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.
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.
em500 · 1h ago
The linked BBC article devotes the last quarter of text to this. Don't assume they're taking all statistics at face value.
dadrian · 1h ago
Yeah, I assume this means there’s a lot of fraud
walthamstow · 46m ago
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!
ekianjo · 1h ago
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.
delichon · 1h ago
Then I may be immortal.
ainiriand · 14m ago
You are just a rounding error.
MichaelRo · 1h ago
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.
Aurornis · 12m ago
> 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.
reactordev · 56m ago
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.
mahkeiro · 40m ago
My wife grandmother made it to 102 and when she died (from an infection)it was a surprise as she was still very active and was walking everyday. Genetics and luck play also a big role.
sleigh-bells · 1h ago
I wonder why nearly all the focus in the US on healthy diets is on the Mediterranean diet and not the Japanese one...
(Greece commits a lot of pension fraud too)
onlyrealcuzzo · 1h ago
Probably the same reason why people focus so much on diet, and so little on lifestyle.
buzzerbetrayed · 55m ago
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.
water-data-dude · 47m ago
I think they're saying that diet is easier for people to commit to than going to the gym regularly and other lifestyle changes.
bobthepanda · 38m ago
Going to the gym regularly is a strictly American thing. Americans are obsessed with gym culture in a way that other countries generally aren't.
Most exercise in Japan takes the form of constant walking. You can walk from most homes to stores and restaurants, from many homes to train stations, from many workplaces to train stations, etc. For many Americans, the most walking they do is the walk from the door to the car.
It's substantially easier to build up a lot of time exercising by just walking as part of the things you do in daily life; a dedicated workout is generally only about 45-90 minutes. And the people going to the gym in Japan are also participating in all that walking, generally.
ivape · 25m ago
It’s because America is built on insecurity. You never know if you’re rich enough, smart enough, skinny enough, pretty enough …
I wonder what anyone in Japan can say of the state of vanity over there. Is it relegated to an age ranges or genders, or is it beginning to pollute the culture entirely like in America?
My opinion is that Japan’s primary sin is pride and not necessarily vanity.
appreciatorBus · 32m ago
Or: diet is eaiser to commit to than going to the gym and going to the gym is easier than convincing your neighbours & city council to allow any sort of change to American style land use patterns that prevent destinations being within walkabout distances and destroy the profitability of transit.
mensetmanusman · 4m ago
It’s not, my mom moved in and I brought her on short daily walks. She lost 70 pounds in one year.
idiotsecant · 10m ago
While diet is obviously essential to a long life, it is not sufficient. There is a mountain of evidence that regular cardiovascular exercise is a pretty essential part of keeping your body working, as well as your mind.
odiroot · 1h ago
Because it's not about diet, at least not mostly. It's about societal pressure.
There's plenty of unhealthy easily accessible food even in Japan.
bee_rider · 1h ago
Everybody loves the Mediterranean, right? It has just the right mix of “down to Earth,” and sophistication.
epolanski · 11m ago
Where's the sophistication? It's mostly vegetables.
ninetyninenine · 1h ago
If you been to Japan, access to unhealthy food is extraordinarily easy. There’s so much bad food everywhere along with good food.
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.
wanderer_79 · 32m ago
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.
Also, portion sizes in America are huge.
evidencetamper · 15m ago
This, plus yearly mandated healthchecks with huge pressure and shame on excessive weight.
Aurornis · 58m ago
> 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.
eagerpace · 2m ago
Agree. Hyper-partisanship has Americans on both sides believing any decision they don’t make for themselves is against their interests.
zdw · 1h ago
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.
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.
tetris11 · 1h ago
Isn't it just affordable access to high quality healthcare services?
Aurornis · 56m ago
Unlikely that health care drives the population’s daily food choices and caloric intake.
PUSH_AX · 1h ago
Are we to believe only one or the other contains the key or is very healthy?
gedy · 1h ago
Mainly because most Americans don't want to eat a (real) asian diet, unlike Mediterranean style food.
tayo42 · 38m ago
What would that diet consist of?
datameta · 1m ago
Mostly vegetables, sizable amount of seafood, and rice (if we speak of coastal east asia generically)
jonathan920 · 1h ago
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.
rtz121 · 11m ago
On my last Japan vacation I actually managed to gain weight
Aurornis · 1h ago
> but do travel out and walk during weekends.
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)
famahar · 36m ago
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.
aetherson · 1h ago
"Japan sets record of nearly 100k people whose children are committing pension fraud."
julianozen · 1h ago
Possible, but also Japan is such a high trust society I would be shocked if this is the reason
danans · 1h ago
> Japan is such a high trust society I would be shocked if this is the reason
Trust works both ways. There's also the trust that nobody will report anyone for the fraud, especially if it is widespread and normalized.
However, it would not surprise me if Japan actually did have high life expectancy rates because several other statistics seem to correlate with that, including low obesity, and universal access to healthcare.
hajile · 11m ago
I don't remember the source, but worldwide, most really old people have a couple things in common. First is that they live in countries with some kind of pension plan. Second, they generally come from poor neighborhoods where all the people around them statistically have lower lifespans.
The logical conclusion is fraud.
sfdlkj3jk342a · 37m ago
I don't think defrauding the government is all that related to what is typically meant by high/low trust societies.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
(Greece commits a lot of pension fraud too)
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.
Most exercise in Japan takes the form of constant walking. You can walk from most homes to stores and restaurants, from many homes to train stations, from many workplaces to train stations, etc. For many Americans, the most walking they do is the walk from the door to the car.
It's substantially easier to build up a lot of time exercising by just walking as part of the things you do in daily life; a dedicated workout is generally only about 45-90 minutes. And the people going to the gym in Japan are also participating in all that walking, generally.
I wonder what anyone in Japan can say of the state of vanity over there. Is it relegated to an age ranges or genders, or is it beginning to pollute the culture entirely like in America?
My opinion is that Japan’s primary sin is pride and not necessarily vanity.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Trust works both ways. There's also the trust that nobody will report anyone for the fraud, especially if it is widespread and normalized.
However, it would not surprise me if Japan actually did have high life expectancy rates because several other statistics seem to correlate with that, including low obesity, and universal access to healthcare.
The logical conclusion is fraud.
It was already seen over a decade ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071
I mean, clearly not all centarians in Japan are actually dead. But I think it's fairly straightforward that the numbers of super-elderly are inflated.