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GoGreenNation news

The indoorsy person’s guide to the great outdoors

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Monday, April 22, 2024

Mary Kirkpatrick for Vox Nature is for everyone. Here’s how to enjoy it, no matter where you live. As a dog walker in Southern California, Rubén Arteaga spends a lot of time outside — at nearby parks, the beach, and on mountain trails. Yet with all his attention on the dogs and his mileage tracker, he never really looked at his surroundings. “My whole life,” he says, “I’ve spent my time looking down.” But something shifted in him one day this winter. In the hills above Laguna Beach, Arteaga lifted his head and looked — really looked — at the clouds above, at the trees. He noticed the wildflowers. “I just saw the world was so much brighter, and that there were so many more colors,” he says. “It just made my gray, dim world feel a little brighter.” Now that he pays more attention to his environment, being outdoors brings him a sense of serenity, he says, grounding him in the moment and pushing away thoughts of his to-do list. Arteaga’s experience, though simple, is powerful — and measurable. Spending time outside in green spaces is linked to a number of positive mental and physical health outcomes. People who live in urban areas with greater exposure to green spaces, such as parks or gardens, have better mental health, according to a recent study. Indeed, living near parks, lakes, and beaches is associated with reduced risk of mental health disorders like anxiety and depression, research shows. Further research suggests that people who live near parks age more slowly than those who don’t. Nature is, in a literal sense, healing. Whether or not we recognize these benefits, many people face hurdles to getting outside. Racism, colonialism, and segregation — past and present — have long excluded or displaced Indigenous, nonwhite, and queer people from safely accessing green spaces. People with marginalized backgrounds often feel unsafe in parks. (Look no further than the 2020 incident where a white woman called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black man who was birding in Central Park, because he asked that she leash her dog.) What’s more, a growing majority of the country lives in urban areas and may lack the time or resources to travel to what are traditionally thought of as “natural” environments — parks, forests, rivers, lakes, and oceans. People with physical disabilities may also have difficulty navigating these spaces. Then there are those of us who just don’t consider ourselves outdoorsy: Camping, dirt, and mosquitos don’t sound like a good time. Yet experiencing time in nature and reaping all of its benefits is actually really easy. And it doesn’t matter where you live. From moss on neighborhood trees to the birds outside your window, the natural world is all around us and full of surprises — you just have to start paying attention. “Nature, in my opinion, is deeply embedded around us,” says Yvette Stewart, the community outreach coordinator at Audubon Texas, a nonprofit environmental conservation group. “If people want to start tuning into it, the best thing to do is just pause outside.” Here’s how to find a version of nature that works for you — and some suggestions on how to spend your time there. How to find your place in nature First things first: What does it actually mean to be “in nature”? Nature is not just some faraway landscape full of trees. Any time we’re outside of a building, we are in nature, according to Katrina Clark, a board member of the Philadelphia-based In Color Birding Club: “That is true regardless of whether you live in the country, the suburbs, or the city.” If you hike through the woods or simply stop to admire flowers near the curb, you’re engaging with nature. Humans are an inherent part of nature, Clark says, though for the purpose of this story, we use “nature” to refer to plants, wildlife, and ecosystems. To have a positive experience with the wild world, it can be helpful to first decide what you’re looking for and what kind of restrictions you might have: Do you want to get exercise? To engage your kids? Do you have limited time or no access to a car? These questions will help guide you toward an accessible setting you’ll enjoy. For example, if you love plants, pay attention to how the trees bloom throughout the year, Stewart says. For a kid-friendly weekend activity, try starting a garden with your family (or just planting basil, mint, and other herbs in pots on your windowsill). Maybe you’re looking for a social activity instead: Search for local birding clubs or guided hikes. Consider the time of year, too. You may want to pay close attention to the sky in the spring and fall when birds migrate. (Bird migration forecast maps can help you figure out the best time and places to see them.) Similarly, think of experiences you want to avoid. If you really hate mosquitos, try spending time outside when it’s still chilly, such as in late fall or early spring. People from communities that have been historically excluded from green spaces will have different considerations. “Coming back to those areas for people of color can be scary and be risky,” says Marc Chavez, the founder and director of Native Like Water, a nonprofit focusing on water. “You have to use precaution. You have to also help get over psychological trauma based on those areas.” To help overcome these personal emotional wounds, Chavez says it can be helpful to remember that any land, mountains, or rivers existed for thousands of years before they became a neighborhood, a national park, or a colonized territory. How to access nature Start small. One of the most universal pieces of advice we received from experts is to spend more time observing plant and animal life in your immediate surroundings. That could be a tree in your backyard, birds on top of buildings, or a neighborhood garden. “It could be something as simple as seeing the grass that is growing between the cracks [in the sidewalk] after a rain,” says He Sung Im, the public programs manager at Audubon Center at Debs Park. If you’re feeling more adventurous, look for nearby city and state parks — they’re often a great place to start. If you live in a city and don’t have a car, check out where public transit can bring you. Even if you live in a place as urban as Manhattan, you can still hike within the city. “Take the A-train and go to Inwood Hill Park,” says Georgina Cullman, an ecologist for the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation. If you want a longer hike, just take the Metro-North train to the Hudson Valley, she says. (Pro tip: Wear long pants, use bug spray, and check your body — and your pet’s — for ticks when you get home. Shower, too.) For help finding appropriate hiking trails, check out websites like TrailLink and AllTrails, which list hikes by difficulty level. AllTrails also maintains a list of over 8,000 wheelchair-friendly trails nationwide. Similarly, the National Park Service has a list of accessibility features online for the country’s parks and monuments. Living near a park is a privilege. Across the country, 100 million people do not have a park within a 10-minute walk from their homes. Parks primarily serving people of color are, on average, half the size of those in predominantly white neighborhoods. For those who don’t have access to reliable transportation and who don’t live near a park, try reaching out to nearby community groups (of birders, hikers, swimmers, etc.) — they may be able to help. For instance, Chavez founded Native Like Water in order to provide Native Americans who no longer had access to the ocean a comfortable, safe space to reconnect to the coastal environment. Initiatives include a 10-day youth program where participants explore the San Diego coastline while learning about the Indigenous peoples of the area, the ecology, and how to surf. Historic barriers to accessibility remain for members of marginalized communities; take the Audubon Society, named after John James Audubon, a naturalist who enslaved others. Despite this history, younger and more diverse populations are reclaiming these spaces and activities — and making them more welcoming to all. What to do outdoors So you’ve figured out where to go. What do you do once you’re there? The easiest thing is, essentially, nothing. Just wander. “There should be no rush,” Chavez says. What’s most important is slowing down and observing what’s in front of you, no matter where you are, even on a five-minute walk outside your office. Pay attention to the creatures around you, the way the sun or the wind feels on your skin, the smell of moist soil. If you feel like engaging a bit more with the space, check to see if there are any community groups or other organizations that oversee it. Places like gardens, arboretums, and nature centers often host tours and other events that will introduce you to the space and get you mingling with the community. Similarly, Facebook groups or “friends of” websites list community-led events and initiatives. Several experts also recommended bringing a friend, especially someone who likes the outdoors more than you. Then, you can determine which aspects of the environment most interest you and what you should keep an eye on next time. You don’t even need to move at all. Clark suggests hanging out at outdoor beer gardens with plants and greenery if you want to socialize in the open air (yes, even that is time in nature!). Or instead of walking up steep trails to look for birds, try a “bird sit,” Im said. Find a nice spot with trees, stay quiet, and observe the birds around you. “We started doing bird sits because we realized a lot of city people are not really comfortable doing hikes,” Im says. To make it even easier, download an app called Merlin, which is essentially Shazam for bird calls; it will listen to and identify the birds around you. “The beautiful thing about birds is they’re literally found everywhere,” Stewart said. If birds aren’t your thing, you could also try insect watching. Hear us out: When flowers are in bloom, dozens of insects may visit them in a single day to slurp up nectar or gather pollen, including butterflies, beetles, and bees. Sit next to some flowers and just watch. It’s relaxing — we swear! If there’s a lake or stream at your destination, consider getting in the water — or even just being next to water. Research shows that looking at bodies of water can lower your heart rate and blood pressure and help you feel relaxed. Consider picnicking by a local reservoir or, better yet, renting a kayak or canoe. Some cities lend them out for free. “One of my favorite things that I get to do for my job,” Cullman says, “is getting to go out on a kayak and see different parts of the city.” If you do, indeed, want to go camping, there are plenty of options short of trekking into the woods with your own gear. Some state parks run programs for a fee that will take you out camping for a night, even if you don’t have much experience or own your own gear. We’re also big fans of low-maintenance car camping. Instead of pitching a tent, you can sleep in your car near a trailhead that allows overnight parking. Then high tail it to the nearest diner for breakfast in the morning. You can even bring an air mattress out to your backyard. No planning required. One very important note: No matter where you go, always be respectful to wildlife and other people. Pick up trash and dog poop, which can pollute streams and spread disease, even if it’s not yours. Do not police people’s behaviors. If you’re in a state park and there are loud children nearby, perhaps walk to another section of the park. Green spaces should be for everyone. On the flip side, if you see people trying to observe birds or other animals, use a quieter voice. What gear and tools you’ll need The good news is that you don’t really need anything. That said, you’ll be more comfortable outside with a good hat, large water bottle (Stewart recommends CamelBak), and sturdy shoes. Even if you’re looking for birds, binoculars aren’t a necessity. You can use the zoom feature on your phone camera, Im suggests. Some stores also rent binoculars or even provide them for free. The best tools to enjoy time outside are free apps and websites. On platforms like iNaturalist, eBird, and PlantNet, you can browse nearby sightings of plants and animals and upload your own photos. A tool called BirdCast shows real-time maps and forecasts of bird migration, so you know where and when to look. A number of different apps, like Seek, will help you identify plants and even animals by just taking photos of them. And again, Merlin is a great platform for IDing birds by their calls alone. Ultimately, a lot of what will make experiencing nature easier and more enjoyable is a shift in perspective — a shift in the way we view what nature is. “If you acknowledge [nature] as being any space that’s outside, where you can feel the wind and you can see the sun and you can get wet from a rainstorm, then it starts to bring nature back into your tangible world,” Stewart said. “Nature is all around us even in the most urban places in the world.”

