I credit the Ig Nobels for alerting me of the "blue zone" myth.

For people who don't know, it was about research related to communities around the world that are known to have a high number of centenarians. Lots of researchers have studied those populations to see how their genes/lifestyles are different from ordinary folks and try to take lessons from them.

Then one researcher came along and showed that most/all of those communities have poor record keeping, and it's quite possible they didn't have as many centenarians as claimed. What's more, for the folks in those communities where the records are reliable, the average lifespan is actually average or even below average.

One example: I think it was Okinawa - most of the records were destroyed due to heavy bombing in WW2. So we just had people's own claims of their age.

Oh why can't anyone just ever call a spade a spade on here?

The main finding was that it was Fraud. People in these villages got addicted to free money for their long dead relatives. So instead of declaring them dead they willfully knowingly illegally buried/cremated them and happily kept cashing checks. In the form of various retirement payments and government social programs.

It unveiled massive wide scale fraud. It was not some silly innocient whoopsie story as you tell it.

That's beautiful whahaha