lifespans gone up and heart disease declined all around the world in lockstep with animal protein consumption? Why do the two longest lived groups in the US (Mormons and upper upper Midwest whites) have high meat consumption?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- jshen 17y ago
  heart disease has increased with meat consumption.
  - zngtk4 17y ago
    Heart disease has also increased with sugar consumption. Older cultures that ate primarily meat, but not a western diet also showed almost no heart disease.
    - Devilboy 17y ago
      Older cultures also didn't live to their 70s like we do now so I'm not convinced that this is a good counter-example.
      - zngtk4 17y ago
        I agree, this is one of the biggest flaws with this line of reasoning. However, it does say something (although it's unclear what it means for us) that some of those cultures had less incidence of the diseases commonly associated with old age compared with nearby similar cultures that ate less or no meat.
        jshen 17y ago
        can you produce a controlled study backing up your assertion ;)
blhack 17y ago
Could you please warn if you're going to link to a page that will launch a print dialog? I appreciate not having to click through pages, etc. a little warning would just be nice.
- rms 17y ago
  It's mostly accepted here that a print dialog pop up is better than having to click through an article divided into five pages.
  - GavinB 17y ago
    Autopager beats either option. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925 What's really needed is an autopager/readability mashup.
- limist 17y ago
  Sorry - I linked to the full version as I figured readers here would prefer to see a click-free version of the story, will add warning in future.
zngtk4 17y ago
>It’s very clear that the more meat you eat, the earlier you die. Cut out as much meat as you can. Absolute nonsense. The only thing that has a clear relationship with extending lifespan is calorie restriction. The rest is very very unclear. This guy finds a population, finds one thing they do that supports his preconceived notions of what makes you live longer, and then says that this population's behavior in this respect proves that this action makes you live longer. So he finds a vegetarian culture that lives long and says OK vegetarianism makes you live longer. He finds a culture that drinks a lot of alcohol and says OK, alcohol doesn't limit longevity. He finds a culture that eats a balanced diet, a culture that exercises a lot, etc. etc. None if this is really any type of proof, and if you examine many different cultures, you will find his evidence is contradicted by other cultures (meat eating cultures that live longer and have fewer health problems than nearby vegetarian cultures, for instance). Our knowledge of what helps humans to live the longest possible life is, sadly, very limited still.
- jshen 17y ago
  there are many peer reviewed and exhaustive studies that show that meat consumption is related to a shorter life. check out the china study for starters.
  - zngtk4 17y ago
    There are zero controlled studies showing this, however, and all of these studies are epidemiological/observational. It's confounded by things such as the fact that many of the groups that are vegetarian also essentially engage in calorie restriction (which has been shown in controlled animal studies to work). Meat eating, however, hasn't even been shown in animal studies to necessarily be bad, because it entirely depends on the animal (feed meat to a rabbit, bad things happen, feed grains to a cat, bad things happen). Cultures that engage in significant meat eating also tend to eat a lot of sugar, trans-fats, and other things. These studies are far from conclusive as a result. Observational studies that are peer reviewed and exhaustive can yield results that are entirely opposite reality. Dozens of peer reviewed, exhaustive observational studies told doctors that hormone replacement therapy reduced the incidence of heart attacks. Only after 16,000 women were enrolled in a double-blind controlled trial of hormone-replacement therapy in the 90s (after 6 million women had received the therapy) did we learn that heart disease, breast cancer, stroke, and dementia actually were more common in people receiving hormone replacement therapy vs placebo. In other words, the exact opposite. Epidemiology is only of value in formulating hypotheses, not in proving anything.
mgenzel 17y ago
Until there's a controlled, replicable method, all these studies, approaches, genius ideas are just blah-blah-blah exercises in pretty correlations.
- quizbiz 17y ago
  Live a healthy lifestyle, consume less, push your body to function efficiently and you will be more likely to live longer. You might still die in a car accident but it makes sense that changes in day to day behavior affect how your cells regenerate.
- jshen 17y ago
  By your reasoning, all this stuff about climate change is just blah blah blah. Correlations seen numerous times in independent efforts are meaningful. I'm also not sure what you mean by "controlled". For example, in the china study the group that ate more meat was compared to a similar group in the same country with the same lifestyle. Isn't this the definition of a control group?
  - kingkongrevenge 17y ago
    > I'm also not sure what you mean by "controlled". Obviously not. You just offered the definition of uncontrolled. > climate change is just blah Well he makes a pretty good point that data dredging for correlations is bad science. But the real reason climate change is "blah" is that the world isn't actually warming. Clearly shown for over ten years now by satellite and ground station data. There was only warming after a long cooling trend that lasted into the 70s. http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/06/how-the-us-temperature-record-is-adjusted/ http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/06/how-the-us-temperat...
    - jshen 17y ago
      please explain what you mean by "controlled" then.
jacquesm 17y ago
correlation != causation.
- fatdog789 17y ago
  Isn't this article about correlation? Isn't the point of the article that something about eating less meat (whether it's lifestyle, actual dietary effects, or something innocuous) correlates, whether or not there is a causal relationship*, to significantly increased longevity?
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    If there is no direct causal link then all correlation does is suggest such a link. You have to FIND the link and prove its real in order to make this about something. X is observed in people doing Y is not a scientific breakthrough, it is an observation. If not all people that do Y have X there is no story, just more work to get to the bottom of what is going on.
Shakescode 17y ago
Re: all the deficiencies of this article: It's journalism(-ish). Not even science journalism. The NG heading says it all: "Adventure Travel - National Geographic Adventure Magazine" ...not even the main NG site, but the "adventure" subdomain. More suitable for pondering than analyzing, IMHO.