A brightly-colored illustration shows a woman with her hand to her ear listening to a songbird, close-ups of different plant and wildlife, a man smelling a honeysuckle flower, and a woman holding an inch worm on her hand to inspect it.
Mary Kirkpatrick for Vox

Nature is for everyone. Here’s how to enjoy it, no matter where you live.

As a dog walker in Southern California, Rubén Arteaga spends a lot of time outside — at nearby parks, the beach, and on mountain trails. Yet with all his attention on the dogs and his mileage tracker, he never really looked at his surroundings. “My whole life,” he says, “I’ve spent my time looking down.”

But something shifted in him one day this winter. In the hills above Laguna Beach, Arteaga lifted his head and looked — really looked — at the clouds above, at the trees. He noticed the wildflowers. “I just saw the world was so much brighter, and that there were so many more colors,” he says. “It just made my gray, dim world feel a little brighter.”

Now that he pays more attention to his environment, being outdoors brings him a sense of serenity, he says, grounding him in the moment and pushing away thoughts of his to-do list.

Arteaga’s experience, though simple, is powerful — and measurable. Spending time outside in green spaces is linked to a number of positive mental and physical health outcomes. People who live in urban areas with greater exposure to green spaces, such as parks or gardens, have better mental health, according to a recent study. Indeed, living near parks, lakes, and beaches is associated with reduced risk of mental health disorders like anxiety and depression, research shows. Further research suggests that people who live near parks age more slowly than those who don’t. Nature is, in a literal sense, healing.

Whether or not we recognize these benefits, many people face hurdles to getting outside. Racism, colonialism, and segregation — past and present — have long excluded or displaced Indigenous, nonwhite, and queer people from safely accessing green spaces. People with marginalized backgrounds often feel unsafe in parks. (Look no further than the 2020 incident where a white woman called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black man who was birding in Central Park, because he asked that she leash her dog.)

What’s more, a growing majority of the country lives in urban areas and may lack the time or resources to travel to what are traditionally thought of as “natural” environments — parks, forests, rivers, lakes, and oceans. People with physical disabilities may also have difficulty navigating these spaces.

Then there are those of us who just don’t consider ourselves outdoorsy: Camping, dirt, and mosquitos don’t sound like a good time.

Yet experiencing time in nature and reaping all of its benefits is actually really easy. And it doesn’t matter where you live. From moss on neighborhood trees to the birds outside your window, the natural world is all around us and full of surprises — you just have to start paying attention.

“Nature, in my opinion, is deeply embedded around us,” says Yvette Stewart, the community outreach coordinator at Audubon Texas, a nonprofit environmental conservation group. “If people want to start tuning into it, the best thing to do is just pause outside.”

Here’s how to find a version of nature that works for you — and some suggestions on how to spend your time there.

How to find your place in nature

First things first: What does it actually mean to be “in nature”?

Nature is not just some faraway landscape full of trees. Any time we’re outside of a building, we are in nature, according to Katrina Clark, a board member of the Philadelphia-based In Color Birding Club: “That is true regardless of whether you live in the country, the suburbs, or the city.” If you hike through the woods or simply stop to admire flowers near the curb, you’re engaging with nature. Humans are an inherent part of nature, Clark says, though for the purpose of this story, we use “nature” to refer to plants, wildlife, and ecosystems.

To have a positive experience with the wild world, it can be helpful to first decide what you’re looking for and what kind of restrictions you might have: Do you want to get exercise? To engage your kids? Do you have limited time or no access to a car?

These questions will help guide you toward an accessible setting you’ll enjoy. For example, if you love plants, pay attention to how the trees bloom throughout the year, Stewart says. For a kid-friendly weekend activity, try starting a garden with your family (or just planting basil, mint, and other herbs in pots on your windowsill).

Maybe you’re looking for a social activity instead: Search for local birding clubs or guided hikes. Consider the time of year, too. You may want to pay close attention to the sky in the spring and fall when birds migrate. (Bird migration forecast maps can help you figure out the best time and places to see them.)

Similarly, think of experiences you want to avoid. If you really hate mosquitos, try spending time outside when it’s still chilly, such as in late fall or early spring.

People from communities that have been historically excluded from green spaces will have different considerations. “Coming back to those areas for people of color can be scary and be risky,” says Marc Chavez, the founder and director of Native Like Water, a nonprofit focusing on water. “You have to use precaution. You have to also help get over psychological trauma based on those areas.” To help overcome these personal emotional wounds, Chavez says it can be helpful to remember that any land, mountains, or rivers existed for thousands of years before they became a neighborhood, a national park, or a colonized territory.

How to access nature

Start small. One of the most universal pieces of advice we received from experts is to spend more time observing plant and animal life in your immediate surroundings. That could be a tree in your backyard, birds on top of buildings, or a neighborhood garden. “It could be something as simple as seeing the grass that is growing between the cracks [in the sidewalk] after a rain,” says He Sung Im, the public programs manager at Audubon Center at Debs Park.

If you’re feeling more adventurous, look for nearby city and state parks — they’re often a great place to start. If you live in a city and don’t have a car, check out where public transit can bring you. Even if you live in a place as urban as Manhattan, you can still hike within the city. “Take the A-train and go to Inwood Hill Park,” says Georgina Cullman, an ecologist for the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation. If you want a longer hike, just take the Metro-North train to the Hudson Valley, she says. (Pro tip: Wear long pants, use bug spray, and check your body — and your pet’s — for ticks when you get home. Shower, too.)

For help finding appropriate hiking trails, check out websites like TrailLink and AllTrails, which list hikes by difficulty level. AllTrails also maintains a list of over 8,000 wheelchair-friendly trails nationwide. Similarly, the National Park Service has a list of accessibility features online for the country’s parks and monuments.

Living near a park is a privilege. Across the country, 100 million people do not have a park within a 10-minute walk from their homes. Parks primarily serving people of color are, on average, half the size of those in predominantly white neighborhoods. For those who don’t have access to reliable transportation and who don’t live near a park, try reaching out to nearby community groups (of birders, hikers, swimmers, etc.) — they may be able to help. For instance, Chavez founded Native Like Water in order to provide Native Americans who no longer had access to the ocean a comfortable, safe space to reconnect to the coastal environment. Initiatives include a 10-day youth program where participants explore the San Diego coastline while learning about the Indigenous peoples of the area, the ecology, and how to surf.

