This is about those aged over 100, not 110 which is a completely different ballpark...
Besides that, all my relatives lived close to 100 and they certainly hadn't a healthy lifestyle nor are they japanese nor had they access to the current medical breakthroughs. I assume the secret is mostly genetics and it
is easy for me to see how 100k are aged over 100 in Japan.
My maternal grandparents are currently 98 and 96 and the last time I visited them grandpa said that his father didn't live to age 60.
Meanwhile he has an older sister who, while bedridden, is very much alive at 100.
I suppose the necessary medical breakthroughs happened in the second half of the 20th century, as no one, including the people in question, anticipated they would live this long. Grandma even stated in her will that my second oldest cousin would inherit the apartment - supposedly to have "a better start in life when she grows up". That was 30 years ago and my cousin's oldest child should be in high school now right now.
That, but also various factors during one's life - most importantly, ample and healthy food (especially during fetal growth, childhood and youth), a lack of exposure to known damaging factors for physical and mental health (smog, noise, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs), and a lack of wars and other forms of violence.
The top killers in the Western world are cardiovascular diseases (strongly linked to food) and cancers (strongly linked, again, to food but also to drugs). A safe working culture (both in business and in private) is also a good thing to have - the typical lackluster attitude towards workplace safety is a top cause of workplace accidents both fatal and non-fatal but serious.
Seems like something similar could still be a problem here, although it seems less likely since the number here is significantly less than article I've linked.
A link to the paper on biorxiv[0], Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud. A bit of the abstract:
In the United States, supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records. In Italy, England, and France, which have more uniform vital registration, remarkable longevity is instead predicted by poverty, low per capita incomes, shorter life expectancy, higher crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, fewer 90+ year olds, and residence in remote, overseas, and colonial territories. In England and France, higher old-age poverty rates alone predict more than half of the regional variation in attaining a remarkable age. Only 18% of ‘exhaustively’ validated supercentenarians have a birth certificate, falling to zero percent in the USA, and supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on days divisible by five: a pattern indicative of widespread fraud and error. Finally, the designated ‘blue zones’ of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Ikaria corresponded to regions with low incomes, low literacy, high crime rate and short life expectancy relative to their national average. As such, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
I also found an interview with the author [1], which had some choice quotes, one that popped out to me,
For example, Costa Rica, 42% of the centenarians in Costa Rica turned out to be lying about their age after the study was conducted. And once you corrected those errors, they went from world leading to, quote, near the bottom of the pack, in terms of late life expectancy. And so the question I have for those researchers is how do you explain that, for example, 82% of Japanese centenarians were missing or dead in your sample? And this wasn't discovered by demographers. This was discovered by the government of Japan.
After reading a couple of articles on fraud or just sloppy record keeping almost always behind centenarians, now I'm extremely skeptical on claims of people having past 100 years of age.
While there are a few people who seemed to be nearly immortal, as in "being around since forever", like the Queen Of England or recently deceased https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Iliescu ... they didn't actually push past 100.
With all the care and life standard, seems to be a hard limit in our genes, so until something is done about that, better get realistic expectations.
My grandfather made it to 98, but holy cow he was frail. The last few years of his life he couldn’t move much. Shuffle walked only a few inches. Drooled on every meal in front of him. I loved my grandfather but watching him in that state, we were all relieved for him when he passed.
He smoked only during WW2, was an army corp of engineers colonel when he retired from the military, came from a dirt farm in Michigan, engineered all kinds of civil and military projects. In the end, he still managed to engineer a smile. He absolutely loved maps/atlases/GIS.
> I'm extremely skeptical on claims of people having past 100 years of age.
People do live past 100.
Look at a chart of how old people are when they die and you’ll see a consistent distribution with a downward curve. There really are people in the tail of that curve.
There is no hard cutoff in the body that can precisely track time passed over 36,500 days and then shut it all down.
Not only are random people on the internet and a few select media outlets aware of the problem, but governments are also aware. Since the problem is costing governments money, usually in the form of retirement benefits, they have been working to eliminate the problem. In fact some governments have been working reducing and eliminating the problem for decades.
Probably but stats aside there certainly are a lot of very old people in Japan living near-normal lives compared to other developed countries.
After an hour in any town and I'd seen more 95+yos walking about than 10 years in Britain. And the number of times I saw 4 generations of men from one family in the bathhouse!
