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In 2010, welfare officials in Tokyo tried to visit Sogen Kato, a local man living in the city’s Adachi district, to congratulate him on his 111th birthday. Their records identified him as the oldest man in the city, but his family kept turning them away, saying he didn’t want visitors or had taken a trip somewhere five hours away.
When police finally entered the house, they found Kato’s mummified remains lying in bed, dressed in pajamas and covered with a blanket. He’d been dead for at least 30 years, although his family claimed he’d shut himself away to become a living Buddha.
His pension kept paying, and someone withdrew 2.7 million yen, about $31,000 at the time, after officials started asking questions.
“This prompted the Japanese Ministry of Justice to check in on other centenarians: not just in Tokyo but across all Japan,” writes scientist Saul Justin Newman in his new book, “Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science” (MIT Press, out now).
Newman investigates how unreliable age records can shape our understanding of aging, including the research behind the popular Blue Zones guides promising lessons in living longer. He also examines anti-aging treatments sold before anyone has established that they work.
Across Japan, the audit identified 234,354 people still on family registers whose whereabouts couldn’t be confirmed. All would have been at least 100 if alive. Newman describes them as dead or missing and puts their share at more than 82% of the recorded centenarian population.
“Imagine if 82% of the stars seen by the Hubble Space Telescope turned out to be dust on the lens,” he writes. “In astronomy, or any other science, this would have caused a massive scandal. In aging science there was not even a shrug.”
While researchers would later argue that Newman misread the audit and that there were only 600 people missing across Japan, the author sees a much wider problem. In Greece, he reports, at least 72% of centenarians disappeared from the count after the 2011 census amid investigations into pension fraud. “Like Sogen Kato, the Greek centenarians were only alive on pension day,” he writes.
Some families went to considerable trouble to preserve that arrangement. Police checking on Irma Borgoglio, reportedly 103, found her propped up in her Italian kitchen, frozen solid. Her son claimed she had just died, although the chest freezer where he’d kept her suggested a longer interval.
Even living people sometimes disputed their records. In 2016, Adele Dunlap, a former teacher living in a nursing home in Pittstown, NJ, was named America’s oldest person. Asked what it felt like to be 113, she answered, “I’m 104,” according to a USA Today account quoted in the book. The newspaper accepted the Gerontology Research Group’s finding that she was 113, an exchange Newman uses to question how researchers handle testimony that contradicts someone’s paperwork.
Getting someone’s age wrong can also affect the advice sold to everyone else. Blue Zones cookbooks and lifestyle guides offer lessons from communities where people reportedly live to 100 or beyond. But if those ages are wrong, Newman argues, we’re copying somebody’s lifestyle choices without knowing whether it helped them live longer.
Citing Japanese government data, Newman reports that citizens of Okinawa — the Japanese island promoted as a place where people routinely live past 100 — rank first in the country for Kentucky Fried Chicken consumption. “The oldest Okinawans also have the worst BMI in Japan,” he writes.
Blue Zones guides recommend belonging to a religious community, but Newman notes that Okinawans are 93.4% atheist. Their vegetable consumption also falls short of the advice. “Again, these are not new or recent trends,” he writes, “and they really should eat some more greens.”
Singapore became a Blue Zone despite having little in common with that guidance. Its health minister said residents “have the opposite attributes of the other five Blue Zones,” describing stressful lives and diets high in sugar and salt. If Singaporeans live longer while doing things differently, why should the habits promoted in Blue Zones guides get the credit?
Blue Zones guides recommend moderate drinking, including Sardinian red wine, as one habit associated with longer lives. Harvard researcher David Sinclair called resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, “as close to a miraculous molecule as you can find.” In 2008, GlaxoSmithKline paid approximately $720 million for Sirtris, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company he helped found.
Three years later, the promise of turning resveratrol into medicine had run ahead of the evidence that it could help patients. “What is the actual use for humans still needs to be discovered,” one researcher said, according to Newman. In 2013, GSK closed Sirtris’ Cambridge operation and absorbed its research.
At Oxford, where he worked as a research fellow, Newman says colleagues shut him out and urged him to stop criticizing the age records used in longevity research. He eventually took a medical research job at University College London.
Newman remains fascinated by experiments that actually change lifespan. In a 1961 study he recounts, removing kokanee salmon’s gonads prevented their usual reproductive death, allowing some to live more than twice as long.
“We can make kokanee double their normal limits of survival with scissors and stitches,” he writes, though that offers no equivalent prescription for humans. The fish might have survived longer, but “a gang of raccoons broke in and ate many of the test subjects.”