His research finds that most of the claims about people living over 105 are wrong.
How did you find out about your award?
I picked up the phone after slogging through traffic and rain to a bloke from Cambridge in the UK.
Odette Ambulher was born on the 17th September 1901. She is celebrating her 111th birthday in the retirement home in Laigne-en-Belin, Sarthe in France.Photo by: BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
I said, Absolutely I want to be in this club.
What was the ceremony like?
The ceremony was wonderful.
Its a bit of fun in a big fancy hall.
Its like you take the most serious ceremony possible and make fun of every aspect of it.
But your work is actually incredibly serious?
In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly dont stack up.
Of those, almost none have a birth certificate.
In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate.
Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.
For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public.
Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones.
The secret to living to 110 was, dont register your death.
The Japanese government has run one of thelargest nutritional surveysin the world, dating back to 1975.
From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan.
Theyve eaten the least vegetables; theyve been extremely heavy drinkers.
What about other places?
The same goes for all the other blue zones.
Eurostat keeps track of life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece.
Its amazing the cognitive dissonance going on.
What do you think explains most of the faulty data?
Thats for two reasons.
For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets.
It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together.
The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.
But most people dont lose count of their age…
You would be amazed.
There are similar stats from the US.
What does this all mean for human longevity?
The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know.
We can then use that to build metrics that help us measure human ages.
Longevity data are used for projections of future lifespans, and those are used to set everyones pension rate.
Youre talking about trillions of dollars of pension money.
If the data is junk then so are those projections.
Your insurance premiums are based on this stuff.
Whats your best guess about true human longevity?
Longevity is very likely tied to wealth.
Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well.
I just put outa preprintanalysing the last 72 years of UN data on mortality.
This data is just rotten from the inside out.
Do you think the Ig Nobel will get your science taken more seriously?
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