In 2010, social leaders in Tokyo attempted to visit Sogen Kato, a resident of the city’s Adachi district, to congratulate him on his 111th birthday. Their records identified him as the oldest man in town, but his family kept turning them down, saying he didn’t want visitors or that he had taken a trip five hours away.
When police finally entered the house, they found Kato’s mummified remains lying in bed, dressed in pajamas and covered with a blanket. He had been dead for at least 30 years, although his family claimed he had locked himself away to become a living Buddha.
His pension continued to pay and someone withdrew 2.7 million yen, or about $31,000 at the time, after officials began asking questions.
“This prompted the Japanese Ministry of Justice to look at other centenarians: not just in Tokyo but throughout Japan,” writes scientist Saul Justin Newman in his new book, “Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science” (MIT Press, available now).
Newman studies how unreliable age data can shape our understanding of aging, including the research behind the popular Blue Zones that guides promising lessons on how to live longer. It also examines anti-aging treatments sold before anyone had established their effectiveness.
Across Japan, the audit identified 234,354 people still on family records whose fate could not be confirmed. All of them would have been at least 100 if they were alive. Newman describes them as dead or extinct and estimates their share at more than 82% of the recorded centennial population.
“Imagine if 82% of the stars observed by the Hubble Space Telescope turned out to be dust on the lens,” he writes. “In astronomy, or any other science, this would have caused a huge scandal. In an aging science, there was not even a shrug of the shoulders.”
While researchers would later claim that Newman misinterpreted the audit and that there were only 600 people missing in Japan, the author sees a much larger problem. In Greece, he reports, at least 72% of centenarians disappeared from the count after the 2011 census, following investigations into pension fraud. “Like Sogen Kato, the Greek centenarians were only alive on the day of retirement,” he writes.
Some families have gone to great lengths to preserve this arrangement. Police checking on Irma Borgoglio, believed to be 103, found her propped up in her Italian kitchen, freezing. Her son claimed she had just died, although the chest freezer where he kept her suggested a longer interval.
Even living people sometimes contested their records. In 2016, Adele Dunlap, a former teacher living in a nursing home in Pittstown, New Jersey, was named the oldest person in the United States. When asked what it felt like to be 113, she replied, “I’m 104,” according to a USA Today story cited in the book. The journal accepted the Gerontology Research Group’s conclusion that she was 113 years old, an exchange Newman uses to question how researchers treat testimony that contradicts someone’s documents.
Getting someone’s age wrong can also affect the advice sold to everyone. Blue Zones cookbooks and lifestyle guides offer lessons learned from communities where people would live to be 100 years old or more. But if those ages are wrong, Newman argues, we’re copying someone’s life choices without knowing whether it helped them live longer.
Citing Japanese government data, Newman reports that citizens of Okinawa – the Japanese island touted as a place where people regularly live past the age of 100 – rank first in the country in Kentucky Fried Chicken consumption. “The oldest Okinawans also have the worst BMI in Japan,” he writes.
Blue Zone guides recommend belonging to a religious community, but Newman notes that Okinawans are 93.4 percent atheist. Their vegetable consumption is also below advice. “Again, these are not new or recent trends,” he writes, “and they really should eat more green vegetables.” »
Singapore has become a blue zone although it has little in common with these guidelines. Its health minister said residents “have the opposite characteristics of the other five blue zones”, describing stressful lives and a diet high in sugar and salt. If Singaporeans are living longer while doing things differently, why should the habits promoted in the Blue Zone guides be recognized?
Blue Zone guides recommend moderate consumption, including Sardinian red wine, as a habit associated with a longer life. Harvard researcher David Sinclair called resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, “as close to a miracle molecule as you can find.” In 2008, GlaxoSmithKline paid about $720 million for Sirtris, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company he helped found.
Three years later, the promise of turning resveratrol into a medicine was ahead of evidence that it could help patients. “How useful it actually is to humans remains to be discovered,” one researcher said, according to Newman. In 2013, GSK closed Sirtris’ Cambridge operations and absorbed its research.
At Oxford, where he worked as a researcher, Newman claims his colleagues excluded him and urged him to stop criticizing age records used in longevity research. He eventually accepted a medical research position at University College London.
Newman remains fascinated by experiments that actually change lifespan. In a 1961 study, he says, removing kokanee salmon’s gonads prevented their usual reproductive death, allowing some to live more than twice as long.
“We can make kokanee double their normal limits of survival with scissors and stitches,” he writes, although this offers no equivalent prescription for humans. The fish might have survived longer, but “a gang of raccoons broke in and ate many of the test subjects.”
Gn Health