40 points by limist 17y ago

From National Geographic, Dan Buettner's search for the fountain of youth among the longest-lifespan cultures of the world.

grandalf 17y ago

I highly recommend The China Study for a more detailed, epidemiological study of nutrition.

kingkongrevenge 17y ago
It's pretty well dismantled. http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html http://www.thegreatcholesterolcon.com/The_China_Study.html http://www.thegreatcholesterolcon.com/The_China_Study.html
- grandalf 17y ago
  I suppose so, if you consider some random people's blogs authoritative. I thought this was HN and not Reddit :) These are blogs written by people who are promoting a high cholesterol diet -- hmm, ever notice that there is lots of money in promoting nutrition advice that confirms to what people are currently already doing?
- jshen 17y ago
  peer reviewed science being "dismantled" by some dude's blog. LOL
  - kingkongrevenge 17y ago
    The china study book is just "some dude's book." It is not peer reviewed. Some of the underlying study is, but most of the conclusions expressed in the book are not a product of peer review.
    - Devilboy 17y ago
      This china study 'dude' is a well respected scientist. That blog author is not.
      - kingkongrevenge 17y ago
        Did you miss the part where he blatantly misrepresents research? The writer irrelevant. Utter your soothing "well respected scientist" mantra all you want. You can look at the abstracts yourself that show campbell's misrepresentations.
        jshen 17y ago
        care to give an example?
        fatdog789 17y ago
        Yes I did. Campbell did not misrepresent anything; abstracts are highly condensed summations written by someone else who may or may not have the background necessary to fully convey the underlying research. Poorly written abstracts are the leading cause of sensationalist headlines.
    - jshen 17y ago
      The "China study" referred to in the title is the China Project, a study comparing diet, lifestyle and disease chacteristics in sixty five counties in rural China in the 1970's and 1980's conducted jointly by Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. has been at the forefront of nutrition research. His legacy, the China Study, is the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Dr. Campbell is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University and Project Director of the China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project. Dr. Campbell received his master’s degree and Ph.D. from Cornell, and served as a Research Associate at MIT. He spent 10 years on the faculty of Virginia Tech’s Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition before returning to the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell in 1975 where he presently holds his Endowed Chair (now Emeritus).
zngtk4 17y ago
On the other hand, as I explain above, epidemiological studies are essentially useless for anything other than formulating hypotheses (see the debacle with hormone replacement therapy). It baffles me that anyone would entirely change their diet and lifestyle based on an epidemiological study.
- Tichy 17y ago
  So how could they overlook the effects of the hormone treatment if they studied so many women? Shouldn't there be some statistical observations?
  - zngtk4 17y ago
    Absolutely, and the observations suggested that hormone treatment was possibly even beneficial. That's why it's completely true that correlation != causation. You can try to "control" for differences in the observed groups, and epidemiologists try this all the time, but unless they already understand everything involved, it's impossible to get this completely right. And sometimes the things they try to control for are themselves based on other epidemiological studies. This is the main reason we are always hearing in the press about how a "study shows that X is bad for us" then a "study shows that X is good for us". The majority of the time when there are such conflicting studies, it is the result of epidemiology or poorly controlled studies.
    - Tichy 17y ago
      So there was some other factor that by chance made the hormones benefitial for the women in the study? Or all the women somehow where more healthy than "normal" women to begin with? How does that happen? And how could one control for it, wouldn't you need thousands of identical twins?
- grandalf 17y ago
  The evidence is not just from the epidemiological study, there have been lots of follow-up studies to examine the processes in detail. I would argue that a broad, epidemiological study is the most persuasive sort of evidence to use when considering whether to make drastic changes. Otherwise you're dealing with information like "omega 3s prevent x, y, and z" so you end up taking an Omega 3 supplement along with the dozen other supplements while eating Wendy's for lunch every day. Thinking that health can be understood on the basis of "taking supplement x is good" is the root of the current supplement gold rush (people sell tons of snake oil substances that contain "omega 3's" etc.) and a highly irrational way to behave.

