British researcher Saul Justin Newman (from the University of Oxford) caused an international sensation by challenging the “Blue Zones” phenomenon. He studied the data on longevity regions (including Ikaria) and reached the following conclusions:
Record Inaccuracy: Newman argues that the exceptionally high rates of centenarians are due to registrar errors and bureaucratic omissions, rather than actual, exceptional longevity.
The Pension Case: According to his research, many of the individuals recorded as centenarians were not actually alive. He explains these phenomena as a consequence of either pension fraud (relatives failing to report deaths in order to collect money) or identity confusion.
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No one is forbidden from talking nonsense. Especially if you hold credentials from the “Owl-ery” (from the owl, the wise bird of Greek antiquity), as Giannis Skarimbas used to call these… charitable institutions, like our own Academy of Athens and Britain’s Oxford, where Saul excels.
Lest we forget, nonsense of this kind is often baptized as “scientific research,” usually to make noise or to deconstruct one another’s work in fields where competition and vanity overflow. (How else do you think that for 50 whole years the blessed egg—and long before the wise men bothered to answer the timeless question of whether… “the chicken made the egg or the egg the chicken”—this excellent delicacy of our grandmothers was placed under dietary persecution, as a highly dangerous cholesterol poison?)
To cut a long story short, we will formulate just one question, even though the eager researcher-author is not going to answer, “playing the duck” (Modern Greek for having no answer).
Well, then. Being a Greek myself, originating not from Chios, but from the other end of our small country, Andritsaina. The beautiful market town where I spent my wonderful childhood years among elders who passed away “full of days” [at a ripe old age]. In those times, before our own, our grandfathers did not receive pensions. If AI researched it correctly, OGA (the Agricultural Insurance Organization) granted the first pensions in Greece in July 1962!
The question: Why did it happen that only on this island, out of the entire rest of Greece, elders were receiving pensions—and what kind?—years before OGA was even founded in the country? And why did their ultra-cunning Chiot relatives, in order to collect these unique pensions in cities and villages of Greece, fail to declare them deceased at the registry office? Likewise in Japan, India, but also in his own “Old Albion,” where provenly, I imagine, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people live there too, having completed a century of life?