> I only can at the moment point you to Longo's book: The Longevity Diet. I am recalling all this from memory, so I apologize for not providing word-for-word citations

No problem with this. To be clear it wasn't a reproach. The name of a book is already something.

> I can only remind you have not done so as well.

Sure, but I don't think I stated much, so I have not much to source.

> Longo claims that the healthy diet he prescribes is supported by centenarian studies -- ie supported by interviews with very old people about their diets and way of living

But that's fine. From what you say he studied his stuff, and yes, one can do that by conducting interviews. Just not from one single random person or a few random people. You take a larger sample, control for biases, all that jazz.

I think I've just understood our main source of disagreement. It seems you took Farragher's position of not taking advice from old people as meaning you can't learn from them, full stop. To me, it means "given one random old person giving health advice, you can't take the advice". I've certainly seen videos of old people with what seemed terrible advice or habits so those statements in the article didn't make me blink for a second.

But if you conduct research and this research includes interviewing a sample of old people, that's very different. I even think you probably can't avoid interviewing a statistically significant sample of people (including some who "made it" to a century) to conduct such research.

> the Farragher quote cited in the article matches the supposed bad habits attributed to those fraudulent (?) Blue Zone inhabitants

I don't think so, and this seems to be the second source of our disagreements. The Guardian link you give says that Blue Zone inhabitants don't seek exercise specifically, because they, in fact, live in a way that naturally exercises their body:

> Remarkably inactive. They didn’t tend to be heavy exercisers, or even to exercise at all. Instead, these people tended to garden, knead dough, and use tools, because movement was a part of their daily lives rather than something they sought out.

This is a very weird way of presenting things by the way. Gardening, kneading dough and using tools are totally physical exercise and the contrary of being "inactive". If you garden all day it doesn't matter one bit that you don't do your biweekly jogging. So the quote from Farragher and this description agree: those people apparently live long because they do indeed physically exercise a lot. The healthy diet is also there:

> Plant-based. Apparently 95% of 100-year-olds eat only plant-based diets, with a heavy emphasis on being bean-based. It never was clarified if this is why they lived so long or a consequence of being so old, but that’s neither here nor there.

I will refrain from commenting that too much, being highly biased here. My diet is plant-based with a healthy amount of beans, so of course it pleases me to read this. Note the "never clarified" warning though.

Now, again: them leaving a long live doesn't mean that everything they do works toward this matter of fact. They are not gods. The bit about wine for instance seems a bit shady to me, scientific results tends to tell that "No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health" [1]. It could very well be that those people would live even longer without the wine. Or not. We don't know everything of course.

[1] https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...