The Mediterranean diet doesn’t exist, these countries have longer life expectancies because they’re bad at reporting deaths and their governments think that they have a bunch of 110 year olds.
Of course, the dropping life expectancy in the US is almost certainly due to depression and lack of healthcare.
The researcher who debunked these so-called “blue zones” received an Ig Nobel prize this year.
That’s just the unusual prevalence of 100+ year olds, in the so called “blue zones.” Overall country life expectancy statistics aren’t thrown off by that type of fraud as much, because the vast majority of people don’t live anywhere close to 100, and these specific blue zones are a very small overall portion of the larger country.
For the most part, we can observe a correlation between wealth/income and life expectancy, where the blue zones are outliers on that general trend (both long lived and very poor). So there’s no reason to believe that these small communities are poisoning the overall stats in any significant quantity.
Yeah thats true. And I agree with the overall idea of better health care = longer life. Just wanted to reinforce that the whole “Mediterranean diet” thing is somewhat debunked.