Historic barriers to accessibility remain for members of marginalized communities; take the Audubon Society, named after John James Audubon, a naturalist who enslaved others. Despite this history, younger and more diverse populations are reclaiming these spaces and activities — and making them more welcoming to all.

What to do outdoors

So you’ve figured out where to go. What do you do once you’re there?

The easiest thing is, essentially, nothing. Just wander.

“There should be no rush,” Chavez says. What’s most important is slowing down and observing what’s in front of you, no matter where you are, even on a five-minute walk outside your office. Pay attention to the creatures around you, the way the sun or the wind feels on your skin, the smell of moist soil.

If you feel like engaging a bit more with the space, check to see if there are any community groups or other organizations that oversee it. Places like gardens, arboretums, and nature centers often host tours and other events that will introduce you to the space and get you mingling with the community. Similarly, Facebook groups or “friends of” websites list community-led events and initiatives. Several experts also recommended bringing a friend, especially someone who likes the outdoors more than you. Then, you can determine which aspects of the environment most interest you and what you should keep an eye on next time.

You don’t even need to move at all. Clark suggests hanging out at outdoor beer gardens with plants and greenery if you want to socialize in the open air (yes, even that is time in nature!). Or instead of walking up steep trails to look for birds, try a “bird sit,” Im said. Find a nice spot with trees, stay quiet, and observe the birds around you. “We started doing bird sits because we realized a lot of city people are not really comfortable doing hikes,” Im says. To make it even easier, download an app called Merlin, which is essentially Shazam for bird calls; it will listen to and identify the birds around you. “The beautiful thing about birds is they’re literally found everywhere,” Stewart said.

If birds aren’t your thing, you could also try insect watching. Hear us out: When flowers are in bloom, dozens of insects may visit them in a single day to slurp up nectar or gather pollen, including butterflies, beetles, and bees. Sit next to some flowers and just watch. It’s relaxing — we swear!

If there’s a lake or stream at your destination, consider getting in the water — or even just being next to water. Research shows that looking at bodies of water can lower your heart rate and blood pressure and help you feel relaxed. Consider picnicking by a local reservoir or, better yet, renting a kayak or canoe. Some cities lend them out for free. “One of my favorite things that I get to do for my job,” Cullman says, “is getting to go out on a kayak and see different parts of the city.”

If you do, indeed, want to go camping, there are plenty of options short of trekking into the woods with your own gear. Some state parks run programs for a fee that will take you out camping for a night, even if you don’t have much experience or own your own gear. We’re also big fans of low-maintenance car camping. Instead of pitching a tent, you can sleep in your car near a trailhead that allows overnight parking. Then high tail it to the nearest diner for breakfast in the morning. You can even bring an air mattress out to your backyard. No planning required.

One very important note: No matter where you go, always be respectful to wildlife and other people. Pick up trash and dog poop, which can pollute streams and spread disease, even if it’s not yours. Do not police people’s behaviors. If you’re in a state park and there are loud children nearby, perhaps walk to another section of the park. Green spaces should be for everyone. On the flip side, if you see people trying to observe birds or other animals, use a quieter voice.

What gear and tools you’ll need

The good news is that you don’t really need anything. That said, you’ll be more comfortable outside with a good hat, large water bottle (Stewart recommends CamelBak), and sturdy shoes. Even if you’re looking for birds, binoculars aren’t a necessity. You can use the zoom feature on your phone camera, Im suggests. Some stores also rent binoculars or even provide them for free.

The best tools to enjoy time outside are free apps and websites. On platforms like iNaturalist, eBird, and PlantNet, you can browse nearby sightings of plants and animals and upload your own photos. A tool called BirdCast shows real-time maps and forecasts of bird migration, so you know where and when to look. A number of different apps, like Seek, will help you identify plants and even animals by just taking photos of them. And again, Merlin is a great platform for IDing birds by their calls alone.

Ultimately, a lot of what will make experiencing nature easier and more enjoyable is a shift in perspective — a shift in the way we view what nature is. “If you acknowledge [nature] as being any space that’s outside, where you can feel the wind and you can see the sun and you can get wet from a rainstorm, then it starts to bring nature back into your tangible world,” Stewart said. “Nature is all around us even in the most urban places in the world.”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Many native plants are missing from habitats where they should thrive – even in wilder areas. Why? Human actions such as logging, poaching and setting fires.

Samantha Terrell/ShutterstockIf you go walking in the wild, you might expect that what you’re seeing is natural. All around you are trees, shrubs and grasses growing in their natural habitat. But there’s something here that doesn’t add up. Across the world, there are large areas of habitat which would suit native plant species just fine. But very often, they’re simply absent. Our new research gauges the scale of this problem, known as “dark diversity”. Our international team of 200 scientists examined plant species in thousands of sites worldwide. What we found was startling. In regions heavily affected by our activities, only about 20% of native plant species able to live there were actually present. But even in areas with very little human interference, ecosystems only contained about 33% of viable plant species. Why so few species in wilder areas? Our impact. 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The age detectives are fighting.

