So there's this short little book "Food rules" by Michael Pollan. Not much content but seems like the author went through a lot of research. He comes to conclusion based on this tons of data that all we really know for sure is that people living in these blue regions are living much longer and it seems to be related to what they eat. That it is basically the only solid and stable data point we have. Welp. (I'm overstating it a bit, but not by that much)
Yes, I happen to be interested in this topic and had previously read this paper. So it's interesting to see how many of the commentors (even on HN) didn't even read the first few paragraphs of the paper or the article. I guess I must do that with articles I'm not previously familiar with. :-)
keeping in mind that they live in countries with higher life expectancy than most countries anyway. Indeed they may not even be outliers within those countries.
Except, it misses the point and doesn't really do that while being persuasive.
According to the Blue Zone researchers, some of the Blue Zones are disappearing because the generations that came after the oldest live differently and much shorter. By differently, their eating, body movement, and other characteristics are different. Looking at the whole population doesn't segment for differences between generation. So, nuance is lost.
In some areas, like the Blue Zone in the US other research is finding the people who live there are healthier than the surrounding populations. Then you have to ask, what area do you average over for your measurement and statistics?
> According to the Blue Zone researchers, some of the Blue Zones are disappearing because the generations that came after the oldest live differently and much shorter.
Of course they would say that. But if these zones are simultaneously recording births better and reducing welfare fraud, and if 80%+ of the centenarians either had no birth certificate or were actually dead, I'm going to need more than "but they're also changing lifestyles" as an explanation.
We're talking here about unusually long life, not just "he's still going strong at 85" long. No one here is arguing that people who are active and eat right don't have a longer healthspan, but that's a concept that's provable without the so-called Blue Zones.
I listened to an interview with the author during the week, in short as soon as you start getting reliable recording of births and clamp down on old age welfare fraud the phenomenon disappears.
"Then you have to ask, what area do you average over for your measurement and statistics?"
This is a big thing that I didn't seen in the paper this article is based on. It seemed like the author was comparing adjusted numbers from the blue zone with unadjusted numbers from non-blue zones. Without comprehensive investigation of error rates and even different error mechanisms by locale, it seems like a poor comparison to make. Comparing life expectancies is better than comparing outlier centarian numbers, but you are right that it depends on what other areas we are using as the baseline or average (and I take it a step farther by saying it depends on what error adjustments need to be made to both data sets).
The whole blue zone idea is a bit misapplied though. These population studies find new variables to look at. Then you have targeted studies to investigate thos variables. Discrediting the centarian numbers doesn't discredit the findings on stuff like a mederteranian diet having better health outcomes than the standard western diet, etc.
Kinda depends on how much you value inductive vs. deductive reasoning, but the authors make the deductive case that:
- There's strong incentives to misreport in these areas (the compelling example from Sardinia was that the person is alive for the purposes of pension fraud, but really dead)
- People who are incentivized to report people being older than they are will do so
And the inductive case relies on data, which is presumed to be totally flawed because of the misaligned incentives.
It is very much to the point, addressing the specific claims and methodology of a specific (and apparently somewhat influential) study.
You are, of course, free to speculate that there are other issues related to longevity than those considered in the study in question, but even if these suppositions are correct, in no way would this justify saying the paper being discussed here misses the point. The point is that the blue zones study is too flawed to support any definite position, which includes both its own conclusions and the more nuanced issues about which you speculate.
> It is very much to the point, addressing the specific claims and methodology of a specific (and apparently somewhat influential) study.
Except, the author doesn't discredit specific claims of the Blue Zones. For example, the Blue Zones might take an area and state there is a higher rate of centurions who are healthy and capable. The counter to that might be the average life span in the region isn't an outlier. In one case you're looking at a targeted subgroup and the other your looking at the population as a whole. One observations doesn't disprove another.
This is just one example. It's why I call the work misleading.
You are using "might" more than once here. I have my opinions too, and FWIW, this looks like motivated reasoning, holding the response to a much higher standard of proof than the original claim.
There was a study I read about in Barrons that was noting that places a western diet goes the health care costs then start going up. Other studies have found that a western diet leads to more unhealthy outcomes (increased disease and earlier death).
I state this to point out that there are other variables at plan than just changes in record keeping.
Could there be third correlated variable namely income that correlate with both western diet and health care costs? Or even better records of disease and deaths?
Not exactly. It establishes that error rates are high in those areas, demolishing the centarian numbers. It doesn't give much investigation into the averages at all. Where it does, it seems to compare adjusted numbers of one data set with unadjusted numbers of another. If you really want to get into the averages, you'd have to determine error rates and adjustments for each specific area, probably by jurisdiction or record keeper, and then compare them. The problem is, nobody is going through that process for the entire world so we just use the face value numbers until we want disprove a specific area and then compare the adjusted numbers against unadjusted numbers. The data is too massive to rigorously investigate. But this whole effort is moot. What tangible benefit comes from disproving blue zone data? These population level studies aren't meant to provide answers. They're meant to provide new variables. Each of the blue zone longevity recommendations have their own studies to either prove (food stuff) or disprove (drinking wine daily) them.
