What if people who live in so-called 'Blue Zones' aren't as old as they claim?
by the economist Christopher Snowdon, people tend to move to certain areas in their retirement. If we really wanted to be sure that it was something about the area, we’d have to make sure they’d lived there all their life.
If we want to find out anything else about why people live to very old ages, it won’t do to just pattern-match from a few places around the world. What if – purely hypothetically – people from one of these long-lived regions have a particular genetic quirk that leads to their living longer? You could look at all the dietary factors in the world and never find anything worthwhile.
To deal with these kinds of problems, we need to do ageing research that involves large-scale, long-term randomised trials of particular diets and lifestyle factors. This kind of trial has beenand its impact on cardiovascular disease; it could be done for other factors too. It’s not like this is a trivial question. Countries around the world, including ours, are facing a scary demographic situation whereby the population is ageing rapidly alongside plummeting birth rates. Countries with relatively low immigration, such as, where 10 per cent of the population is now older than 80, have an even bigger problem than elsewhere, since it’s harder for them to fill essential jobs. But the ageing of our populations will affect us all eventually.
Until we do better-quality research on the factors that might slow down ageing, we can’t expect to learn anything beyond the obvious . Doing more research on what affects ageing should be a global priority – but vague studies of “Blue Zones” just aren’t going to cut it.Both the XL Bully’s breed and its owner’s behaviours can render it dangerous that everyone is talking about. This one is a quick point-by-point rebuttal to many of the pro-Bully arguments that you often see online.
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