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It’s still not enough. We want to live longer, healthier lives. What can we do about it?You’ve probably heard of “blue zones,” regions of the world where researchers claim to have found disproportionate numbers of people living into their hundreds. The first such Eden was Sardinia, Italy. Then Okinawa, Japan, and Loma Linda, California, among others.But in recent years, despite the prevalence of cookbooks and diets and Netflix docuseries about these places explaining how to learn from the lifestyles of people living in these regions, something hasn’t quite added up.My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.Saul Newman is a longevity researcher at the University of Oxford and the University College London who has become convinced that this research doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First, when he looks at the regions of the world designated blue zones, they just don’t look like particularly healthy places. The blue-zones theory claims that people live longer in these regions because of their naturally healthy lifestyles, but what Saul finds when he looks at these regions is low literacy, low incomes, high crime, and even short life expectancies relative to the national average. But even more tellingly, according to his research, introducing official birth certificates suspiciously coincides with a steep 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people claiming to be over 109. A number of other statistical oddities indicate that the people claiming to be over 100 years old are either misleading us or are misled themselves.Here at Good on Paper, several of the studies we discuss are preprints, which means they haven’t finished going through the formal review process that can take years. We do this because waiting to discuss studies until after they’ve been through that process would mean missing out on tracking important live debates. But I say all that now because, while Saul is convinced of his findings, this is not yet a settled debate. The proponents of blue zones are fighting back and claim he “omits or misunderstands” how rigorous their methods are.But to hear his perspective on the science of longevity and why he doesn’t trust the blue-zones research, I’m excited to have Saul joining us today.Saul, welcome to the show!Saul Newman: Pleasure to be here.Demsas: So why do people die?Newman: Why do people die? Well, this is a fascinating question, and many of the people in aging research sort of still admit that we really don’t understand the fundamentals. So it’s actually a surprising thing that something so obvious is something we’re still figuring out. The best approximation we have at the moment is that we look at the inverse question: Why continue to live? What is the sort of evolutionary advantage of continuing to live?There are two main thoughts. One I favor, and another that’s quite out of date. The out-of-date one is this sort of Darwinian idea that we exist just to make children. And this is the idea that has the problems, because if we exist just to make children, you get stuck with all sorts of awkward questions, like why does menopause evolve? Why evolve not to have children? Why evolve to help other people at the cost of your own reproduction? And we know all these things happen, and they happen across the animal kingdom, which brings us to the second idea.And the second idea is that we evolve to pass on genes. And because we are related to so many different people, there are a lot of ways to pass on genes, including indirect ways where we help others. This is a sort of still-developing field in answering that question of why we exist, essentially. And it’s a very exciting one because it can explain things like the evolution of menopause, where we’re taking care of grandchildren.But it can also potentially explain a lot of traits that are very difficult to analyze. Traits like homosexuality don’t make sense in this sort of cruel, hard Darwinian sense of, Oh, you’re just a baby factory. But there is a potential to explain them using inclusive fitness. I mean, that said, there was also the flip-side argument to that: Why do I need to justify myself in terms of evolutionary theory in order to exist? Well, of course you don’t. So it’s a very difficult debate to get through, but it’s also an open question at this point.Demsas: What exactly is happening, though, when you die? Let’s say you don’t get an illness, right? Like, we know what happens when someone dies of a stroke or has a heart attack or has cancer or some other kind of long-running illness. But if you are just a generally healthy person—you’re in your 80s, or you’re in your 90s—what’s happening to your body?Newman: It is slowly degenerating, in functional terms. So this is, you know, often very hard to measure, because you have to define what the function of your body is to say, you know, how it’s degenerating, but there are sort of obvious signs. So your metabolic function declines with age. Obvious things, like your physical capacity to run a hundred meters, for example, declines with age. Mental capacity does decline, but it can be much slower. And you know, I think that’s really fascinating, because if you look at, for example, the rankings of top chess players, they decline, but they decline extremely slowly. But essentially, there’s this sort of general systemic decline as you get older in terms of how well you can function.Demsas: There’s a paper that I know that you wrote about this idea of, you know, as you get older, of course, your likelihood of death increases as you age. But there was a hypothesis that perhaps at a certain point, the rate at which you were likely to die kind of leveled off. So if you made it to 80, if you made it to 90—yes, your likelihood of dying every year was still, you know, elevated relative to a younger person, but it no longer was increasing significantly. What happened with that hypothesis?Newman: Well, this touches on the best way we have to measure age and aging, and the sort of functional decline is increases in the mortality rate, because once you hit about age 40 or 35, your odds of dying double at a sort of fixed clockwork rate.Demsas: Wait—what year was that?Newman: Around 35 to 40. It depends a little bit because—Demsas: Okay, great. Just logging that. (Laughs.)Newman: Yeah. It starts to decline earlier, but it’s obscured by something called the “accident hump.” And this is basically, like, what you do when you’re a teenager, right? There’s a big bump in mortality caused by, you know, cars running into trees or jumping off of buildings into swimming pools or whatever it happens to be. But this clockwork doubling means that your mortality, your odds of dying, double usually around every eight years, and there’s really nothing we can do about that.We can change the baseline, but every eight years, your odds of dying will double and double and double until you reach old age. And so in old age, there’s a hypothesis that mortality rates stop getting worse with age, and therefore that aging rates kind of stop or at least slow down considerably. Now, it doesn’t mean that things are getting better. You end up in this sort of Russian-roulette scenario where it’s a “see if your odds of dying flatten out.” And essentially, you’re playing Russian roulette every three months in terms of your mortality risk.And what does that mean in terms of human lifespan? So it means something very interesting. It means that there’s no actual limit to how long you can play roulette without losing. You know, there’s a probabilistic sort of cap where eventually you are going to lose.Demsas: Yeah, unless you’re the luckiest person alive.Newman: Exactly. So there’s nothing per se ruling out a run of good numbers. But the problem here is that this idea is something that has been fought over for 50-odd years and has not been resolved, because it may be that your odds of dying do keep doubling and doubling and doubling until they hit the odds of dying that equal to one, right? So this is what I call the “maximum survivable age.” And it’s not clear to scientists which of those two was correct—whether we strike a maximum survivable age, where we can’t possibly live older than this age, or whether we reach a sort of grim Russian-roulette scenario.Demsas: But life expectancy has improved remarkably over the 20th century. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, people with average lifespans of late ’70s in many developed nations, and rates of child mortality have declined significantly. So it seems like there’s a lot that policy, development, changes in public-health strategies can do to improve lifespan.Is it your sense that—I mean, you just kind of brought up this idea of a maximum survivable age. Is it your perception that there is a number—there is a threshold at which, despite all of these things that you can do to make yourself healthier, to make yourself better, the genetic selection that might exist over generations, there’s just not a chance that humans are gonna live to be 300, 400, etcetera?Newman: Well, in 2016, I waded into this debate because, like I said, there are two sides. And one of the sides had published an idea that there was this hard limit to maximum lifespan. And they published it in one of the most elite scientific journals there is. And I realized they had made colossal mistakes in their analysis—really just fundamental mistakes. They had rounded off most of their data to zero. They had accidentally deleted everyone who died in May and June, and just really made a complete mess of it. But they had argued for one case, and this case was that there’s a limit to how long you can live, a single limit.I had another group come along and argue the opposite. Now, the opposite was this Russian-roulette scenario. The problem was that they had done something even worse, because they had taken everybody in Italy over the age of 105 and used them to build this sort of flattening-out curve. And when they had made this curve, they needed to say what it was flattening out from. So they needed to say, Well, what’s the normal midlife probability of death, and how fast does it get worse? What it boiled down to is that they had picked out the only estimate from earlier life-mortality models that gave them a flattening-out result.So they had 861 options, and they chose the only option that gave them a significant result. So here I was, in the middle of a very vitriolic and long-running debate, saying that both camps were wrong. And I think both camps are wrong, because if you take that maximum survivable age and you estimate it, it doesn’t converge to a single value mathematically. And so in plain language, what that means is that if you grow up in a different environment, your maximum survivable age is different. And it moves over time, really clearly moves over time. So there is not one limit to human life. There is, at best, a smorgasbord of limits that depend on where you grew up, what population you’re in.Demsas: So essentially, there is a maximum survivable age, but it will differ based on the environmental and policy choices that are being made at that time. And so I guess that then the question just becomes, like, how much can you really do on environmental factors?So I want to get to this question about this theory of blue zones, which I think has become very popular. I mean, there’s been, you know, a popular book, a Netflix docuseries. It has inspired tons of attention.There are regions of the world where people have claimed to live remarkably long lives—past 80, even past 100—at rates higher than you would expect just based on if it was just distributed normally: places like Okinawa, in Japan; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece. What was originally the evidence for the idea that these places were unusually good for long life?Newman: Well, the original evidence was rather amusing, actually, because like everything else in extreme-age research, there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents. You know, you have government documents or informal documents that say, I’m this old. But the amusing factor was that the first blue-zone study found a bunch of people within Sardinia that seemed to be living a long time. They didn’t measure anyone outside of Sardinia. They decided that this was a global outlier for extraordinary ages, and they thought that incest, that people sleeping with each other was making this island—Demsas: I’ve never heard this. (Laughs.)Newman: It’s extraordinary. It doesn’t make it to the documentary—Demsas: —to the Netflix docuseries. (Laughs.)Newman: —for a very good reason. Yeah. I mean, there’s nobody making this lifestyle recommendation, I hope. (Laughs.)Demsas: Dear God.Newman: It’s kind of amazing. And that was the start of the blue zones.So, you know, I sort of vaguely knew about this idea while I was getting involved in this fight between the plateau people and the people who think there’s a limit to human life. And, you know, I sort of thought of it as an amusing aside, but as time went on, it became less and less amusing, more and more concerning—like, starkly concerning. And the reason is that everything in these studies is based on looking at documents and saying, Oh, they’re consistent.Demsas: You mean, like, birth certificates?Newman: I mean birth certificates. So there are a lot of problems with that, that really came out of the woodwork over time because, you know, it’s on paper.But when I started looking into these extreme-age cases, it really snowballed. Everything snowballed in a way that completely destroyed the idea and the underlying data of the blue zones. And effectively, you know, people are just believing their own fairy tales here. This really, you know, goes beyond cases, though, because early on