TeaHere in hell there is a special place reserved for those doctors who trade their authority, status and medical training to make money out of public fear and gullibility. Every time I scroll past a qualified therapist promoting elixirs promising youthful vigor, cellulite-free thighs or a gut microbiome makeover, I want to puke their insidious eyes out. At best, these fraudsters have prioritized lining their own pockets rather than helping others. At their worst, as in the case of Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers, they are actively dangerous – something I witnessed firsthand in hospital wards in 2021, when unvaccinated patients succumbed to the disease.
Nowhere has human hope been more ruthlessly monetized by medical grifters than in the anti-aging industry. Our inevitable fate – fall and death – prepares us for exploitation. Who wouldn’t want to pop a pill or hook themselves up to an IV infusion that, for just £99.99 a month, would magically prevent the moment you become a grandparent? in sickness, Newcomer author Saul Justin Newman, a research fellow at the Institute of Population Aging at the University of Oxford, is ready to topple the entire slimy house of cards. His main argument is that our fear of frailty and dying “has paved the way for all kinds of fraud in the science of aging”, an area of research rife, he argues, with “misleading claims, misconceptions and outright fraud. The world’s oldest man is a fake, thousands of the world’s oldest people have actually died, and five decades of research on human longevity is controversial.
These are shocking allegations, especially when made by someone whose Amazon author page reads as if it were the target of obsession, but written on acid. Among other things, Newman has “met a man with a walrus-skull book-end, saved two people from drowning… been run over by a moped, got his hand stuck in a giant clam, been hit full in the face with a pavlova.” My uneasiness increased when I saw their publisher, MIT Press, book description An excerpt from “Entertaining, if instructive, chaos”. I’m an angry person who seeks education and inspiration, not chaos, from non-fiction literature. However, MIT Press sells its author short—because that’s exactly what this interesting, eccentric book provides.
Take the revelations about the world’s oldest person, Jiroemon Kimura, who died in Japan in 2013 at the age of 116 years and 54 days. Newman points out that although his age was clearly verified by detailed examination of demographic records, despite no documented divorce, Kimura had at least two documented names, two documented birthdays, and three documented wives. The more Newman investigated the personal cases of the world’s famous “oldest” people, the more discrepancies he found in record-keeping. A pattern emerged: “An extreme longevity case will be announced, splashed across the global press and praised by all, and then disappear years later once the evidence is examined.”
Even more worryingly, the phenomenon of mis-aging of the world’s oldest people exists at the population level. For example, in Tokyo in 2010, famous supercentenarian Sogen Kato, whose official age was 111, was discovered to have a mummified husk in his family home – where he lay dead for at least 30 years while a relative claimed his pension. In the wake of the upcoming scandal, Japan’s Justice Ministry reportedly investigated all people over the age of 100. More than 82% of them were found dead or “missing”. Newman found another population of dead centenarians in Greece. There, in an effort to clean public records in 2012, the government discovered that more than 9,000 people listed as over the age of 100 were actually dead, with many of the survivors existing only on paper to enable unscrupulous relatives to obtain their pensions.
The islands of Okinawa (Japan) and Ikaria (Greece) are two of the six much-discussed “Blue Zones” – areas of exceptionally high late-life survival where centenarians are abundant. Newman brilliantly skewers Dan Buettner, an American entrepreneur who built a lucrative brand around a trademarked word, founded the Blue Zones Company and sold books, diets and lifestyles that promise nine “secrets” of longevity. In many ways, Buettner is a precursor to tech-bro biohackers like Brian Johnson, also filmed by Newman, who aims to stave off death by infusing his son’s plasma into himself, injecting his penis with Botox and tracking his bowel movements in public. Needless to say, Johnson’s website promises “personalized longevity insights” when you purchase a “Biomarker Subscription” for just $365 per year.
In an era of frequent online grifting and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy as US health secretary, Newman’s conclusions are refreshingly simple. Longevity “science” is largely built on bullshit data. So laugh at those who promise to give you a “cure” for aging or sell you a trademark hoax. Provide space for reproducible basic research. Give importance to scientific method. Don’t smoke, eat more plants, move more. There’s only one goal I won’t allow. Newman should not contest David Attenborough’s longevity in any shape or form.
