The news hasn’t been good for people planning to live for ever. First came Dr Saul Newman’s investigative work into supercententarians – those aged 110 or older. In a paper titled “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud”, Newman reported that high concentrations of supposedly extremely old people occurred, implausibly, in places with the highest rates of poverty – a predictor of the worst health – and with no birth certificates. In the US, the number of supercentenarians declined by between 69% and 82%, depending on the state, when birth certificates were introduced.

Guttingly for anyone who spends a fortune on jasmine tea and nattō by following the Okinawa diet, Newman’s research also challenged the notion of “blue zones”, pointing to high error and fraud rates in those mythic, much-admired areas with high concentrations of centenarians. In 2010, more than 230,000 Japanese centenarians turned out to be missing, imaginary, clerical errors or dead; in Greece, 72% of census-reported centenarians in 2012 were discovered to be dead (“or, depending on........

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