in the investigation, I discovered that Japan, where it was claimed Japan had among the world’s best evidence for birth records. And in 2010, it turned out that 82 percent of the people over the age of 100 in the country were dead.Demsas: And was it pension fraud, or what?Newman: It was not pension fraud. It was the remarkable fact that in Japan, the household has to register your death, and if you are the last person in the household and you are dead, how do you do that?Demsas: Oh, wow.Newman: So they had, like, literally hundreds of thousands of people who had died in World War II or had died subsequently, and who were just getting older on paper, including the oldest man in Tokyo and the oldest woman in Tokyo.Demsas: Were they paying them, like, Social Security?Newman: Oh, yes.Demsas: Like, what was happening? Where was the money going?Newman: Well, in the case of the oldest man in Tokyo, the money was going to the family. And he was an extraordinary case that kicked off this investigation because—so there’s a sort of week in Japan where there’s a respect for the aged [day], and in preparation, city officials in Tokyo had gone looking for the oldest man. And eventually, they found out that the oldest man was in Tokyo, but he’d been dead in his apartment for 30 years, and his family were living in the apartment. And the oldest man in Tokyo had been steadily collecting his pension checks.Now, what’s extraordinary about that is that his paperwork was perfectly in order. Like, if you handed their paperwork to a demographer, they would not be able to see anything wrong with it. I mean, it’s not like you die and automatically a form pops out in the central bureaucracy, right? There’s no actual way to know.So it turned out that most extreme-old-age data was undetected errors, and this happened in every blue zone.Demsas: So you went through all the blue zones and saw the same pattern?Newman: I went through all the blue zones. The same thing happened. In Greece, at least 72 percent of the people in Greece who were over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from underground. And what’s remarkable about that is they had just passed a government audit, despite being dead. They passed a government audit in 2011, and in 2012, the government turned around and said, Actually, all those people were dead.Demsas: So walk me through this a little bit, because I think there’s a few different arguments that you’re making here. One is that there are places where it’s quite difficult to know what’s happening with the population, because there’s [a situation] like what you mentioned in Japan, where the reporting of death is happening in a method where you actually can’t validate, when the oldest person in a household has died.And then there’s a second strand of things, which is that people are actively committing fraud because of pensions and Social Security or other sorts of welfare benefits. And then there’s a third, which is just that these documents are not consistent or good, and so when demographers are trying to do this kind of research, they’re ending up having to rely on pretty shoddy documentation or to make broad claims.So how much of this is happening in each place? Like, what do you think is most prevalent?Newman: We don’t know what’s most prevalent. I mean, this is actually part of the problem: that we can see when an error has happened, but if we have documents in front of us that look good, we don’t know if they’re in error or not. And this pattern repeats itself. So there are many, many ways. There’s a whole layer cake of different methods by which you can screw up someone’s age.Like you said, you can just write it down wrong at the start. There was a case where the world’s oldest man was actually just his younger brother, and they just swapped documents. It’s completely undetectable, and it’s happened three times. And there are other cases where there’s active pension fraud. I mean, there’s also cases where you just have someone who is illiterate and has picked up the wrong documents. The list goes on and on and on.But the point is that demographers keep validating these people, and then decades—or even in one case, a century later—find out that they aren’t who they say they are. And that process is pretty much random. So you have to ask yourself, you know, what happens to a field over the course of more than a century when the data can only be checked for being consistent? You can’t actually tell if it’s true?And I think it really set up this extraordinary disaster where not only are the blue zones based on data that doesn’t make sense; we actually have this sort of fundamental problem in looking at the oldest people within our society. Blue zones are an exemplary case of this, but it’s more general.So to give you an example, health in the blue zones was poor before, during, and after they were established. Even in America, at least 17 percent of people over the age of 100 were clerical errors, missing, or dead—at least 17 percent. Many of them just did not have birth certificates. And we have no way of knowing. Like, it’s not as if I can take a person into a hospital, and they can put them into a machine, and it tells me how old they are.Demsas: Cut their arm off and count the rings (Laughs.)Newman: Exactly. The old pirate joke. You cut the leg off and count the rings. You can’t do that.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And that means we are just taking all of this evidence at face value. Normally, that would be fine. Right? And this is where I’m going to apologize for talking numbers. But this is a theoretical result I came up with in 2018.Let’s imagine you have 100,000 people who are 50, really 50. Like, they’ve got their documents, everything. And then you have an extraordinarily low rate of error in which you take 100 40-year-olds, and you give them documents to say they’re 50. If you do that, normally you’d expect, Oh, I can just ignore this. My statistical model will take care of it as noise. But something happens instead that is extraordinary, because those 40-year-olds are, like I said, less than half as likely to die than the real data. So your errors have a lower rate of dying and being removed from the population than your real data—Demsas: Wait—sorry. Can you explain that? I don’t understand.Newman: So you remember: I told you about the clock where your mortality rate doubles every eight years? That means if, let’s say—and I call them “young liars.” If my young liars are eight years younger, their odds of dying day to day are half. So the errors have half the mortality rate of the real data. Every eight years, the percentage of errors doubles, and by the time you get to 100, every single person or almost every single person is an error.So you can’t ignore these tiny error rates. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. It doesn’t matter where you are. You can’t just pretend they don’t exist, because they build up in this weird, nonlinear way over time, and it means that you would actually mathematically expect all of the oldest people in the world to be fake. So, you know, I’ve published this in a scientific journal. No one’s ever been able to argue the math, but they do not want to face up to sort of the repercussions of this.Demsas: Yeah. Part of this is very familiar to me. I don’t have a birth certificate. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the only document I have about my birth and parentage is a baptismal certificate, where I’m pretty sure it was filled out by a member of the church that I was baptized into. I’m not joking: It’s written in teal ink.We were asylum seekers here. I’m, like, taking this to the State Department. I’m like, I swear to God, my father is my father. You literally have to give me a passport. I’m a citizen here. And it was such—it was awful. It was such a hassle. And then—now I’m getting off topic here, but—my brother had to get a DNA test to prove that our parents were his parents in order to get his driver’s license eventually, and his passport. So I’m very familiar with this.And there’s another phenomenon—which, I mean, I don’t know if this is something that you’ve seen in your research—wherein some cultures and communities, of course, being older is, like, quite an advantage. And so there will be people who you’re like, I know how old you are, but you are telling everyone you are 10 to 15 years older than you are. Have you seen this in your research?Newman: All the time. Yeah, I mean, constantly. There was a study in the BBC a couple of months ago where they looked at heart age. And this is a National Institute on Aging–funded study on people in the rainforest, right? And they say, We don’t have any idea how old we are. And the headline is, Oh, these people have really young hearts for their age. You know, they don’t know their age. They’re literally telling you, We are making it up.And, you know, if you have any doubts about the blue zones, there used to be something called the “longevity zones” that predates the blue zones. It was put out by National Geographic in exactly the same way. It had exactly the same hallmarks of, Oh, you live in a mountainous region that’s very remote, and you eat yogurt and vegetarian diets.And it was exactly what you’re saying. These people gave status to village elders, so people were inflating their ages to an extraordinary degree. They were saying, I’m 122. And that’s all it was. You know, this was three regions across the world: Soviet Georgia, where apparently yogurt was the secret; the Vilcabamba Valley, in Ecuador; and the Hunza Valley, in Pakistan. These were the blue zones, and every single case was based on rubbish recordkeeping. And, you know, it just seems to be that’s exactly what’s happened again.[Music]Demsas: After the break: Even if blue zones aren’t real, does that really change how we think about living longer?[Break]Demsas: The thing I’m wrestling with when I engage with this, because, you know, you have published this work; you’ve written about it in the Times and other places. But the fundamental idea that there are locations that are better for people’s lifespans seems not overturned by this, right?Like, we know that location matters a lot for health outcomes, air pollution in particular. It feels like there’s a new paper every other week showing that there’s massive impacts of air pollution on life expectancy, on cognitive functioning, on general health. Is the fundamental concept that there are certain places where people are going to live longer still one that we should be putting more research into?Newman: I think that’s not controversial. But I also think it’s very well understood, for exactly the reasons you say. There’s a study every week on average life expectancy. And what’s striking about this is that those places are very different from the places that get extreme life expectancy.So I basically took a sample of 80 percent of the world’s 110-year-olds and most of the world’s 105-year-olds, and looked at their distribution within countries. So I’m sitting in London right now. And in all of England, the place with the best rate of reaching 105 was the single poorest inner-city suburb with the single fewest number of 90-year-olds.So those two things—where it’s good to live, on average, and where it’s good to reach extreme old age—were exactly the opposite. This is like saying Flint, Michigan, is the healthiest place in the U.S.A. No shade on Flint, Michigan. The government is really the cause of this, but it does not make any sense. It fundamentally doesn’t make any sense. And it gets even worse when you start looking at the details.So the single U.S. blue zone is Loma Linda. I mean, the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan. They measure it, and it is completely and utterly unremarkable.Demsas: I’m not, you know, deeply reporting in the longevity space here, but the way that you have talked about your interactions with some of these authors makes me think it’s an especially contentious field. Why has it kind of remained so difficult to sort of overturn this popular narrative around blue zones?Newman: Well, it makes a lot of money.