Pharyngula

My great-grandfather ate peanut brittle like it was going to be outlawed tomorrow. He also smoked cigars and drank scotch, and golfed into his early 90s. He died at 95.

And incedentally, the only way any of my organs are going to be discussed on the internet, I imagine, is in the context of how not to treat one's body.

Posted by: The Disgruntled Chemist | September 4, 2006 12:32 PM

This confirms my longstanding opinion that you either have longevity genes or you don't. If you don't, there's no way you'll even make 85 no matter what you do, but if you do, you can do whatever the fuck you want and still make a hundred. I can't tell you how many relatives I've had who keeled over between 69 and 74, regardless of how they lived their lives.

Posted by: George Cauldron | September 4, 2006 1:44 PM

When I'm dead, I want someone to discuss my internal organs on the internet.

Post some more pictures like in this one, and you won't have to wait until you're dead.

Posted by: RavenT | September 4, 2006 2:22 PM

All of these "grandpa lived to a ripe old age eating grease and deep-fried nasty every day" stories just remind me of the concept of spurious correlation.

Did his diet really matter? Why don't we look at some other aspect of variation in human behaviour - do these old dead greasy guys have anything else in common? And what about all the old dead vegetarian (or whatever) guys?

All this attention to the extreme right-side tail of the age-at-death distribution seems rather useless if the goal is longer lifespans for anyone else.

Posted by: TheBrummell | September 4, 2006 4:17 PM

We live in a world that likes to focus on flash...the best news is breaking news that portrays the latest tragedy...whether that be a plane crash, a shooting, or any of a number of calamities. At the same time, slower burning, less inflammatory catastrophes unfold at a reliably steady pace each day. The question is what makes one the focus of near obsessive attention and the other an item to be placed obscurely on the back burner?

A new article points to a classic example of this phenomenon...the expansion of humanity...around the waist. While we do see an occasional news piece on the topic, it rarely breaches the psyche to the same degree that, for example, the number of U.S. troop fatalities in Iraq has achieved. Clearly, many Americans could cite the number of troops lost but only perhaps a handful could offer the statistics on deaths attributed to obesity. The full article can be read here.

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - An obesity pandemic threatens to overwhelm health systems around the globe with illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, experts at an international conference warned Sunday.

"This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world," Paul Zimmet, chairman of the meeting of more than 2,500 experts and health officials, said in a speech opening the weeklong International Congress on Obesity. "It's as big a threat as global warming and bird flu."

The World Health Organization says more than 1 billion adults are overweight and 300 million of them are obese, putting them at much higher risk of diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure, stroke and some forms of cancer.

Zimmet, a diabetes expert at Australia's Monash University, said there are now more overweight people in the world than the undernourished, who number about 600 million.

I found the information in the last paragraph fascinating...overweight people now outnumber the undernourished! The reason I find it fascinating may surprise my readers...but I guess the element of surprise may well be what we all prefer. It is fascinating to me because it seems to be consistent with the polarization that permeates the United States and much of the world...perhaps a further sign that humanity is woefully out of balance...living largely at the extremes.

Link to the full text here:

www.thoughttheater.com

Posted by: Daniel DiRito | September 4, 2006 4:58 PM

Your missing the main point about this story folks.

>"He had no heart disease, he had no cancer, no diabetes and no Alzheimer's. His body was clean as a whistle..."

And he still croaked.

Now...doesn't that make you feel better? :}

Posted by: James | September 4, 2006 10:09 PM

Not only a possible virus, but compounded with that a change in the gut flora that causes some people to extract more nutrients from food than others. It was in the NY Times a week or two ago. This has been kicking around since the 1970s, when a study on nutrition and obesity found that at least one obese patient fed what *should* have been the appropriate amount of calories for weight maintenance gained almost a pound a day instead. However, the 3500 calories = 1 pound for everyone has held tight like an iron fist despite many studies indicating that fat storage/release is more complicated and variable than that. The same article mentioned the virus, and that people with the antibodies indicating they had been infected with it had to eat 15% fewer calories than those who hadn't to maintain rather than gain weight.
Then there are all the studies indicating that obesity doesn't cause health problems for a large number of people, and that the CDC had to revise downward their numbers of "deaths by obesity" by over half but news stories still use the original numbers, and so on.

Posted by: Carlie | September 5, 2006 10:40 AM

But 112 year olds don't survive pneumonia very often. (and neither did Jim Henson.) Those kinds of infections really hit the elderly hard. I have a Slovak friend who said basically the hospital system at home is such that when the elderly end up there, no matter what the reason, the general assumption is that they will catch either pneumonia or something else infectious and die of it before they get out of the hospital for whatever they went in for.

Posted by: Carlie | September 6, 2006 9:53 PM