When there's money to be made from dead relatives, and an incentive for governments to make it look like people live beyond 100 so that they can claim superiority, yeah, that's a good recipe for massive fraud.
Anecdotal, but living in Japan now and I do eat much healthier and walk way more than I ever did. Sometimes it's just for fun since the city I live in is walkable, but also my commute to work involves at least an hour of walking to and from stations which I have gotten used to.
As others have mentioned, social pressure plays a role in fitness, but there definitely is an abundance of unhealthy food. A previous generation may have had less unhealthy food options, so I'd be interested to see if this trend continues. All the greasy fast food chains exist here too and they are always packed.
Funny that you say it, but I think Japan doesn't eat any healthier than the average European country. Coming from the USA, I can see how the conclusion might change.
I come from a country that isn't well-known for its cuisine but live quite long lives, but I still gained (and lost when I left) about 7kg when I lived there.
Nothing about their high-sugar, high-sodium, no-fruits diet seemed particularly healthy.
Okinawans eat very differently than people who live in Tokyo, I guess.
More (many more?) of us are familiar with and have familial connections with the Mediterranean. We also have easier access to, say, olive oil than pickled plums.
Remember, the goal of marketing a diet is selling books. Books telling you to find, prepare and eat seaweed are a harder sell than books telling you to eat ingredients you're probably already cooking with (but maybe in different quantities) and use tools and techniques you're already familiar with.
Also we have a much longer tradition of western European cooking on a pedestal. Asian recipes really only start showing up in American media in the 90s, and blew up in a serious way in the 2010s.
Japan in particular is not food self sufficient and has a declining agricultural production so is not spending as much money on convincing people to export food. Plus technically a lot of Japanese food is not grown or caught in Japan and so can be made elsewhere using the same recipes.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at, but if you’re referring to weight, diet is significantly more important than lifestyle.
In other words, it’s way easier to out diet a bad lifestyle than out lifestyle a bad diet, if your goal is to not be overweight. Obviously that doesn’t apply to all health metrics.
As a Japanese, I will also mention that what you see out to eat in Japan is not exactly what we eat at home traditionally. I doubt many would know about all the multitude of traditional dishes that my mom regularly made at home that one would typically not go out to eat, such as hijiki salad (ひじきの煮物) or kinpira gobo (きんぴらごぼう). These and others are the types of dishes that remind me of home (and not tamago-sandos and ramen). My mom emphasized eating things of different colors, which came in the form of assortments of various types of vegetables.
>it’s the choices that Japanese people make within this environment that are healthy.
Precisely that they don't need to make choices due to their environment is what makes the difference. In the US and EU people love their individualism, spend a gazillion on fitness interventions and most people are overweight, it's probably the most visible sign of the importance of culture. As Russ Ackoff said, the correct way to address problems is not to solve them, but to dissolve them. Not to fix individual issues but to create conditions under which they do not occur.
The best way to lose weight is actually to move to a place that's full of thin people, not "do" anything. It's funny that the reverse is common wisdom, everyone who moves to an unhealthy place will always proclaim how they gained 20 pounds immediately
> it’s the choices that Japanese people make within this environment that are healthy
This is a difficult truth for a lot of people to accept because it’s so much easier to blame invisible factors that are poorly understood: Microplastics, xenoesteogens, microbiome, trace lithium in the water supply, or the other trendy excuses.
In some cultures moderating your eating and controlling your weight comes with very high societal pressure. Everyone sees this from a young age and internalizes it. It’s hard to communicate how strong this pressure is and it gets lost when you only look at studies about the food supply.
I think this is mostly a social/societal thing - at an early age in schools they tell kids that they should only eat until they're 80% full. And there's substantial social pressure and bullying of anyone considered even mildly overweight.
Also, most people have a lot of walking/biking built into their daily schedule, especially in larger cities where having a car is impractical.
This all means that while there is a huge amount of sweets and fatty food, it's usually eaten in moderation, and people get exercise in their daily lives to work it off.
North America is a car captured hellscape where so many people have zero options but to sit in a car to get everywhere they want to go.
Meanwhile in Japan and so many other regions in Europe that are pointed to as healthier people have the option to simply walk to do so many of their daily tasks.
No real surprise that the regions where people have to actively work harder to be active are in poorer health than others where being active is the default easiest choice.
The built environment is a critical thing here we can fix to make a healthier society.
The Mediterranean diet is pretty much nothing like people in the Mediterranean eat today either. Very old people had a radically different diet during most of their life.