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: It’s really that simple. I mean, there are multiple best-selling cookbooks, you know. And I’d like to point out, of course: Don’t take your health advice from cookbooks. Its really sort of needs reinforcing every now and again. (Laughs.) But, you know, if you really had a cure for aging, you’d be winning the Nobel Prize.Demsas: You wouldn’t be writing a cookbook? (Laughs.)Newman: You would not be writing a cookbook. You wouldn’t be on late-night television, you know, making a sales pitch. You’d just be like, I want my Nobel Prize. I have a cure for all diseases. Where’s my money? It’s really fundamental.But there is another aspect to this in that a lot of research careers are built on examining the oldest old, and even more research careers are built on just assuming that birth-certificate ages are correct. And to show that they’re not correct in an undetectable fashion on such a massive scale threatens a lot of people’s research careers.Demsas: But part of the thing that I find interesting about the blue zone’s recommendations is that a lot of them are things that are just straightforwardly good advice, right? Move naturally. Have a sense of purpose. Stress less. Don’t eat too much. Eat beans and legumes. Have community. Put your family first. The only one that I think is potentially not actually good is: Drink alcohol in moderation. But the rest of them are generally associated with good health to different extents and, you know, with longevity to different extents.I guess, like, what drove you to become so interested in pushing back on this narrative, given that the advice that people are getting is generally still, like, you know, good health advice? Like, you probably should do most of these things if you’re not already.Newman: Well, I think the problem is the way in which the people in these regions are really kind of culturally being exploited. Because they don’t bear any connection to what actually happens in the blue zones. And I think that was what really drove it home for me, is that you have this sort of flavor of some guy who turns up for a few weeks, looks around, decides it’s the ikigai, and goes home. And if you actually go to the government of Japan, they’ve been measuring Okinawa, for example, since 1975. And every single time they’ve measured Okinawa, it has had terrible health. It has been right at the bottom of the pile.Demsas: Wow.Newman: I’ll take you through some statistics that were robustly ignored by people in selling these blue-zones ideas. Body mass index is measured in Okinawa and compared to the rest of Japan, and it’s measured in over-75-year-olds. So if you go back to 1975, that’s people born 1900 or before, and they measure how heavy they are. They have been last every year, by a massive margin.And then you look at the next claim. So that sort of knocks a hole in the “move naturally” claim. The “move naturally” claim also has this sort of idea that people grow gardens in the blue zones, right? The government of Japan measures that, and they are third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. They don’t grow gardens. And we’ve known that since the beginning of records.And then you look at the idea that they eat plants. It seems really noncontroversial. But people in Okinawa do not eat their veggies. And we know this because we ask them. They’re last in the consumption of root vegetables, last in the consumption of leafy vegetables, last in the consumption of pickled vegetables. They’re third from the top in other raw meat. You know, they eat 40 kilograms of meat a year, at least, which is way above the global and national average. And even sweet potato—sweet potato is on the front of the Netflix documentary, these purple sweet potatoes—they are last for sweet potato consumption out of all the 47 prefectures of Japan.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: And they always have been. There’s another idea that, you know, they have a sense of belonging, that they belong to a faith-based community. They’re 93.4 percent atheist. They’re third to last in the country, and it is a very atheist country. So the problem is that none of these claims have any connection to reality whatsoever.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: And it’s been sitting in the open for decades.Demsas: Have you become a lot more cynical about scientific research as a result of this?Newman: Oh, I mean, absolutely. It’s extraordinary, the sort of cognitive dissonance that goes on. And really, I mean, all of these claims just have no connection to reality. And you see this sort of sad thing playing out with the locals, where a beach resort will get built. People will fly in for three days, and they’re still sitting there going, like, Why don’t we have a hospital? Why are we all still poor?You know, just basic social problems get overlooked because of this. So yeah, it has made me much more cynical, because these, I guess you would call them “lumps and bumps,” should have been obvious right from the point when someone said incest was good for living a long time.Demsas: So, like, I mean, preregistration helps reduce a lot of issues in social science. There’s also been increasing attempts to subject, you know, big findings, important findings to replication by various groups and individuals.I mean, is there something fundamental that you think needs to happen differently in terms of how reputable journals accept new findings? Do you think that all the data needs to be open? What needs to happen here to prevent these sorts of problems in the future?Newman: In short, the answer is: really a lot.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: The slightly less short answer is that the core of science is reproducibility. It is the core idea. And these results are not reproducible. And it’s not just that they’re not reproducible. After 20 years, nobody has published the underlying data. And there needs to be a much heavier emphasis on replication in science and on testing claims—especially profitable claims—before they’re just thrown out into the open.Because, you know, I find it amazing. This is something that was discussed at an elite level at the World Economic Forum. Now, we cannot have a cookbook-based piece of lifestyle advice governing global health. So we need to really rejig the—I mean, first, the level of skepticism in science needs to go up considerably. And second, we need to really start hitting back on papers that need to be retracted, papers that need to be removed from the scientific record because they do not replicate or because, you know, like the first two—the studies I pointed out here—because they’re based on extremely questionable choices.Demsas: So most people listening to this will have heard of this topic before, but have you found anything that indicates it’s been especially influential in public health in that policy makers are taking it quite seriously as a way of trying to push different nonvalidated recommendations?Newman: Yes. I mean, the presentation at the World Economic Forum is really a low point, an extraordinary low point. But I think what is, like I said, more troubling is that you have an entire machinery of public health here that didn’t spot how completely wrong this is. In retrospect, it’s so wrong that everybody’s sort of giggling. But it’s been 20 years of this being perhaps the most popular idea in demography.And so I get worried about this because I’ve just completed a new study. And in this new study, I have taken every single 100-year-old in the world and analyzed where they’re from and what countries attain the age of 100 at the highest rates. And to do this, I took United Nations data contributed by every government on Earth, in good faith, with the best efforts at data cleaning—both by the governments and by the UN. And the places that reach 100 at the most remarkable rates don’t make any sense.Malawi, which is one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth, is in the top 10, and it’s in the top 10 routinely. You know, Western Sahara, which is a region that does not have a government, is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, according to the UN. I mean, that’s fundamentally absurd. And it’s fundamentally absurd that it has been 70 years that this data has been produced for, and nobody has noticed the absurdity. And I find that deeply shocking.Puerto Rico was one of the top 10, and that initially passed muster. You’ve got a place in a rich country that has a long history of birth certificates, until you realize that this is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, and the reason seems to be that the birth certificates are so badly documented that they restarted the entire system in 2010. They said, Birth certificates are no longer legal documents. They threw it all out and started again because of systemic levels of error.Demsas: Wow.Newman: And that’s how you reach 100.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: You just write your age down wrong. And you know, there is this sort of public-health element that is deeply troubling because you are one of the people in the world that doesn’t have a birth certificate, and you’re not alone.Demsas: Yeah.Newman: A quarter of children now don’t have a birth certificate—a quarter of all children. And we are just ignoring that.Demsas: I want to take a step back because I think that even though I think that this is deeply troubling, there is still a desire—I mean, part of the reason why there’s such a focus on this issue is people really want to figure out how to extend their life. Every year they get older, they’re, you know, deeply concerned with yoga, with protein intake, with lifting weights. A lot of different things begin to occupy your mind as the number turns to 3, 4, 5 at the beginning of your age.I want to ask about how much we know about the role of environmental versus genetic factors in determining longevity. Is all of this effort to try and tweak our life expectancy—is it really that worth it, or is it largely just a question of your genetics kind of determining what your life expectancy is going to be?Newman: I mean, there’s good news and bad news. And I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is—well, it depends on your perspective, I suppose. The bad news is that the people who live the longest, on average, are born into rich countries with free health care. It’s that simple. The good news is: When it comes to the environment, it plays a big role, a very big role in how long you live. And there is a lot you can do about it, not a single one of which costs any money, right?So I’ll break it down. The simple things that we really know about lifespan: Don’t drink. There you’ll get, it depends, but if you [weren’t] going to get addicted, you’ll get about an extra 30 years of lifespan over what you would if you got addicted to alcohol. And for context, the CDC estimates that that’s about the same as heroin addiction. But if you drink without getting addicted and give up drinking, you’re still going to gain roughly three to four years.Demsas: Wow. Okay.Newman: Right. So that’s simple.Don’t smoke: You’ll gain about seven years. Do some exercise: You’ll get probably—it depends how much you exercise, but let’s say four years. And go to your GP, and that’s it. You don’t need to buy the cookbook.I think the reason the cookbook sells so well is that those three things are somewhat difficult, right? They’re kind of hard, and I think this is why longevity cures perennially do so well, is that they’re always easier than those three things. Almost always, you know, the ones that do well. And that is what underpins this market. But if you really want to live a longer time, just don’t drink; don’t smoke; do some exercise.Demsas: Well, tell me a little bit more about the genetic factors here. I mean, there was a study I saw that looked at 20,000 Nordic twins born in the late 1800s, and found that genetic differences had negligible impacts on survival before about age 60, but after age 60 and particularly those reaching their 80s and beyond, genetic factors become more important. I don’t know if you’ve seen that paper or if you’ve seen other research about this, but what do we know about the role of genetics in longevity?Newman: I haven’t seen that paper, but I’ve seen some extraordinarily bad papers on the roles of genetics and longevity. There’s just something called a genome-wide-association study, where you effectively say, you know, what genes are associated with extreme longevity. And I’ve seen that conducted on sample sizes of less than 200 people, which is, I mean—it’s a bit like saying you’ve got a space program when you let go of a carnival balloon. It’s a joke.So I would be extremely skeptical of longevity claims. You know, there is just this fundamental problem with our documents that if you go into that study and dive into that study, you’ll realize that they, like everybody else, have to trust what is written down on the piece of paper that says how old these people are.And there’s no way to check that. You know, I think we’re on the edge of a situation where you can. There have been some extraordinary scientific advances in estimating people’s age, but nobody seems to want to face up to that fundamental problem yet.Demsas: Well, Saul, this has been fantastic. Always our last and final question: What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being just good on paper?Newman: I’ll tell you something that turned out to be bad on paper in the moment. When I was an undergrad, it’s kind of like someone said to me, Go to the best U.K. university. It’s the one in Oxford, Oxford Brooks, which is not the University of Oxford. They told me completely the wrong university to go to, and I’d gone to it. And so to sort of crawl my way out of this hole, I found out that my university offered an exchange program to the Ivy League. And it was the first year they’d run it. So they just didn’t understand how much it was gonna cost.Demsas: Okay.Newman: And I was like, Great. I could be the poorest kid in the Ivy League, right? So I went on exchange, but without me knowing it, they realized how much it cost and pulled my visa status after the first six months. So I wound up in the FBI building in L.A., you know, in a locked elevator, going to one of the rooms for an interview, just completely not knowing that I’d overstayed.Demsas: Is that even a good on paper? That just sounds like you got screwed.Newman: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s as close as I got. I mean, it was good on paper right up until that point.Demsas: Yeah. What school were you going to?Newman: I was going to Ithaca—Cornell, in Ithaca—and paying, I think, $1,000 a semester in student loans.Demsas: Oh my gosh. That is, like, one of those things where you really gotta check to see if that deal’s going to pan out.Newman: Yeah, I think it worked out long term, but short term, yeah, not so great.Demsas: Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.Newman: Thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.Demsas: If you like what you heard on today’s episode, I have a suggestion for you! My colleagues here at The Atlantic are exploring how we talk about aging, in our newest How To series. You can hear a trailer at the end of this episode, and then go subscribe to How to Age Up, coming April 7, wherever you listen to podcasts.[Music]Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Animals
Culture
Forests

