Perhaps you’ve heard about the so-called “blue zones”—locations where humans are more likely to live longer due to lifestyle, diet, and other factors.
Blue zones have been getting much attention lately from people who want to hack the human body and find ways to live longer, healthier lives.
It appears that the most important factor contributing to longer life was quite unexpected:
Fraud.
Once researchers started investigating the secrets of these long-lived people, they found that the key to linking these communities was “poor recordkeeping” and access to government benefits via fraudulent accounting.
People were either pretending to be older to obtain senior benefits early or not reporting the death of a person to continue to receive their social security.
When Greece audited its centenarians, 72 percent of them disappeared overnight.
When Costa Rica conducted a similar audit, 42 percent were identified as fraudulent.
Just like that, thousands of pundits, podcasters, and publications touting the benefits of afternoon naps, olive oil, and figs were rendered irrelevant because a bunch of old people living in places where record keeping was sparse and the incentives for lying were considerable pretended to be even older than they are.
Long live the skeptic.