What a horrible post, missing the entire point by a mile and worse yet, misguiding everyone about the most basic facts :(
I assume you're from a western society, so I can't possibly imagine how you could have possibly reached such a conclusion. The contrast should be obvious at first glance.
The default Japanese diet is greatly more healthy than the default western diet, especially the American diet.
As a person living in the west and willing to put in some of my limited effort into eating healthy, I'm screwed. There's barely any healthy options available, I'm flooded by an ocean of awful food and it takes significant effort and cost not to drown in it.
I can't emphasize this enough, it absolutely does not matter what you can technically do or not. Defaults are what matters. By default in Japan you eat a reasonably healthy diet and walk/bike regularly. By default in America you eat fast food and drive everywhere.
Because it's easier to emulate Mediterrean diet as all the ingredients are more likely to be accessible? Japanese cuisine has a lot of funky ingredients that are not really produced outside of Japan or East Asia.
It all comes down to the work of Ancel Keys. He was the guy that got American soldiers to eat the right rations during the war and did all the research into what diets led to the best outcomes.
In his recommendations to the government (after the President had a heart attack), he could have gone with what folks were eating in Okinawa, but this was just after the war when Americans didn't have a lot of love for Japan. Hence the Mediterranean Diet was the recommendation.
Chris MacAskill is the source of my understanding of this and his Viva Longevity YT channel.
Because a Japanese breakfast of rice and fish, and a lunch of rice and fish, and a dinner of... you guessed it, rice and fish isn't appealing, and fish itself distributed across the contiguous US lends to poor and narrow selection.
I'm partly exaggerating on Japanese meals, but not by much.
Probably because Mediterranean ingredients are accessible to most of the US, a but you're pretty much out of luck making Japanese food unless you live near one of the major cities of the US.
Japanese food is probably also an unacquired taste to many.
Okinawa, Japan is famously one of the world's five "blue zones" and much ink has been expended on figuring out why. Bitter gourd or certain types of seaweed, perhaps?
What's less often discussed is that it's also Japan's poorest prefecture to this day, with spotty record keeping since it was effectively a Japanese colony (it was previously the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was annexed by Japan in 1879). Vast slabs of the main island were razed to the ground during the WW2 Battle of Okinawa and much of the civilian population simply starved to death.
I remember a paper from last year in which they are suggesting that basically Blue Zones are made just by a combination of clerical error and pension fraud: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
I actually lived in Japan for 2+ mths , ate like how I ate more than what I ate in Singapore , literally lost 5kg. I was remote working there but do travel out and walk during weekends.
I actually miss the dirty oil fried food from Singapore , it’s much nicer when it’s greasy. Japan cooking oil is very clean , food quality is much higher too, less processed.
Traveling somewhere where you walk more and then losing weight is such a common story that it has become a meme.
People also don’t accurately judge how much they eat. The portion sizes were likely smaller and the food composition was different than what you ate in Singapore, even if you thought you were eating the same. A lot has been written arguing about hidden factors in food, but in actual studies it always comes down to eating fewer calories. Eating less calorie dense foods and smaller portion sizes will do it. Even the GLP-1 studies revealed that the magic of their weight loss is directly proportional to reduction of calories eaten, even if patients eat exactly the same foods (but in smaller quantities or less frequently)
* You can use cheaper types that are nothing but omega 6
* You can heat them too high for their smoke point
* They can oxidize and go rancid
* You can use an enormous amount of it
Likely one of the main reasons a lot of restaurant food may not settle as well as home cooking. But in principle a restaurant could do the reverse of these four points.
I love how the common consensus in comments here is not "what should we do in our societies to increase the number of old people in good health?" but "they're lying".
Rejecting bad data is part of what we should do to get people healthy. This isn't a controlled scientific study, it's just a news article about a government supplied statistic with a lot of unsubstantiated claims as to why.
Because the places where everyone lives to 200, are also the places devastated by war or full of corruption.
It's like how every asylum seeker in the uk is born 1st of january. It's not because they're born 1st of january, it's because they burned their documents in order to illegally migrate. But if you took that at face value, you'd assume that afghanistan only ever births people on the 1st of january.
I believe Japan has a different concept of retirement than America; I can't speak for other Western cultures. More elderly people work low-paying part-time jobs to remain members of society, in addition to their financial needs. Americans tend to work in retirement out of financial needs, while idealizing not working during retirement.
However, when officials went to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, they found his 30-year-old remains, raising concerns that the welfare system is being exploited by dishonest relatives.