emontero1 17y ago

OK, educate: I don’t want to die at 50. What do I do? The first step is to think about who you hang out with. There’s no silver bullet for longevity. I’m not gonna tell you to take a pill. If your three best friends are obese, there’s a good chance you will be. Surrounding yourself with people who don’t smoke or drink too much and who have a spiritual component in their lives has a profound impact over time. Cut out the toxic people in your life and spend time and effort augmenting your social circle with people who have the right values and a healthy lifestyle. I don't know why, but this snippet brought Robert Greene's The 48 Rules of Power to mind: "Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky" (Rule 10). Of course, Greene's approach can be interpreted as a tad Machiavellian. But the message is still the same: watch who you're hanging out with. I've noticed that many of one's peculiar behavioral habits can be directly attributed to friends and acquaintances. It's interesting to see longevity talked about in the context of the people you spend time with.

JacobAldridge 17y ago
My father boiled this down into an aphorism I still use and share. "You are who you hang with." I know sometimes when I'm feeling crap I look at which groups of friends I've been spending time with lately. Always scary stuff.

kingkongrevenge 17y ago

> the more meat you eat, the earlier you die Then why have lifespans gone up and heart disease declined all around the world in lockstep with animal protein consumption? Why do the two longest lived groups in the US (Mormons and upper upper Midwest whites) have high meat consumption?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jshen 17y ago
heart disease has increased with meat consumption.
- zngtk4 17y ago
  Heart disease has also increased with sugar consumption. Older cultures that ate primarily meat, but not a western diet also showed almost no heart disease.
  - Devilboy 17y ago
    Older cultures also didn't live to their 70s like we do now so I'm not convinced that this is a good counter-example.
    - zngtk4 17y ago
      I agree, this is one of the biggest flaws with this line of reasoning. However, it does say something (although it's unclear what it means for us) that some of those cultures had less incidence of the diseases commonly associated with old age compared with nearby similar cultures that ate less or no meat.
      - jshen 17y ago
        can you produce a controlled study backing up your assertion ;)

blhack 17y ago

Could you please warn if you're going to link to a page that will launch a print dialog? I appreciate not having to click through pages, etc. a little warning would just be nice.

rms 17y ago
It's mostly accepted here that a print dialog pop up is better than having to click through an article divided into five pages.
- GavinB 17y ago
  Autopager beats either option. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925 What's really needed is an autopager/readability mashup.
limist 17y ago
Sorry - I linked to the full version as I figured readers here would prefer to see a click-free version of the story, will add warning in future.

