Disclaimer: Greek islander.
Their diet is not that different from many other Greek islands. What I find different is the total lack of stress. It's not that people wake up late. It's that they are worry free. You go to a cafeteria sit and wait and noboby comes. You get up go inside and ask for a coffee and they show you the coffee pot. Or they smile and tell you that you are free to make it yourself. They will probably not move a finger. Then you leave the money on the table and leave. When the article says they wake up late, there are no shops in the morning. They are open when the owner feels like it, and the system works quite well since everybody else knows it... Doors in villages are unlocked. Funerals and marriages of the locals are a special occasion but people don't dress up that much. Everything is serene and simple. Comming from Athens this is very very frustrating at the beggining but I grew to like it. The place is very different from anything else I have seen.
The island where people forget to die
101–110 of 154 posts
Re: The island where people forget to die
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. You may have read a different article. As this article noted before even the first of so many page breaks: "And in Loma Linda, Calif., w…
So does it apply to all SDA's or just in Loma Linda. This reminds me of the best schools being small schools example, where governments tried to make schools smaller, ignoring the fact that the worst schools were small schools. How do you separate the data from the variance with such small groups? Admittedly lack of smoking and reduced stressed are well studied factors: avoiding red meat can help, although entirely n…
Admittedly, the middlebrow dismissal is often worse than that: a call to ignorance rather than a call for more data. In that respect I agree that we should probably be dismissive of that dismissal.
Re: The island where people forget to die
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically. Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source…
I've noticed this too. It's a vicious hit-and-run attack on a thread's discussion that presumes only the empirical viewpoint is worth considering. It often trainwrecks the thread into intellectual pissing contests, rather than discussing subjects with fellow human beings. Removing karma entirely might help. Too many people treat it as a vanity metric, and game it.
> only the empirical viewpoint is worth considering
So what other viewpoints are there?
Re: The island where people forget to die
#104Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…
> Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. You may have read a different article. As this article noted before even the first of so many page breaks: "And in Loma Linda, Calif., w…
Imagine you have a randomly distributed age population. When you break it into groups (especially small groups), you will ALWAYS find a group with the largest average lifespan. Depending on what your average group size is, their lifespan can easily be several standard deviations higher than the overall average.
Re: The island where people forget to die
#105Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…
> anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity
I've seen claims that having few friends shows up in mortality worse than than a pack-a-day smoking habit. Of course that's all hand-wavy statistical controls, but then again so is the stuff on exercise and calories.
Re: The island where people forget to die
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
He also recalls being 5 years older than his birth certificate says.
That's not uncommon on less urbanized parts of the world. But yeah, we can't tell for sure.
Yup, my mother doesn't now her real birthday, and she was born in '57 in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
Re: The island where people forget to die
#107Another health factor at work might be the unprocessed nature of the food they consume: as Trichopoulou observed, because islanders eat greens from their gardens and fields, they consume fewer pesticides and more nutrients. She estimated that the Ikarian diet, compared with the standard American diet, might yield up to four additional years of life expectancy. Oh boy, 4 years. Eureka. You've done it. You've found the…
I wish someone like Bill Gates would stop doing sisyphean third world do-gooder junk and fund some long term, large controlled studies on humans instead. It seems to me that to do actual science on human health you need space program like money. So instead we get all this observational garbage.
Re: The island where people forget to die
#108Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…
The other problem with blue zones is, they could just be a statistical blip. It's especially bad when you try to identify things like centurions, or spontaneous remission of cancer - things which are rare are the most prone to statistical blips.
To a certain extent they can be, however generally speaking the very tops of this set tend to have both good luck, good genes and good lifestyle. It's hard to get to right near the very top of lifespan without all three, and the population from which we select centrenarians is extremely large. Statistical blips (good luck or unmeasured factors) can be relevant, even highly relevant, but unless you're overlooking very important things it's extremely unlikely to rise to the top without favorable outcomes in other factors.
So maybe we observe things that are 95% of optimal instead of the best genes in the data set. Or maybe we observe diets that have 90% of the performance of optimal diets. We still learn a hell of a lot.
By optimal I mean best-performing in terms of life expectancy from among the total data set (people) not just among centrenarians.
Re: The island where people forget to die
#109The point that interested me most was how instead of a quick fix or a band-aid approach the whole being healthy is interwoven in their lifestyle. They don't exercise to reduce a few kilos, rather it is impossible for them to not exercise because there isn't any other way of getting around. Same with food, they're not trying to eat healthy like us but the food they know to cook is just healthy.. it's not as a quick-fix to reduce weight.
This point is interesting to me because I was recently reading a book called 8 Weeks To Optimum Health and the author (Andrew Weil i think) mentions that it is good to add a little turmeric to your diet. Now having been lived in India all my life, we all have been eating turmeric all our lives without ever giving much thought to it. It's not something we do to remain healthy, but rather something without which you can't food here. I don't remember not eating it for the last 30 years. Unfortunately, we counter-balance it with fried samosas, etc but still the point to take is when a society as a whole develops good habits it often becomes way too easy for everyone to follow through without missing a day of that (for decades).
Re: The island where people forget to die
#110Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…
If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically. Unsophisticated people read an article like this and think: Gosh, I better eat honey for breakfast! People a little more sophisticated think: Hey, this is anecdotal evidence! Yeah, we know that. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article? Is it not at least a source…
I'm not commenting on this article specifically (not least because I haven't read it), but there are plenty of articles that deserve little more than "middlebrow dismissal".
Very likely one could find plenty of more interesting things to say about those articles. One can find interesting things to say about anything. But if an article is about an attention-grabbing subject, is superficially plausible, but is just plain unsound in the sort of way the grandparent of this comment is alleging, the "middlebrow dismissal" -- predictable as it is for the cognoscenti -- may still be the most useful thing there is to say about it, and a comment thread that didn't have "please note, this is probably wrong in the usual way" near the top of it would be a bad and misleading one.
If HN is worse off for being full of middlebrow dismissals, the real problem may not be the middlebrow dismissals but the articles that provoke them.