> More than 230,000 elderly people in Japan who are listed as being aged 100 or over are unaccounted for, officials said following a nationwide inquiry.
Readit News
The secret to living to 110? Bad record-keeping, says Ig Nobel Prize winner.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2024/12/25/lifestyle/lifes...
Meanwhile he has an older sister who, while bedridden, is very much alive at 100.
I suppose the necessary medical breakthroughs happened in the second half of the 20th century, as no one, including the people in question, anticipated they would live this long. Grandma even stated in her will that my second oldest cousin would inherit the apartment - supposedly to have "a better start in life when she grows up". That was 30 years ago and my cousin's oldest child should be in high school now right now.
That, but also various factors during one's life - most importantly, ample and healthy food (especially during fetal growth, childhood and youth), a lack of exposure to known damaging factors for physical and mental health (smog, noise, tobacco, alcohol and other drugs), and a lack of wars and other forms of violence.
The top killers in the Western world are cardiovascular diseases (strongly linked to food) and cancers (strongly linked, again, to food but also to drugs). A safe working culture (both in business and in private) is also a good thing to have - the typical lackluster attitude towards workplace safety is a top cause of workplace accidents both fatal and non-fatal but serious.
In Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal he mentions that research shows that long life is not particularly heritable.
Seems like something similar could still be a problem here, although it seems less likely since the number here is significantly less than article I've linked.
Obligatory mention of how genetics and early nurture and environment cannot be separated in research: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/looking-in-the-cultu...
Were you there when they were born, so that you can verify their true age?
Is this some kind of new math? 100 and 110 are within 10% of each other, which seems very much in the same ballpark to me.
[1] https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/09/25/the-secret-to-a-l...
While there are a few people who seemed to be nearly immortal, as in "being around since forever", like the Queen Of England or recently deceased https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Iliescu ... they didn't actually push past 100.
With all the care and life standard, seems to be a hard limit in our genes, so until something is done about that, better get realistic expectations.
He smoked only during WW2, was an army corp of engineers colonel when he retired from the military, came from a dirt farm in Michigan, engineered all kinds of civil and military projects. In the end, he still managed to engineer a smile. He absolutely loved maps/atlases/GIS.
People do live past 100.
Look at a chart of how old people are when they die and you’ll see a consistent distribution with a downward curve. There really are people in the tail of that curve.
There is no hard cutoff in the body that can precisely track time passed over 36,500 days and then shut it all down.
Many others lived past 100.
Last Civil War veteran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Woolson another example.
After an hour in any town and I'd seen more 95+yos walking about than 10 years in Britain. And the number of times I saw 4 generations of men from one family in the bathhouse!
Hoping I live to something something something.
Dead Comment
As others have mentioned, social pressure plays a role in fitness, but there definitely is an abundance of unhealthy food. A previous generation may have had less unhealthy food options, so I'd be interested to see if this trend continues. All the greasy fast food chains exist here too and they are always packed.
I come from a country that isn't well-known for its cuisine but live quite long lives, but I still gained (and lost when I left) about 7kg when I lived there.
Nothing about their high-sugar, high-sodium, no-fruits diet seemed particularly healthy.
Okinawans eat very differently than people who live in Tokyo, I guess.
(Greece commits a lot of pension fraud too)
Remember, the goal of marketing a diet is selling books. Books telling you to find, prepare and eat seaweed are a harder sell than books telling you to eat ingredients you're probably already cooking with (but maybe in different quantities) and use tools and techniques you're already familiar with.
Japan in particular is not food self sufficient and has a declining agricultural production so is not spending as much money on convincing people to export food. Plus technically a lot of Japanese food is not grown or caught in Japan and so can be made elsewhere using the same recipes.
In other words, it’s way easier to out diet a bad lifestyle than out lifestyle a bad diet, if your goal is to not be overweight. Obviously that doesn’t apply to all health metrics.
So in short food itself from Japan is not generically healthy… it’s the choices that Japanese people make within this environment that are healthy.
Also, portion sizes in America are huge.
Precisely that they don't need to make choices due to their environment is what makes the difference. In the US and EU people love their individualism, spend a gazillion on fitness interventions and most people are overweight, it's probably the most visible sign of the importance of culture. As Russ Ackoff said, the correct way to address problems is not to solve them, but to dissolve them. Not to fix individual issues but to create conditions under which they do not occur.