zngtk4 17y ago

>It’s very clear that the more meat you eat, the earlier you die. Cut out as much meat as you can. Absolute nonsense. The only thing that has a clear relationship with extending lifespan is calorie restriction. The rest is very very unclear. This guy finds a population, finds one thing they do that supports his preconceived notions of what makes you live longer, and then says that this population's behavior in this respect proves that this action makes you live longer. So he finds a vegetarian culture that lives long and says OK vegetarianism makes you live longer. He finds a culture that drinks a lot of alcohol and says OK, alcohol doesn't limit longevity. He finds a culture that eats a balanced diet, a culture that exercises a lot, etc. etc. None if this is really any type of proof, and if you examine many different cultures, you will find his evidence is contradicted by other cultures (meat eating cultures that live longer and have fewer health problems than nearby vegetarian cultures, for instance). Our knowledge of what helps humans to live the longest possible life is, sadly, very limited still.

jshen 17y ago
there are many peer reviewed and exhaustive studies that show that meat consumption is related to a shorter life. check out the china study for starters.
- zngtk4 17y ago
  There are zero controlled studies showing this, however, and all of these studies are epidemiological/observational. It's confounded by things such as the fact that many of the groups that are vegetarian also essentially engage in calorie restriction (which has been shown in controlled animal studies to work). Meat eating, however, hasn't even been shown in animal studies to necessarily be bad, because it entirely depends on the animal (feed meat to a rabbit, bad things happen, feed grains to a cat, bad things happen). Cultures that engage in significant meat eating also tend to eat a lot of sugar, trans-fats, and other things. These studies are far from conclusive as a result. Observational studies that are peer reviewed and exhaustive can yield results that are entirely opposite reality. Dozens of peer reviewed, exhaustive observational studies told doctors that hormone replacement therapy reduced the incidence of heart attacks. Only after 16,000 women were enrolled in a double-blind controlled trial of hormone-replacement therapy in the 90s (after 6 million women had received the therapy) did we learn that heart disease, breast cancer, stroke, and dementia actually were more common in people receiving hormone replacement therapy vs placebo. In other words, the exact opposite. Epidemiology is only of value in formulating hypotheses, not in proving anything.

mgenzel 17y ago

Until there's a controlled, replicable method, all these studies, approaches, genius ideas are just blah-blah-blah exercises in pretty correlations.

quizbiz 17y ago
Live a healthy lifestyle, consume less, push your body to function efficiently and you will be more likely to live longer. You might still die in a car accident but it makes sense that changes in day to day behavior affect how your cells regenerate.
jshen 17y ago
By your reasoning, all this stuff about climate change is just blah blah blah. Correlations seen numerous times in independent efforts are meaningful. I'm also not sure what you mean by "controlled". For example, in the china study the group that ate more meat was compared to a similar group in the same country with the same lifestyle. Isn't this the definition of a control group?
- kingkongrevenge 17y ago
  > I'm also not sure what you mean by "controlled". Obviously not. You just offered the definition of uncontrolled. > climate change is just blah Well he makes a pretty good point that data dredging for correlations is bad science. But the real reason climate change is "blah" is that the world isn't actually warming. Clearly shown for over ten years now by satellite and ground station data. There was only warming after a long cooling trend that lasted into the 70s. http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/06/how-the-us-temperature-record-is-adjusted/ http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/06/how-the-us-temperat...
  - jshen 17y ago
    please explain what you mean by "controlled" then.

jacquesm 17y ago

correlation != causation.

fatdog789 17y ago
Isn't this article about correlation? Isn't the point of the article that something about eating less meat (whether it's lifestyle, actual dietary effects, or something innocuous) correlates, whether or not there is a causal relationship*, to significantly increased longevity?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  If there is no direct causal link then all correlation does is suggest such a link. You have to FIND the link and prove its real in order to make this about something. X is observed in people doing Y is not a scientific breakthrough, it is an observation. If not all people that do Y have X there is no story, just more work to get to the bottom of what is going on.

Shakescode 17y ago

Re: all the deficiencies of this article: It's journalism(-ish). Not even science journalism. The NG heading says it all: "Adventure Travel - National Geographic Adventure Magazine" ...not even the main NG site, but the "adventure" subdomain. More suitable for pondering than analyzing, IMHO.