Don’t Think Too Hard About Gum

When you chew gum, you’re essentially gnawing on plastic.

At the turn of the 20th century, William Wrigley Jr. was bent on building an empire of gum, and as part of his extensive hustle, he managed to persuade the U.S. Department of War to include his products in soldiers’ rations. His argument—baseless at the time—was that chewing gum had miraculous abilities to quench thirst, stave off hunger, and dissipate nervous tension. But he was right: Scientists have since found that gum chewing can indeed increase concentration, reduce the impulse to snack, alleviate thirst, and improve oral health.Perhaps that’s why people around the world have had the impulse to gnaw on tacky materials—roots, resins, twigs, blubber, tar made by burning birch bark—for at least 8,000 years. Today, gum is again being marketed as a panacea for wellness. You can buy gum designed to deliver energy, nutrition, stress relief, or joint health; scientists are even developing gums that can protect against influenza, herpes, and COVID. Ironically, this new era of chewing gum is manufactured with a distinctly modern ingredient, one not usually associated with wellness: plastic.By the time Wrigley began his business venture, Americans had grown accustomed to chewing gum sold as candy-coated balls or packaged sticks. The base of these chewing gums was made from natural substances such as spruce resin and chicle, a natural latex that Aztecs and Mayans chewed for hundreds if not thousands of years. Unfortunately for 20th-century Americans, the chicozapote trees that exude chicle take a long time to grow, and if they are overtapped, they die. Plus, cultivated trees don’t produce nearly as much chicle as wild trees, says Jennifer Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity University and the author of Chicle. In the 1950s, chicle harvesters began struggling to meet demand. So gum companies turned to the newest innovations in materials science: synthetic rubbers and plastics.Today, most companies’ gum base is a proprietary blend of synthetic and natural ingredients: If a packet lists “gum base” as an ingredient, that gum most likely contains synthetic polymers. The FDA allows gum base to contain any of dozens of approved food-grade materials—substances deemed either safe for human consumption or safe to be in contact with food. Many, though, are not substances that people would otherwise think to put in their mouth. They include polyethylene (the most common type of plastic, used in plastic bags and milk jugs), polyvinyl acetate (a plastic also found in glue), and styrene-butadiene rubber (commonly used in car tires). The typical gum base contains two to four types of synthetic plastics or rubbers, Gwendolyn Graff, a confectionery consultant, told me.Everything we love about gum today is thanks to synthetic polymers, Graff said. Polyvinyl acetate, for example, strengthens the bubble film. “If you blow a bubble, and it starts to get holes in it and deflate, that’s usually an indicator that it doesn’t have polyvinyl acetate,” Graff said. Styrene-butadiene rubber creates a bouncy chewiness that makes gum more likely to stick to itself rather than to surfaces like your teeth. Polyethylene can be used to soften gum so it doesn’t tire out your jaw. Gums with only natural polymers “can feel like they're going to fall apart in your mouth,” Graff said.Plastic gum, though, also falls apart, in a way: Gum chewing has been linked to microplastic ingestion. In a study published in December, U.K. researchers had a volunteer chew on a piece of gum for an hour, spitting into test tubes as they went. After an hour of gum chewing, the saliva collected contained more than 250,000 pieces of micro and nano plastics—comparable to the level of microplastics found in a liter of bottled water. In a study presented at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society (which has not yet been peer-reviewed), a graduate student’s saliva contained elevated microplastic levels after she chewed several commercially available gums, including natural ones. The research on gum chewing and microplastics is still limited—these two papers effectively represent analysis of just two people’s post-chew saliva—but gum chewing has also been correlated with higher urine levels of phthalates, plastic-softening chemicals that are known endocrine disruptors.Scientists are still learning about the health impacts of microplastic ingestion, too. Microplastics find their way into all kinds of foods from packaging or contamination during manufacturing, or because the plants and animals we eat absorb and ingest microplastics themselves. As a result, microplastics have been found in human livers, kidneys, brains, lungs, intestines, placentas, and breast milk, but exactly how our bodies absorb, disperse, and excrete ingested plastic is not very well studied, says Marcus Garcia, who researches the health effects of environmental contaminants at the University of New Mexico. Some research in mice and cultured cells hint that microplastics have the potential to cause damage, and epidemiological research suggests that microplastics are associated with respiratory, digestive, and reproductive issues, as well as colon and lung cancer. But scientists are still trying to understand whether or how microplastics cause disease, which microplastics are most dangerous to human health, and how much microplastic the body can take before seeing any negative effects.The answer could affect the future of what we choose to eat—or chew. Ingesting tiny plastic particles might seem inevitable, but over the past 10 years or so, Americans have grown understandably fearful about bits of plastic making their way into our food, fretting about microwaving food in plastic containers and drinking from plastic bottles. Gum has, for the most part, not triggered those worries, but in recent years, its popularity had been dropping for other reasons. In a bid to reverse that trend, gum companies are marketing synthetic gum as a tool for wellness. Just like Wrigley, they are betting that Americans will believe in the power of gum to soothe nerves and heal ailments, and that they won’t think too hard about what modern gum really is. For anyone worried about swallowing still more plastic, after all, gum is easy enough to avoid.