So yeah, it's great the errors in the data have been called out it's a bit surprising that the author interviewed is so angry in the article. I guess it's fitting that he got the Ig nobel, since this correction doesn't have any applicable impact to end result, which were additonal studies investigating the individual suggestions/variables, such as specific dietary practices.
It would be different if these were new studies, but this is all in the past. This new finding of unreliability doesn't have any impact, hence the Ig nobel instead of the real nobel.
The Ig Nobel is not for trivial achievements, it is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." This takes different forms.
The part of the wikipedia article you are referencing is an inference from a particular article: "A September 2009 article in The National titled "A noble side to Ig Nobels" says that, although the Ig Nobel Awards are veiled criticism of trivial research, history shows that trivial research sometimes leads to important breakthroughs."
The definition of "blue zones" never had anything to do with average longevity. The entire concept is predicated on unusual numbers of centenarians, not long average life spans. In fact, as is pointed out in the Ig Nobel winning paper, Blue Zone places like Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria have always been paradoxical: they are supposed to have higher numbers of unusually long lived people, but have shorter average lifespans than the rest of their countries. The paradox goes away with the finding that the count of centenarians is incorrect. There's nothing left to the Blue Zone concept without the centenarians.
Yes, it is definitely satirical. But isn't specifically for "trivial", it gets deployed in different ways.
Some of the awards are straight up criticism of the research, like for bunk homeopathy stuff. It was awarded for the prank paper used in the Sokal affair, in which it's definitely praise of what Sokal did. Sometimes it is awarded for a bizarre but funny thing from something being studied in another more serious context like the magnetic frog levitation paper.
What topic are you suggesting to search on Pubmed? I have yet to see anything that supports some places have places with exceptionally long lived people. Especially to the massive outlier values that is often put forth. (So, 105 is not that crazy of a number to consider. 110, however, already starts to stretch credibility quite heavily.)
(Leaving discussion of the ignobel to the other thread.)
So link me a single bloody paper that goes over this? Searching "blue zones" on pubmed shows mainly things older than this paper. And a lot of stuff that, frankly, feels highly suspicious.
Similarly, if there are places that have debunked this paper, link one. It is a genuinely interesting topic to read about.
Please see the comment history for my opinion on blue zones, a link, and the areas to search on Pubmed. You can even find the areas of blue zone recommendations in TFA. You're not supposed to search for blue zones, but for studies on those recommendations (plant heavy or mederteranian diets, exercise, etc).
There are basically zero studies which prove anything about particular foodstuffs. It's all observational studies with small effect sizes and multiple uncontrolled confounding variables: junk science.
We know we need certain essential nutrients to prevent deficiencies, an energy intake surplus causes weight gain, and a few substances like trans fat are problematic. Beyond that, people seem to be making claims and recommendations not backed by hard evidence and frequently confuse correlation with causation.
We aren't talking about unequivocal proof. If someone asks what they can do to increase longevity, it's perfectly reasonable to tell them about studies that show strong correlations and mention the way the confounding factors play a role.
You might be interested to look into some of the twin studies that put twins on similar exercise regimens and differening diets. They seem to be the strongest evidence possible for this sort of thing. Hardly what I would call junk science.
The exercise part I can believe as we have somewhat better quality evidence there. But if you have seen dietary studies on twins that actually meet evidence-based medicine criteria then I would greatly appreciate a citation as those would be interesting to read.
As I suspected, another low-quality study which changed a bunch of variables in a small study group for only a few months and found a minor change in a few blood tests (no actual measured change in longevity or other health outcomes). The most obvious flaw in the study design is that the two diets weren't isocaloric, which basically invalidates all of their conclusions. It's really disappointing to see junk "science" like this make it through peer review. I mean this is the kind of garbage that an undergraduate journal club could rip apart without any advanced statistics.
And I have searched on my own before. Never found much of anything reliable or actionable.
Ozempic is showing that life expectancy is mostly avoiding obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, but not a specific magic food. It is just calories, vitamins and minerals.
Have a link that explains how Ozempic is fiber-mimetic or pro-biotic-mimetic? If that were the case I would expect to see fiber and probiotics to be associated with gastroparesis. They aren't.
Ozempic exists because Americans are addicted to hypercaloric hyper delicious "food" that was engineered by the big tobacco companies that used their excess cash to buy food companies in the 80's. They then applied their research on making tobacco addictive to make food addictive.
Modern American food is literally the new tobacco.
Ozempic disrupts hunger signals. Fiber does that to a certain extent ("increases feelings of satiety"). I haven't seen anything about probiotics doing that, but I think probiotics are bunk and tend not to read about them.
