HN Reader

Related, perhaps?

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...

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.

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.

I read such news with a grain of salt:

However, when officials went to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, they found his 30-year-old remains, raising concerns that the welfare system is being exploited by dishonest relatives.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071 (2010)

NHK, the Japanese national broadcaster, has a bunch of programs that highlight small businesses across the country with owner/operators, many of whom who work well beyond the traditional retirement age. It's pretty common to see people in their 70's & 80's running a family business or working at one. These small business owners often have had entire careers elsewhere then come back to the family business for a second career in retirement age. Being the third/fourth/fifth generation owner of a small business is very common in these shows and not one has ever said it's the Omega 3's in their diet keeping them going.

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)

together they have 10 million years of total experience, put that in your LLM and watch it smoke

100K out of 123 million is about 1 in 1200, not so absurd.

Certainly life span is long in Japan even if some of the centenarians aren't really that old.

Wonder when these folks retired.

Kind of blows my mind that there are people out there that have lived longer in retirement, than they have worked.

I know someone who wants to live as long as he possibly can. Not appealing to me at all.

Okinawa, Japan is famously one of the world's five "blue zones" and much ink has been expended on figuring out why. Bitter gourd or certain types of seaweed, perhaps?

What's less often discussed is that it's also Japan's poorest prefecture to this day, with spotty record keeping since it was effectively a Japanese colony (it was previously the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was annexed by Japan in 1879). Vast slabs of the main island were razed to the ground during the WW2 Battle of Okinawa and much of the civilian population simply starved to death.

We have really good family records dating back hundreds of years. What stands out to me is the number of my ancestors who regularly lived into their 80s or 90s 500 years ago. At the same time it's very easy to see that entire branches of the family were wiped out, probably by basic things like Flu, IE: when you see a bunch of young people in their teens or 20s die within a short timeframe, that's the most likely explanation. I'm just a layperson, but it certainly feels intuitive to say that physical work like they did (avoid cardiovascular disease), probably minimal non-processed food diet, and a whole lot of serious luck when it came to avoiding disease and especially childhood maladies, is probably what worked. Sure it's anecdata, but it seems very consistent across many generations.

That’s wonderful. I hope I can live so long.

The cohort of Japanese men would be of military age during WW2, so the gender proportions of centenarians are lower due to men being KIA.

Japans whole "hikikiomori" population is estimated to be in between 500k to over 1M people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

these old people are gunna be kinda fucked

I love how the common consensus in comments here is not "what should we do in our societies to increase the number of old people in good health?" but "they're lying".

Fun fact: in japan diapers are much more targeted at old people that babies.