Animals
Business
Chemicals

A marine biologist discovered something incredible in a beer bottle on the seafloor

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo. One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it […]

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo. One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it out.  Through her dive mask, Koch peered inside to make sure it was empty.  That’s when she saw an eyeball.  “There was something staring back at me,” Koch told me.  It wasn’t just one eyeball, actually — but dozens. Inside the bottle was an octopus mom with a brood of babies. “You could see their eyes, you could see their tentacles,” Koch said in a recent interview with Vox and The Dodo. “They were fully formed.” Instead of taking the bottle with her and throwing it away like she initially intended, Koch handed it to her colleague, another marine biologist, who carefully placed it back on the sandy sea floor. Based on the images and video, Chelsea Bennice, a marine biologist at Florida Atlantic University, said the animal was likely a species of pygmy octopus — making this whole encounter even cuter.  On one hand, it’s hopeful to find life — an octopus family! — living in rubbish. “One man’s trash is another octopuse’s nursery,” as University of Miami environmental scientist Jennifer Jacquet told me when I showed her the photos. Her graduate student, Janelle Kaz, said it’s actually not uncommon for octopuses to take up residence in beer bottles. “They are highly curious and opportunistic,” Jacquet said.  But it’s also a reminder that, as Florida ecosystems decline, there are fewer and fewer places for wildlife to live. Overfishing, pollution, and climate change have devastated near-shore habitats in the Keys — and especially coral reefs — in the last few decades.  The irony, Koch told me, is that she runs a state-funded project in Monroe County to create “artificial reefs:” structures, often made of concrete, to enhance the habitat for fish, lobsters, and other sea creatures. And she was actually snorkeling that morning to figure out where to put some of the structures.  “This octopus found artificial habitat to make its home,” Koch said. “I was just like, ‘Wait momma, because I’m going to put out some better habitat for you — something that someone can’t pick up and throw away.’”

Animals
Climate
Pollution

Sea Lion Bites Surfer Amid One of the Worst Outbreaks of Domoic Acid Poisoning That California Wildlife Rescuers Can Remember

Sea lions, dolphins and birds are sick and dying because of a toxic algae bloom in Southern California—and animal care organizations are overwhelmed by the scale

Volunteers with the Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute in Santa Barbara, California, rescue a sick sea lion that's likely suffering from domoic acid poisoning. David Swanson / AFP via Getty Images It started as a normal surf session for RJ LaMendola. He was roughly 150 yards from the beach in Southern California, riding the waves and enjoying the peaceful solitude. But the situation quickly turned violent when a sea lion emerged from the water and charged at LaMendola. The 20-year surfing veteran tried to remain calm as he frantically paddled back to shore, but the sea lion was behaving unusually—“like some deranged predator,” LaMendola wrote in a widely shared post on Facebook. The sea lion made contact, delivering a hard bite on LaMendola’s left buttock that pierced through his wetsuit. “Never have I had one charge me, especially at that ferocity, mouth open,” LaMendola tells the Ventura County Star’s Stacie N. Galang and Cheri Carlson. “It really was out of, like, a horror movie.” Eventually, LaMendola made it back to the sand and drove himself to a nearby emergency room. After being treated, he contacted local wildlife authorities. The most likely explanation for the sea lion’s abnormally aggressive behavior? The creature was probably suffering from domoic acid poisoning, which results from toxic algae blooms. Across Southern California, authorities are grappling with one of the worst outbreaks of domoic acid poisoning they’ve ever seen. Dozens of sea lions and dolphins have been affected by the condition in recent weeks, reports the Los Angeles Times’ Summer Lin. Birds are also turning up dead, according to the Los Angeles Daily News’ Erika I. Ritchie. At least 140 sick sea lions are being cared for at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, per the Los Angeles Times, because they have a 50 to 65 percent chance of surviving if they receive treatment. Roughly another 45 are being cared for at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, reports the Los Angeles Daily News. SeaWorld San Diego has rescued another 15 this year, reports KGTV’s Jane Kim. Other sea lions have been found dead on area beaches. “This morning, we had three calls within 30 minutes of daylight breaking,” Glenn Gray, CEO of the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, told the Los Angeles Daily News on March 18. “That’s the magnitude of it.” Members of the public are being urged to report any sick, distressed or dead animals they find on the beach. Beachgoers should also stay away from the animals and give them space. David Swanson / AFP via Getty Images Dozens of dolphins, meanwhile, are washing up dead or close to death on beaches. Veterinarians are euthanizing the dolphins, because they rarely survive domoic acid poisoning, per the Los Angeles Times. “It’s the only humane option,” says John Warner, CEO of the Marine Mammal Care Center, to the Westside Current’s Jamie Paige. “It’s an awful situation.” A similar outbreak occurred in 2023, killing more than 1,000 sea lions. But officials say this year is shaping up to be worse. The harmful algae bloom started roughly five weeks ago. During a bloom, environmental conditions cause microscopic phytoplankton to proliferate. Some species of phytoplankton produce domoic acid, which then accumulates in filter-feeding fish and shellfish. Marine mammals become sickened when they eat the affected fish and shellfish. (Humans can also get sick from eating contaminated fish, shellfish and crustaceans.) In marine mammals, symptoms of domoic acid poisoning include seizures, lethargy, foaming at the mouth and a neck-craning behavior known as “stargazing.” Biting incidents—like the one LaMendola endured—are rare, but sickened animals have been known to behave aggressively. “The neurotoxin is crippling and killing sea lions and dolphins,” says Ruth Dover, managing director of the nonprofit Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute, to the Ventura County Star. The bloom likely started when cold water from deep in the Pacific Ocean rose to the surface in February. Now, it also appears to be spreading closer to the shore. Researchers are monitoring the bloom, but so far, they have no indication of how long it will last. Authorities say toxic algae blooms are getting worse and happening more frequently because of climate change, agricultural runoff and other human-caused factors. This is the fourth straight year a domoic acid-producing bloom has developed off Southern California, as Dave Bader, chief operating officer of the Marine Mammal Care Center, tells KNX News’ Karen Adams. “We don’t know what the long-term impacts will be for having so many consecutive years of this toxic bloom,” Bader adds. “But [dolphins are] a sentinel species. They’re telling us about the health of the ocean, and when we see marine life dying, and we’re seeing it in increasing levels with more frequency, the ocean’s telling us something’s off.” The ongoing outbreak is taking its toll on Southern California veterinarians, volunteers and beachgoers. The incidents are particularly heartbreaking for lifeguards, who typically comfort dying dolphins—and keep beachgoers away—until authorities can arrive. Members of the public are encouraged to report any distressed, sick or dead animals they find on the beach. And, more importantly, they should leave the animals alone. Authorities say pushing a sick creature back into the ocean will likely cause it to drown. Dolphins also become especially agitated when they’re out of the water and people are around—to the point that they can die from fear. “People need to leave them alone and not crowd around them,” Warner tells the Los Angeles Times. “Selfies kill animals, so use your zoom, and stay away.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Animals
Climate
Water

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HOME

If you visit Hawaii for the first time, you might be shocked about the wild chickens everywhere around the island. HOME explores the variety of relationship between people and wild chicken in Hawaii. People are trying to protect their community, but wild chickens become a huge part of it. Now we need to find a home for wild chickens, if it’s not already taken over by humans.

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Return of the Buffalo

The Lakota people on the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota welcome buffalo back to their land with hopes that this reunion will restore their cultural, physical, spiritual, and economic health.

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Jetty Cats

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Dipsas Speaks

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When Worlds Collide: A Formosan Black Bear's Deadly Dance with Civilization

This is the true story of one Formosan black bear’s encounter with civilization. A fateful encounter with a wild boar trap in mid-autumn 2019 first brought this bear to national attention. However, after months of recuperation and subsequent release back into the wild, it lingered worryingly near settled areas, damaging orchards and even ransacking a mountain cabin in search of food. Re-released in a remote forested area, the bear set out an incredible journey across arduous terrain in the direction of home. This is the moving story of “711” … also known as “568” – a wild Formosan black bear from Taichung’s Mt. Daxue area. The bear died on the 25th day of its long journey home in May 2022 in the Mt. Wujie region of Nantou County. News of the death was a devastating blow to the hundreds involved in 711/568’s rescue, recovery, and tracking efforts. It also offered a difficult lesson for us all about the work yet ahead for wildlife conservation. This film examines Formosan black bear conservation from multiple perspectives, including those involved in this bear’s rescue and care, living in areas affected by 711/568, and working in the many public and private organizations dedicated to the cause of wildlife conservation. We hope the story told here helps further raise public understanding and concern for wildlife conservation in Taiwan.

Conservation
Inspirational
Animals

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