The Grim Reaper Does Not Care About the Latest Longevity Study You Saw on Facebook
If it sounds too good to be true, maybe it is
By Sara Chodosh
Centenarians always want to tell you how much beer they drank. How many cigarettes they smoked. How often they ate bars of chocolate.
Similarly, headlines regularly belt out accolades for every study that purports to show a link between living past 90 and drinking/smoking/eating mac & cheese three times a day. You know the one — its an article that probably goes something like this:
There’s reason to celebrate if you love/hate [insert whatever habit the study looked at]. A new study suggests [doing or not doing the thing] might help you live longer. The research looked at a group of [probably a few thousand people, enough to make you think this is legit] and found that [whatever food or habit we’re talking about either decreased risk of death or increased average lifespan] by [a small, but statistically significant, amount]. “Our study found that [insert food/habit] significantly [increases/decreases] lifespan,” says [lead study author], though s/he cautions that [whatever they found could also be explained by a third factor]. The study didn’t prove causation, but it did [insert a compelling statistic that people can cite to their friends].
