Something Is Wrong with Modern Longevity Science

Jiroemon Kimura, who is on record as the world’s oldest man, died at the reported age of a hundred and sixteen, in 2013. His passing spawned a slew of articles about the secret to extreme longevity. (Apparently, it’s small meals.) Kimura is said to have been born in a fishing village in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, in April or March of 1897. Strangely, he is the only one of his five siblings to have multiple graduation records; he seems to have completed elementary school in 1907, or 1909, or 1911. He supposedly married his wife on three different dates, and at some point he not only adopted his wife’s surname but also changed his first name. (He was born Kinjiro Miyake.) Demographers who attempted to validate his age wrote that their investigation uncovered irregularities and inconsistencies. And yet they concluded that “no critical discordances were discovered.” The word “critical” was doing a lot of work. Cases such as Kimura’s—and some that inspire even more skepticism—fill the pages of “Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science” (M.I.T. Press), a lively and sometimes conspiratorial new book by the Oxford researcher Saul Justin Newman. Newman won the satirical Ig Nobel Prize, in 2024, for demonstrating that many of the world’s oldest living people may actually be dead. In “Morbid,” he argues that dubious age claims are not isolated—blemishes on the record of, say, Jiroemon Kimura or the famed elder Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment—but, rather, a systemic problem infecting longevity studies. “It is pretty hard to publish a scientific case report about a grandma reaching 88 years old, but if she manages 122 you might even squeeze a book out of it,” Newman writes. An exceptionally long life, in Newman’s telling, is not necessarily a function of good genes, good behaviors, or good luck. It’s evidence of bad record-keeping. The world’s oldest people, he quips, have “birth certificate allergies.” In accordance with Newman’s theory, many long-lived people are hardly paragons of healthy choices. Christian Mortensen, who held the record for the world’s oldest man before Kimura, smoked for nearly a century. Juan Vicente Pérez—who was born in rural Venezuela, had no official papers until his fifties, and seemingly died at a hundred and fourteen—drank aguardiente every day. The Guinness Book of Records once credited Carrie White, who was given a diagnosis of “post-typhoid psychosis” in her thirties, with being the longest-lived person—until it learned of a clerical error at the psychiatric institution where she spent more than seven decades of her life. “Where are all the athletes?” Newman wonders. “The aerobically svelte, annoyingly pious, scare-you-with-their-abs types? Dead.” According to Newman, the reason that supercentenarians—people who live past a hundred and ten—frequently have unhealthy habits is that they aren’t supercentenarians at all. Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In a useful thought experiment, Newman shows how small errors in recorded age can compound to undermine aging research. Suppose that a hundred forty-year-olds fake their ages so that on official documents they’re listed as fifty. (The U.S. Census Bureau has said that millions of Americans misrepresented their age in the most recent census.) In a country that contains a hundred thousand fifty-year-olds, these “young fakers” would account for only 0.1 per cent of the population. No big deal. But because the faux fifty-year-olds are far less likely to die than real fifty-year-olds—after age thirty, our risk of death doubles roughly every eight years—they will come to make up a larger and larger share of their purported age group. At “sixty-six,” they represent 0.4 per cent of their cohort; at “eighty,” three per cent. At “a hundred and five,” they compose virtually the entire population. This is a problem for longevity science, and also for public policy. All sorts of profound decisions depend on how long we’re expected to live: the amount we pay into both Medicare and Social Security and the rate at which we’re paid back, the cost of insurance, the funding that’s allocated to various medical specialties and facilities, the amount of infrastructure that’s built for seniors. Unfortunately, such decisions are not always sound. In 2010, on Respect for the Aged Day, Japanese officials sought out a Tokyo man named Sogen Kato to congratulate him on living to a hundred and eleven. Instead, they found a mummified corpse in his bedroom. Kato had been dead for three decades, and his family had fraudulently collected more than a hundred thousand dollars in pension money. A government investigation later revealed that hundreds of thousands of “living” residents of Japan had in fact gone missing or died, including eighty per cent of Japanese centenarians. During the fiscal belt-tightening of the Great Recession, Greece discovered that two hundred thousand people—about two per cent of the population—were engaged in pension fraud. Most of the country’s supposed centenarians were a product of this deception, a government minister said; nearly three-quarters of them vanished in a subsequent census, conducted in 2011. In the United States, centenarians are less common in generations for which birth certificates are widely available. But even government documents can deceive. The Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services has warned that people can easily obtain fakes; in 2010, Puerto Rico invalidated all its existing birth certificates, citing rampant fraud and identity theft. One study found that, in the middle of the twentieth century, more than a quarter of Americans had ages listed on census documents that were inconsistent with those on their death certificates. In some demographic groups, as many as two-thirds of the population had discrepancies. Some were large enough to classify individuals in an entirely different age bracket. It’s jarring to think that our age—unlike our height or weight—can’t be precisely measured. One can count the rings on a tree to calculate how many years it was alive, but there’s no equivalent marker in humans. Every so often, in the hospital where I work, I notice that a patient has a listed age of more than a hundred and twenty. This is disorienting until I realize that the patient may have come into the hospital with no I.D. and no known contacts, and