File picture. Photo: AFP
Australian Dr Saul Newman from Oxford Institute of Population Ageing has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for his work debunking the idea that people in Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia in Italy and Greece live longer lives than average.
These long-lived people we've been taking "lifestyle tips from" are "mostly corpses," Newman told RNZ's Afternoons.
"I found out that at least 72 percent of the people in Greece over the age of 100, thousands of people, they're all dead.
"These numbers come from the people handing out the pensions, and they've been handing out the pensions for 100-year-olds despite the fact that these people are dead.
"It's extraordinary to have a ton of science based off this, because, like, what are you going to conclude? Essentially it's nonsense."
Okinawans, it is claimed, live long healthy lives because of among other things, their love of veggies.
"The Japanese government actually asked Okinawans since 1975 they've asked them about their nutrition, and they've always been dead last out of 47 regions of Japan.
"They're always last in terms of eating sweet potatoes, in terms of eating their veggies full stop. They're always last. None of this stuff stacks up."
In all these regions record keeping, the basis on which these longevity claims are made, was decidedly poor, he said.
"It's wild. There were 230,000 people in Japan that were alive on paper and dead in reality - 230,000. It's incredible. Greece was roughly 8000."
In fact, he said, Okinawans were among the least healthy people in Japan.
"It's astounding the level of poor health and the extensive records of poor health in Okinawa.
"They start measuring people in 1975 when the Americans handed the province back. And since 1975 they've measured how heavy the older people are in Okinawa with the over 75s and they've always been dead last in terms of body mass index. They've always had the worst health."
The island of Sardinia is another place where people are claimed to live long lives, not so much, Newman said.
It measures life expectancy at age 85 and has done so since 1990 and it has never been remarkable.
"It's about 60th roughly in Europe right now. And when they first started measuring, they were 51st in Europe. So, they've never been anywhere near the top."
It was a similar story on Greece, he said, with data showing in 1990 Greece had higher levels of overweight people than the USA.
He has found no correlation between longevity and geography, he said.
"We're assaulted by bad data here … there's a huge volume of research about this, and it's so transparently wrong, then how are you going to rely on anything else?
"I'm not a nutritionist, right? I can't tell you what a good diet is. I can just tell you that this, the diets being proposed here, have no connection to what actually happens in these regions."
