{"id":893500,"date":"2026-10-24T22:46:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T22:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/893500\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T22:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T22:46:08","slug":"living-past-100-this-is-the-real-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/893500\/","title":{"rendered":"Living past 100: This is the real secret"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2010, welfare officials in Tokyo tried to visit Sogen Kato<\/a>, a local man living in the city\u2019s Adachi district,\u00a0to congratulate him on his 111th birthday. Their records identified him as the oldest man in the city, but his family kept turning them away, saying he didn\u2019t want visitors or had taken a trip somewhere five hours away.<\/p>\n

When police finally entered the house, they found Kato\u2019s mummified remains lying in bed, dressed in pajamas and covered with a blanket. He\u2019d been dead for at least 30 years, although his family claimed he\u2019d shut himself away to become a living Buddha.<\/p>\n

His pension kept paying, and someone withdrew 2.7 million yen, about $31,000 at the time,\u00a0after officials started asking questions. <\/p>\n

Japan is often celebrated for having a significant population over age 100. A new book questions some of the numbers. Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cThis prompted the Japanese Ministry of Justice to check in on other centenarians: not just in Tokyo but across all Japan,\u201d writes scientist Saul Justin Newman<\/a> in his new book, \u201cMorbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science<\/a>\u201d (MIT Press, out now).<\/p>\n

Newman investigates how unreliable age records can shape our understanding of aging, including the research behind the popular Blue Zones guides<\/a> promising lessons in living longer. He also examines anti-aging treatments sold before anyone has established that they work.<\/p>\n

Across Japan, the audit identified 234,354 people still on family registers whose whereabouts couldn\u2019t be confirmed. All would have been at least 100 if alive. Newman describes them as dead or missing and puts their share at more than 82% of the recorded centenarian population.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine if 82% of the stars seen by the Hubble Space Telescope<\/a> turned out to be dust on the lens,\u201d he writes. \u201cIn astronomy, or any other science, this would have caused a massive scandal. In aging science there was not even a shrug.\u201d<\/p>\n

While researchers would later argue that Newman misread the audit and that there were only 600 people missing across Japan, the author sees a much wider problem. In Greece, he reports, at least 72% of centenarians disappeared from the count after the 2011 census amid investigations into pension fraud. \u201cLike Sogen Kato, the Greek centenarians were only alive on pension day,\u201d he writes. <\/p>\n

Author Saul Justin Newman investigates how unreliable age records can shape our understanding of aging, including the research behind the popular Blue Zones guides promising lessons in living longer. He also examines anti-aging treatments sold before anyone has established that they work.<\/p>\n

Some families went to considerable trouble to preserve that arrangement. Police checking on Irma Borgoglio, reportedly 103, found her propped up in her Italian kitchen, frozen solid. Her son claimed she had just died, although the chest freezer where he\u2019d kept her suggested a longer interval.<\/p>\n

Even living people sometimes disputed their records.\u00a0In 2016, Adele Dunlap, a former teacher living in a nursing home in Pittstown, NJ, was named America\u2019s oldest person. Asked what it felt like to be 113, she answered, \u201cI\u2019m 104,\u201d according to a\u00a0USA Today\u00a0account quoted in the book.\u00a0The newspaper accepted the Gerontology Research Group\u2019s finding that she was 113, an exchange Newman uses to question how researchers handle testimony that contradicts someone\u2019s paperwork.<\/p>\n

Getting someone\u2019s age wrong can also affect the advice sold to everyone else. Blue Zones cookbooks and lifestyle guides offer lessons from communities where people reportedly live to 100 or beyond.\u00a0But if those ages are wrong, Newman argues, we\u2019re copying somebody\u2019s lifestyle choices without knowing whether it helped them live longer.<\/p>\n

Citing Japanese government data, Newman reports that citizens of Okinawa \u2014 the Japanese island promoted as a place where people routinely live past 100 \u2014 rank first in the country for Kentucky Fried Chicken consumption. \u201cThe oldest Okinawans also have the worst BMI in Japan,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

Blue Zones guides recommend belonging to a religious community, but Newman notes that Okinawans are 93.4% atheist. Their vegetable consumption<\/a> also falls short of the advice. \u201cAgain, these are not new or recent trends,\u201d he writes, \u201cand they really should eat some more greens.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Greece, Newman reports, at least 72% of centenarians disappeared from the count after the 2011 census amid investigations into pension fraud. ADDICTIVE STOCK \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n

Singapore became a Blue Zone despite having little in common with that guidance. Its health minister said residents \u201chave the opposite attributes of the other five Blue Zones,\u201d describing stressful lives and diets high in sugar and salt. If Singaporeans live longer while doing things differently, why should the habits promoted in Blue Zones guides get the credit?<\/p>\n

Blue Zones guides recommend moderate drinking, including Sardinian red wine<\/a>, as one habit associated with longer lives.\u00a0Harvard researcher David Sinclair called resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, \u201cas close to a miraculous molecule as you can find.\u201d In 2008, GlaxoSmithKline paid approximately $720 million for Sirtris, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company he helped found.<\/p>\n

Three years later,\u00a0the promise of turning resveratrol into medicine had run ahead of the evidence that it could help patients.\u00a0\u201cWhat is the actual use for humans still needs to be discovered,\u201d one researcher said, according to Newman. In 2013, GSK closed Sirtris\u2019 Cambridge operation and absorbed its research.<\/p>\n

At Oxford, where he worked as a research fellow, Newman says colleagues shut him out and\u00a0urged him to\u00a0stop criticizing the age records used in longevity research.\u00a0He eventually took a medical research job at University College London.<\/p>\n

Newman questions much of the advice related to \u201cBlue Zones,\u201d including the supposed benefits of red wine. <\/p>\n

Newman remains fascinated by experiments that actually change lifespan. In a 1961 study he recounts, removing kokanee salmon\u2019s gonads prevented their usual reproductive death, allowing some to live more than twice as long.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can make kokanee double their normal limits of survival with scissors and stitches,\u201d he writes, though that offers no equivalent prescription for humans. The fish might have survived longer, but \u201ca gang of raccoons broke in and ate many of the test subjects.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2010, welfare officials in Tokyo tried to visit Sogen Kato, a local man living in the city\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":893501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[2594,223,4135,97,6801,3471,149,2749,42337],"class_list":["post-893500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-aging","tag-books","tag-greece","tag-health","tag-italy","tag-japan","tag-lifestyle","tag-longevity","tag-postscript"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/893501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}