Maybe the point is that taking advice from ANY single person is a bad idea since thay are making conclusions from a sample size of 1, while a "scientist" is telling you things that are statistically more likely to help you?
It's quite unintuitive but us mere mortals are not experts in our own health/longevity.
We know our own bodies better than anybody else experimentally speaking, but we don't know shit about how it works for the most part and we know even less how others work.
Unless it's your area of expertise of course, but then I hope you'll avoid spreading unproven advice.
The guy quoted in the article, Faragher, seems completely unaware of his biogeronologist collegue Valter Longo at the USC Davis School of Geronology and Longevity Institute, whose recommendations have picked up mainstream adoption by the public. Of course, he is probably aware of Longo but he is probably unaware that his statements as quoted in the article, contradict Longo's own first hand research and other additional research on centenarian studies.
In fact, the unhealthy habits that Farragher says are common among most old people are in fact not common lifelong habits of centenarians, according to Longo.
If Faragher is aware of the contradiction then he should state on what evidence and research he is disputing Longo's findings.
Based on his research, Longo's recommendation is basically:
Eat vegetables, complex carbs and whole grains most of the time, fish ocassionally, meat very rarely unless over 65, and fast some of the time.
Longo in fact claims that these are supported--along with epistmilogical and clinical studies-- by centarian studies which are literally first-hand detailed interviews with 100+ year-old people.
Farragher's incomplete explanation of survivorship bias also seems to have confused other commentators in this thread.
I don't understand how your comment answers mine, and what is your actual concern. Assuming Longo conducts good scientific research, the whole article might as well mean "Don't listen to any single old people, read studies from people like Longo".
> In fact, the unhealthy habits that Farragher says are common among most old people are in fact not common lifelong habits of centenarians, according to Longo.
I don't know, but this is certainly not the main point of the article.
I suppose you are taking issues with the two following quotes:
> What you see with most centenarians most of the time – and these are generalisations – is that they don’t take much exercise.
That's where he says "most". Do you have a source to contradict this?
> Quite often, their diets are rather unhealthy
Do you have a source to contradict this? Note that "quite often" is not quite precise, and doesn't mean "most".
Anyway, it takes only some centenarians to have unhealthy habits for the point to still stand. When receiving advice from a centenarian, you don't really know that you are not speaking to one of those. I would even argue that it's not even necessary, because as I developed in another reply to you, nobody actually knows what allowed them to live long. They might as well have some specific genes allowing them to do all sorts of things that would be unhealthy for many people but that have no serious consequences for them.
EDIT: had a response here to your "most" comment because I thought you hadn't seen the full quote from Farragher in the article but saw that you referred to it earlier in your comment and were just making a distinction between the frequency of "exercise" and "healthy diet", so I deleted it.
>Do you have a source to contradict this?
My claim, as I hoped was fairly clear in my comment, was that Valter Longo, an expert with similar crendentials presumably, presents a contradicting view to the source being cited in the article. As I stated in my comment, Longo claims that the healthy diet he prescribes is supported by centenarian studies -- ie supported by interviews with very old people about their diets and way of living. Now if you want me to literally cite Longo's work in detail despite your lack of citations supporting Farragher's position, I only can at the moment point you to Longo's book: The Longevity Diet. I am recalling all this from memory, so I apologize for not providing word-for-word citations. I can only remind you have not done so as well.
>I don't understand how your comment answers mine
Your comment had this phrase:
>Unless it's your area of expertise of course, but then I hope you'll avoid spreading unproven advice.
I was pointing to the irony that the expert quoted in the article was possibly saying something that was itself disputed by other experts in his field.
In fact just a few hours ago, someone shared this article on HN:
The claim in this article is that many of those old people with bad health habits were most likely frauds, and that experts who relied on government statistics, and who didn't bother talking to these people and checking whether these people were actually alive, came to the wrong conclusion. It well be that Longo's research is also affected, but the Farragher quote cited in the article matches the supposed bad habits attributed to those fraudulent (?) Blue Zone inhabitants.
moral of the story: before jumping on an expert's bandwagon, check with other experts.*
> I only can at the moment point you to Longo's book: The Longevity Diet. I am recalling all this from memory, so I apologize for not providing word-for-word citations
No problem with this. To be clear it wasn't a reproach. The name of a book is already something.
> I can only remind you have not done so as well.
Sure, but I don't think I stated much, so I have not much to source.
> Longo claims that the healthy diet he prescribes is supported by centenarian studies -- ie supported by interviews with very old people about their diets and way of living
But that's fine. From what you say he studied his stuff, and yes, one can do that by conducting interviews. Just not from one single random person or a few random people. You take a larger sample, control for biases, all that jazz.
I think I've just understood our main source of disagreement. It seems you took Farragher's position of not taking advice from old people as meaning you can't learn from them, full stop. To me, it means "given one random old person giving health advice, you can't take the advice". I've certainly seen videos of old people with what seemed terrible advice or habits so those statements in the article didn't make me blink for a second.
But if you conduct research and this research includes interviewing a sample of old people, that's very different. I even think you probably can't avoid interviewing a statistically significant sample of people (including some who "made it" to a century) to conduct such research.
> the Farragher quote cited in the article matches the supposed bad habits attributed to those fraudulent (?) Blue Zone inhabitants
I don't think so, and this seems to be the second source of our disagreements. The Guardian link you give says that Blue Zone inhabitants don't seek exercise specifically, because they, in fact, live in a way that naturally exercises their body:
> Remarkably inactive. They didn’t tend to be heavy exercisers, or even to exercise at all. Instead, these people tended to garden, knead dough, and use tools, because movement was a part of their daily lives rather than something they sought out.
This is a very weird way of presenting things by the way. Gardening, kneading dough and using tools are totally physical exercise and the contrary of being "inactive". If you garden all day it doesn't matter one bit that you don't do your biweekly jogging. So the quote from Farragher and this description agree: those people apparently live long because they do indeed physically exercise a lot. The healthy diet is also there:
> Plant-based. Apparently 95% of 100-year-olds eat only plant-based diets, with a heavy emphasis on being bean-based. It never was clarified if this is why they lived so long or a consequence of being so old, but that’s neither here nor there.
I will refrain from commenting that too much, being highly biased here. My diet is plant-based with a healthy amount of beans, so of course it pleases me to read this. Note the "never clarified" warning though.
Now, again: them leaving a long live doesn't mean that everything they do works toward this matter of fact. They are not gods. The bit about wine for instance seems a bit shady to me, scientific results tends to tell that "No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health" [1]. It could very well be that those people would live even longer without the wine. Or not. We don't know everything of course.
It's quite unintuitive but us mere mortals are not experts in our own health/longevity.
We know our own bodies better than anybody else experimentally speaking, but we don't know shit about how it works for the most part and we know even less how others work.
Unless it's your area of expertise of course, but then I hope you'll avoid spreading unproven advice.