BOOKS // Caveat Emptor
Selfie
The rotten roots of the self-esteem movement
by Walter Foley
EXCERPT //
Every year at MIT, “Ig Nobel” prizes are ceremoniously awarded (often by actual Nobel laureates) to “honor achievements so surprising that they make people laugh, then think.” This year’s recipient in the category of demography, Saul Justin Newman, published a paper that seems to discredit the notion of “blue zones”—those precious geographic areas where an uncommon number of citizens live past the age of 100.
Haven’t you heard? People in Okinawa, Japan, live a very long time, so you should eat lots of tofu and seaweed. There are parts of Italy and Greece where people also live a very long time, so after you’ve finished your tofu and seaweed, you should adopt a Mediterranean diet.
Newman’s research into the longevity statistics for these regions comes in part from an observation that the places that report a large number of 100-something-year-olds also report a dearth of 90-something-year-olds. He also noticed that these regions are often very poor, and poverty is almost never correlated to longevity.
As it turns out, many of these people are probably a decade or two younger than claimed. Depending on the region, “blue zones” seem to be places where government documents such as birth records have been lost, or deaths haven’t been recorded—sometimes due to pension fraud as people collect the checks of their deceased relatives. //
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