Revisited: are the world’s oldest people really that old?
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This is The Guardian. Hi, Madeleine here. The Science Weekly team are on a two-week break for the Christmas holidays, so for the next four episodes we're going to be bringing you some of our favourites from 2024.

This year we've covered a lot on ageing. And if you haven't already heard it, do go and check out our mini-series, Secrets of Ageing. But I think my favourite story has to be this one about some surprising research which won an Ig Nobel Award for science that makes you laugh and then think. I hope you enjoy it too.

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It's a question humanity has been asking for millennia. In fact, we on Science Weekly posed it just a few months ago in a special miniseries. How can we live well for as long as possible?

Obvious places to look for clues are blue zones. Regions of the world like Sardinia in Italy, Okinawa in Japan and Akaria in Greece, where people more regularly reach 100. Do they really? By my estimate, 72% of Greek centenarians were pension fraud cases in 2012. That's quite a way to achieve remarkable longevity.

Dr Sol Newman is an interdisciplinary researcher at University College London and Oxford University, and he's just won an Ig Nobel Award, the prize for research that makes you laugh and then think, for his work scrutinising longevity data.

I tracked down 80% of all the extremely old people in the world and mapped them to their place of birth and death. Partly I used databases, partly I just used gumption and a spreadsheet. And it's amazing what you can do with Google and a spreadsheet.

What Sol's award-winning paper reports is that our understanding of what will help you see out a century is not quite right. I mean, you don't need the Mediterranean diet. You just need bad paperwork. According to his investigations, even the most popular ideas of extreme ageing are sadly based on bad data.

And it shows how seductive research that appears to offer simple solutions can be. There's been unending backlash on this. No answers whatsoever. So longevity research has a lot to answer for because they never seem to learn from this mistake and they don't seem to want to learn from this mistake. So today, have we got extreme ageing wrong? And if we have, what does that mean for our approach to human longevity?

From The Guardian, I'm Madeline Finlay, and this is Science Weekly. Sol first got interested in ageing data after finding errors in a 2016 study published in Nature. They were saying that it was impossible for humans to live above a certain limit. So I had carefully worked my way through it, but because I was one person working quite slowly, I was...

scooped by about five different teams. But it sparked his interest and scepticism. So when another paper came out in 2018 in Science claiming that there was potentially no limit to human existence, Sol got straight to work. During this process, I came up with a theoretical reason that you would expect most old age data or all old age data to be junk.

And so this preprint that has won the Ig Nobel Prize was testing that hypothesis. Could you talk me through what that theoretical reason was? Well, briefly, it's very simple. If you imagine a group of 50-year-olds, let's say 10,000 50-year-olds, and into this group you introduce 140-year-olds where you write down their age as if they were 50.

Now, let's call them young liars. This group of young liars are very rare errors, and they're a very small percentage of the population. But what happens over time? Well, people who are actually 40 survive at a higher rate than people who are 50. So the errors are more likely to survive over time than the real data. And this leads to a sort of exponential growth or near exponential growth in the number of errors with age.

until eventually you reach a point where errors become the entire population. And this can happen when you have error rates of 1 in 10,000. And we know that the error rates are often far higher than that in age reporting. So it suggests that beyond a certain point, you just cannot trust any of this data.

So you've got this theory that the data for extremely old people is likely to be junk. And so you set about trying to test it. And this is the work that you received your Ig Nobel for, which I should say here is a preprint paper. So it hasn't yet been peer reviewed.

But you tracked down as many of these people as you could and you checked where they were born, where they died. You had a look at their documentation and gathered other data about these regions. So give me some examples of what you came across when you went looking for these centenarians. So for France, I was able to get estimates of life expectancy at birth in the regions of their birth.

that showed that they were not born into regions that had remarkable or even better than the average life expectancy. In fact, that most of the supercentenarians, the extremely old people in France, seem to come from overseas territories that don't keep good records. They come from the very poorest regions of France. In England, it turned out that the best place to reach age 105 was

was Tower Hamlets, which is coincidentally also the worst place to be an old age person, according to the English government. You know, higher rates of old age poverty were associated with more people reaching extreme ages. And it has the single smallest rate of 90-year-olds per capita in the country. Even the number of 90-year-olds was negatively correlated with the number of 105-year-olds, meaning...

the more 90-year-olds you have, the fewer 105-year-olds you have. Now, that doesn't make any sense unless this is an error process. Right. So in this case, poverty and potential...

potentially the pressure to commit pension fraud is actually a good indicator of reaching 100. And I'll admit, this did make me laugh. In your paper, you cite that in 2012, at least 72% of the centenarians in Greece were dead, which you've speculated is down to pension fraud. Greece is a great example. It's a really great example because

The Greek minister, the one guy in the world who has the most incentive to cover up the size of the problem, estimated that 2% of the entire population was committing pension fraud. And he's giving out the pensions. You know, the obvious place to look for centenarians in Greece is under the ground. Except miraculously somehow on pension day, all their bank accounts are cleaning themselves out.

And, you know, this is pretty amazing. It's pretty funny. But also it's incredible to me that the demography community doesn't notice this. They haven't cited it happening. It's in the newspapers, but it's not in any journals or any scientific findings whatsoever. It's like...