The best way to lose weight is actually to move to a place that's full of thin people, not "do" anything. It's funny that the reverse is common wisdom, everyone who moves to an unhealthy place will always proclaim how they gained 20 pounds immediately
This is a difficult truth for a lot of people to accept because it’s so much easier to blame invisible factors that are poorly understood: Microplastics, xenoesteogens, microbiome, trace lithium in the water supply, or the other trendy excuses.
In some cultures moderating your eating and controlling your weight comes with very high societal pressure. Everyone sees this from a young age and internalizes it. It’s hard to communicate how strong this pressure is and it gets lost when you only look at studies about the food supply.
Also, most people have a lot of walking/biking built into their daily schedule, especially in larger cities where having a car is impractical.
This all means that while there is a huge amount of sweets and fatty food, it's usually eaten in moderation, and people get exercise in their daily lives to work it off.
Meanwhile in Japan and so many other regions in Europe that are pointed to as healthier people have the option to simply walk to do so many of their daily tasks.
No real surprise that the regions where people have to actively work harder to be active are in poorer health than others where being active is the default easiest choice.
The built environment is a critical thing here we can fix to make a healthier society.
But so is healthy food. Imagine saying "I ate nothing but 7/11 food for two days and I feel the best I have in years" in America.
Where I'd be having a hot dog or pizza I was having onigiri. Small things like that add up.
And yes, they do walk a lot -- I spent a whole evening just walking around Shinjuku in awe of the place.
I assume you're from a western society, so I can't possibly imagine how you could have possibly reached such a conclusion. The contrast should be obvious at first glance.
The default Japanese diet is greatly more healthy than the default western diet, especially the American diet.
As a person living in the west and willing to put in some of my limited effort into eating healthy, I'm screwed. There's barely any healthy options available, I'm flooded by an ocean of awful food and it takes significant effort and cost not to drown in it.
I can't emphasize this enough, it absolutely does not matter what you can technically do or not. Defaults are what matters. By default in Japan you eat a reasonably healthy diet and walk/bike regularly. By default in America you eat fast food and drive everywhere.
In his recommendations to the government (after the President had a heart attack), he could have gone with what folks were eating in Okinawa, but this was just after the war when Americans didn't have a lot of love for Japan. Hence the Mediterranean Diet was the recommendation.
Chris MacAskill is the source of my understanding of this and his Viva Longevity YT channel.
I'm partly exaggerating on Japanese meals, but not by much.
Japanese food is probably also an unacquired taste to many.
It’s not like you can just blanket label it “Japanese diet”.
What's less often discussed is that it's also Japan's poorest prefecture to this day, with spotty record keeping since it was effectively a Japanese colony (it was previously the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was annexed by Japan in 1879). Vast slabs of the main island were razed to the ground during the WW2 Battle of Okinawa and much of the civilian population simply starved to death.
I actually miss the dirty oil fried food from Singapore , it’s much nicer when it’s greasy. Japan cooking oil is very clean , food quality is much higher too, less processed.
Traveling somewhere where you walk more and then losing weight is such a common story that it has become a meme.
People also don’t accurately judge how much they eat. The portion sizes were likely smaller and the food composition was different than what you ate in Singapore, even if you thought you were eating the same. A lot has been written arguing about hidden factors in food, but in actual studies it always comes down to eating fewer calories. Eating less calorie dense foods and smaller portion sizes will do it. Even the GLP-1 studies revealed that the magic of their weight loss is directly proportional to reduction of calories eaten, even if patients eat exactly the same foods (but in smaller quantities or less frequently)
* You can use cheaper types that are nothing but omega 6
* You can heat them too high for their smoke point
* They can oxidize and go rancid
* You can use an enormous amount of it
Likely one of the main reasons a lot of restaurant food may not settle as well as home cooking. But in principle a restaurant could do the reverse of these four points.
You can use rancid oil, seed oil, high and long temperatures on polyunsaturaded oils etc. All very unhealthy. Not sure what Japs use though.
It's like how every asylum seeker in the uk is born 1st of january. It's not because they're born 1st of january, it's because they burned their documents in order to illegally migrate. But if you took that at face value, you'd assume that afghanistan only ever births people on the 1st of january.
Kind of blows my mind that there are people out there that have lived longer in retirement, than they have worked.
However, when officials went to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, they found his 30-year-old remains, raising concerns that the welfare system is being exploited by dishonest relatives.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071 (2010)
That's a pretty stark difference.