that they might be suffering from a condition—dementia, schizophrenia—that makes it hard for them to remember who they are, let alone how old. In such cases, the hospital’s computer system defaults to a birth year of 1900. Recently, tech companies have increasingly claimed that various products can reveal a person’s “biological age,” and scientists have made real progress toward developing “epigenetic clocks,” which analyze patterns in DNA to estimate the age of a person or an individual organ. But, so far, these approaches remain approximations, and they are less reliable in the very old. If Newman is correct that many of the oldest people are younger than we think, then our conclusions about them—and about the places that produce them—must be unreliable. His theory appears to explain some counterintuitive findings. An unusual number of centenarians seem to hail from low-income areas. The French Republic’s overseas départements of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which have some of its highest rates of poverty, also have France’s highest concentration of hundred-and-ten-year-olds. Newman’s own research suggests that London’s impoverished Tower Hamlets neighborhood has more hundred-and-five-year-olds than the rest of England combined. Newman aims his most pointed criticisms at so-called blue zones, places that are credited with producing extraordinary longevity. The term was introduced in a 2004 paper in which researchers tried to figure out why so many Sardinians lived past a hundred. The research team, led by a respected demographer named Michel Poulain, interviewed residents, checked documents, and recorded in blue ink on a map the places where centenarians lived. The blue clustered in a mountainous region in the middle of the island, leading the investigators to speculate about potential longevity-boosting factors, including the area’s climate and its inhabitants’ diet, life style, and high rate of inbreeding. The following year, a journalist named Dan Buettner published a hugely popular National Geographic cover story that introduced more longevity hot spots, including the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa, and Loma Linda, California. Buettner trademarked Blue Zones and partnered with Poulain. He went on to write best-selling books, offer cooking classes, charge substantial speaking fees, and found a company that made millions of dollars by issuing municipalities Blue Zone stamps of approval. The aggressive commercialization eventually led to a rupture with Poulain. (According to Science magazine, the researcher ended the partnership after Chanel released a skin-care product called Blue Serum, which was marketed as anti-aging because it included materials from blue zones, and Buettner wanted to sue the luxury label for its use of the term.) Buettner also admitted that he originally included Loma Linda because his editor wanted to identify a blue zone in the U.S., and that he “never bothered to delist it.” The case of Okinawa, a group of relatively poor islands in the south of Japan, is instructive. Among Japanese prefectures, Okinawa ranks first in consumption of KFC and last in consumption of seafood, sweet potatoes, and leafy greens—its residents have Japan’s highest average body-mass index. More than a third of Okinawan men smoke. Although some books about blue zones encourage people to drink two glasses of red wine a day, “preferably Sardinian Cannonau”—a recommendation plainly at odds with current public-health advice—Okinawans like beer. If we want to live a long time, should we do as the Okinawans do? Probably not. In 2010, Okinawa reportedly had twice as many centenarians per capita as the rest of the country. But, as Poulain himself has pointed out, Okinawa was the site of a devastating American bombing campaign during the Second World War; much of its infrastructure and essentially all its civil records were destroyed. U.S. authorities reconstructed the civil registry by asking survivors to report their age, a process complicated by language barriers and a traditional Japanese calendar that differed from the Gregorian. The country’s postwar welfare system distributed some benefits based on age, and many Okinawans requested that their records be updated. There is a strong correlation between the number of requests made in a village and the supposed life span of its residents. Our tendency to fetishize faraway lands, trying to unearth their secrets to slow aging, can seem strange when one considers that wealthy Americans already live into their eighties and nineties. Scientists have reliable data for octogenarians and nonagenarians—one research project, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, has been running since 1938—and the lessons are clear enough. The things that help us live longer are things that pretty much everyone wants: money, education, safety, clean air and water, community. Of course, these things are unevenly distributed, and the consequences of that are readily apparent. Research led by the economist Raj Chetty has found that the highest-earning Americans live more than a decade longer than those in the bottom one per cent. And the gap has been widening. Between 2001 and 2014, life expectancy among the top five per cent of earners increased by nearly three years; in the bottom five per cent, it essentially stagnated. One hardly needs a list of blue zones to think of commonsense ways to improve life span. We can invest in biomedical research and enact laws and regulations to reduce pollution, design walkable neighborhoods, establish safe public spaces, create affordable housing, and curb smoking. Such strategies might not trend on TikTok, but they would be more effective than the latest juice cleanse. Unfortunately, the pursuit of longevity—like so much else in American life—is increasingly an individualistic endeavor. We adopt new health fads as though they are forms of personal expression, experimenting with cold plunges and red-light therapy, wearable devices and peptide injections. Though it’s nice to think that striving to be healthy is cool or popular—it wasn’t always—the quest for extending life can become monomaniacal, and we easily forget that one’s life span is not, by and large, a life-style choice. Instead, longevity has always been a communal affair. In the early eighteen-hundreds, a Belgian astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet coined the term “social physics” to