Of course, not all of this is going to be fraud. You also point out that a lot of these errors may be down to the fact that people actually just forget their birthdays or don't know how old they are or when their birthday actually is. And I think that's a big part of it.

And a nice stat in your paper is that the number of supercentenarians, so that's people who reach 110, born on the first day of the month is 150% higher than the previous day. And you might think, well, what about people's birth certificates or passports? But...

A lot of this documentation isn't consistent or it's missing. And one example you cite is Japan, where one of the best predictors of where centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by Americans during the war. Yes, exactly. Okinawa was run by an occupation government. Basically, you've got GIs that don't speak Japanese running the government.

and issuing the birth certificates that they've just bombed into oblivion. The capacity for error there is enormous. And where they have bombed the birth records, you find a cluster of centenarians. And this explains about 80% of the variants within Okinawa. And this wasn't my finding. This was an earlier finding that has been wholeheartedly ignored.

Sol, the fact that your investigation has shown that the best way to achieve old age is by living in a place with high rates of poverty, a lack of birth certificates and having fewer 90-year-olds...

I mean, for so long we've had this idea that these so-called blue zones, places with unusually high numbers of centenarians, are defined by things like the Mediterranean diet, close communities, you know, eating fish, having wine. I mean, this is such a recognised concept as the key to living well into old age. There are Netflix documentaries. It's even been discussed at the World Economic Forum recently.

So what do you make of blue zones now? It's obviously fantasy. If you ask the actual people in Okinawa, and the Japanese government does this routinely, they do not behave anything like a blue zone. So let's go through the claims. There are nine central claims of the blue zones.

The first is move naturally, right? That people move without thinking and grow gardens. Well, Okinawa consistently since 1975, they've had the worst body mass index in Japan out of 47 prefectures. Always the worst. And this includes the old people. And not only that, the Japanese government is so detailed, they measure how many people garden and they are third last for gardening. They rank fourth last for rest and relaxation time.

And you can move on to the next claim, which is purpose. Okay, they have the fourth highest suicide rate for over 65s in Japan. Then there's the repeated claims about vegetarianism. They are dead last for root vegetable consumption, leafy vegetable consumption, pickled vegetable consumption, everything. They eat over 40 kilos of meat a year per capita.

There are sweet potatoes on the front of the Netflix documentary. They eat the least sweet potato in Japan, and they always have. And this is according to one of the largest nutritional surveys ever run. One of the claims is that people belong to a faith-based community. They are 93.4% atheists.

So where on earth have the Blue Zones been getting their data? It's astounding. And it's astounding that it's been sitting out in the public for 20 years almost and no one has seen how daft it is.

So where do you think this leaves longevity research? And so often the advice that we're given, like you've described, gardening, community, fresh fruit and vegetables, which, you know, instinctively does feel like good advice to be healthy. Where does your research leave all of that? What these claims are doing is they are playing to your preferences.

The reason they sound, as you said, sort of reasonable to you is because that is the way they are designed. These behaviors don't resemble anything like a Sardinian peasant diet or lifestyle. They're nothing like it. And the reason for that is that they resemble the idealized lifestyle of someone who is rich in the West. The very idea that being a peasant is a simple, honest lifestyle with moderate physical activity is delusional, is completely delusional.

I mean, ask a peasant. Like, you know, it's incredible to me. That fantasy maybe gets to a more truthful point, which is these idealised versions of blue zones don't exist, but do zones exist where people are living longer and are those zones just where people are wealthier? Yes, I mean, this is very clearly the case in terms of average life expectancy, average

Eurostat, for example, measure hundreds of regions across the EU. The first time they did this, downtown Brussels was the place that lived the longest. Now it's Switzerland. You just pick a rich place that is boringly safe and that's the answer. And the reason is very simple. These are clean places with lots of money and what they spend their money on

is exercise, you know, doctors. It's not very complicated. Where do you think longevity researchers go from here? How do you begin to actually get accurate data and get rid of those compounding errors that you described today?

to get good data on how old people actually are? At the moment, you can't do it. There's no physical measure of human age. You can't put a person into a machine, have that machine go bing, and tell you how old they are. There needs to be a really concerted effort to get to a point where you can put someone into a machine and you can say how old they are. Because otherwise...

this is going to go on and on and on. So we need to actually measure how old people are because this just sells too well. I know you've recently put out another paper looking at estimates of old age populations from the United Nations that shows that some of the regions which appear to have the best survival to ages beyond 100 include Puerto Rico and Malawi.

There will be a lot of longevity researchers that disagree with your findings in that paper and the Ig Nobel Prize winning paper. Has there been a backlash to your work? Oh, of course. The immediate response when I published this was that I had people from the longevity community ring my boss demanding that I get fired. If I had made a mistake, all my data, all my code that I can share, I have shared.

And there is zero barrier to anybody in the demographic or the longevity research community putting up the reasons that these patterns happen. The preprint has been talked about for a very long time at a very high level, and it is not asking very complicated questions. And, you know, if there's a simple answer, I'd love to know what it is, because I have been asking for years. Well, good luck with the rest of your investigations and debunking.

And thank you so much. You're very welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks again to Dr Sol Newman. You can read our coverage of the Ig Nobels at theguardian.com. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by me, Madeline Finlay. It was sound designed by Joel Cox. And the executive producer is Ellie Burey. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then. This is The Guardian. The Guardian.

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