Book review of "Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential Age"When, less than an hour ago, this book arrived, I was excited because it's authors interviewed over 100 centenarians to find out what they did to make it that far. So I had hoped there would be something truly useful: information about what foods they ate. You see, if you take a large enough sample of objects in which each object's properties is a smooth function of several random variables, the variables upon which each object's properties primarily depend can be easily picked out just by looking at just the similarities between the extreme objects. In English: each extremely long lived person must have been on a longevity diet, of had longevity genes, _and_ of lived a longevity lifestyle. I can't change my genes, don't want to change my personality/driving habits, and already think I know nearly everything about exercise, so the one thing I wanted to learn from this book was what type of diets the centenarians ate. Unfortunately, it wasn't in this book. Instead, there are lots of pictures of old people doing things like playing golf. I learned nothing new.
The only thing I could find was on page 59:
"One of our centenarians had been eating bacon and three eggs every day for breakfast for 15 years. Had he survived so long in spite of or because of this diet? Other centenarians swore by dietary concoctions they had invented, such as James Hanlon's breakfast combination of oatmeal, olive oil, raisins, apples, and other fruits. There was no rhyme or reason to the results we saw."
But the real truth is that these authors simply were too narrow-minded and lazy to ask questions about what the centenarians used to eat. They didn't obtain the relevant data but formed a conclusion anyways. A classic example of bad science that looks good on paper.
What is most pathetic is that they actually did perform a limited survey using an inappropriate questionnaire which only asked what the centenarians are eating right now. About the questionnaire, they write (on page 58),
"After looking at responses from only 20 centenarians, it was clear that studying self-reported diet would not prove fruitful for several reasons. In the first place, we were interested in the conditions that allowed people to live to 100---what they were doing once they arrived at that age was often a different story. Many of our subjects had lost their robust appetites, and were no longer consuming full diets. We found a number of centenarians with deficiencies in important nutrients. They had to some extent migrated away from their lifelong dietary habits, and those potentially health-sustaining practices were the ones that interested us."
I agree with them that the questionnaire they used was stupid. But to then say that lifespan is independent of diet is in blatant contradiction with the scientific method. (In fact the above supports the theory of calorie restriction.) It's like saying that because it is relatively difficult in studies about heart disease to measure the saturated fat to poly-unsaturated fat ratio in diets that heart disease is not a function of it.
Their attitude is summed up on page 118 in this blatantly ridiculous paragraph:
"Newspapers and magazines are full of fountain of youth prescriptions: hormones, extracts of ginkgo and garlic, yogurt. Fruit flies don't take any of these nostrums. Their variation in longevity did not appear to be linked to differences in diet or environment."
Regardless of his opinions on calorie restriction, I think Doug Skrecky (along with 100's of others) has shown that the opposite is true. If you are 60 and want to feel inspired about being active while old, read this book. You can have my copy. If, on the other hand, you hate fluff, don't waste your time with this book.
Jason A. Taylor, Ph.D.