describe a method for modelling human development. Stargazers often made small errors when recording the position of planets; the individual errors were unpredictable, but, in the aggregate, they followed a pattern. We now call this pattern a Gaussian distribution, for the astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, or, more commonly, a bell curve. Quetelet showed that similar patterns could be found in social phenomena, including births, deaths, marriage, and crime. There was some variation—and, of course, each year there were different people being born, dying, marrying, and committing crimes—but over-all rates were remarkably stable. These occurrences could not be chalked up to individual choices. They were products of measurable—and modifiable—social conditions. A historian later summarized Quetelet’s thesis: “Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.” Not all of Quetelet’s ideas were good ones; he also contended that a person’s physical traits determined social outcomes. Still, it is unfortunate that today’s longevity discourse has become so fully untethered from his sociological point of view. Influencers who peddle supplements and squats are ignoring the enormous role of societal conditions. During my medical residency, in Boston, I spent some of my time seeing patients from Roxbury, Dorchester, and other low-income neighborhoods, where they were more likely to be exposed to crime, drugs, stress, and toxins such as lead. Other weeks, I’d work at a hospital in Newton, a wealthy suburb a few miles away, where kids grew up in large homes on tree-lined streets. In both places, I could offer patients the same basic advice on healthy habits. But it would be absurd to think that my advice helped some Newton residents live into their nineties while many of my less affluent patients might barely make it to seventy. Society prepares the life span; the individual lives it. Of course, we still have to make decisions about our health. We can’t wait around for governments and institutions—especially this government and these institutions—to bring about the conditions for a wholesome and prosperous society. So what, exactly, should we do? The longevity-industrial complex tends to frame this question in oddly specific ways. Should you eat or avoid eggs? Seek out or shun coffee? Exercise in the morning or the evening? Walk seven thousand steps a day or ten thousand? Nowadays, influencers often invoke scientific research, but it tends to be stripped of context and caveats; they might cite small-animal studies to justify bold recommendations for humans, or argue that everyone can benefit from treatments that are approved for narrow applications. We keep hearing about the new drug that will change our lives. In the two-thousands, David A. Sinclair, a Harvard biologist and a co-author of “Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To,” declared that resveratrol, a compound found in grape skins and red wine, was “as close to a miraculous molecule as you can find.” He sold a resveratrol-focussed startup to GlaxoSmithKline. But a researcher at the National Institute on Aging later told the Times that the molecule’s “actual use for humans still needs to be discovered,” and G.S.K. eventually abandoned work on the compound. More recently, in “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity,” Peter Attia promoted rapamycin, a molecule that was first sampled on the South Pacific island of Rapa Nui and developed into an immunosuppressant for organ-transplant patients. Laboratory studies have shown that rapamycin could extend the life spans of yeast and mice—but, in a recent randomized human trial, older adults on the medication didn’t seem to experience any physical gains. If anything, they benefitted less from exercise and had more side effects than those who didn’t take the drug; one participant developed a serious infection. Attia and other influencers have said that they have stopped taking the drug, owing to mouth sores, infections, and other complications. A fundamental challenge that longevity gurus face is that what’s true is often boring, and what’s interesting often isn’t true. Against this backdrop, “Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life” (Norton), by the physician and bioethicist Ezekiel J. Emanuel, arrives as a welcome tonic. The book follows a structure characteristic of the longevity genre: divide the text into a handful of familiar sections, start each chapter with an anecdote, review some relevant research, and conclude with tips on how readers can apply your recommendations. (Move! Sleep! Socialize!) The longevity industry profits from mystifying the obvious, but Emanuel largely dispenses with pretense. He tells us to brush our teeth twice a day and then moves on to such closely held longevity secrets as abstaining from smoking, soda, and drunk driving. These are hardly paradigm-shifting insights, and that’s exactly the point. We already know how to improve our chances of living a long life—exercise, eat well, sleep enough, maintain relationships, don’t drink to excess, don’t smoke at all. (In a notable exception, Emanuel reviews evidence that, weirdly, eating ice cream is linked to a lower risk of diabetes and heart disease—a controversial correlation that gives the book its title.) Emanuel makes the case that the quest for a meaningful life is more important than the quest for a lengthy one. “Wellness and living long are only means,” he writes. “They are not, themselves, the essence of a good life.” Sometimes the means even get in the way. If I skip dinner at a friend’s house because it’s going to ding my sleep score, or if I totally abstain from my favorite food because it’ll mess up the stats on my continuous glucose monitor, my life might be worse, not better. As I read Emanuel’s book, I started to think of the pursuit of longevity as akin to the pursuit of happiness. John Stuart Mill famously argued that people don’t find happiness by furiously chasing it—they find it by seeking something other than their happiness. “Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way,” Mill wrote. The brevity of “Eat Your Ice Cream” is itself a kind of advice. Absorb the basics, Emanuel seems to be saying, and then get on with your life. He wants to help us make healthy choices, but he also wants us to see that even the best habits can’t stop us from aging. The first rule of life, Emanuel writes, is that we’re all going to die. ♦