Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are 91 and 97 years old respectively and have famously bad diets and do no exercise yet are both healthy and productive. Many other examples, like William Shatner, who is 91. Or Henry Kissinger, 98. I think much of conventional wisdom about weight, diet, health is wrong. Outcomes are influenced much more by genes than anything else. That's how these old guys keep going when the 'conventional health wisdom' by the experts says they should be dead.
The summary as I understood is that hereditary factors will determine about 40% of your ageing rate. Doing the right things (eating your greens etc) will affect maybe 10-15% of your ageing rate if you're generally healthy. Avoiding the bad stuff (obesity, smoking, alcohol) will drastically affect your healthspan and lifespan.
It's hard to take these men as an example not to care. Who knows what genetic cards they were dealt, and who knows how much luck or invisible preparedness they have with their bodies. The conventional health wisdom you mention is borne of millions more examples and unequivocally points in the direction of keeping your body in as good a shape as possible through your whole life.
Hard to reason from world-famous anecdotes. They could also just have supremely healthy genetics, thus explaining why they’re able and willing to work very hard far beyond the normal retirement age. You’d need large studies to learn more.
This is completely unsupported. Instead of jumping to conclusion that conventional wisdom is wrong, maybe show the evidence about their supposedly bad diets?
The big assumption in this statement is that they have a poor diet but where is your collaborating proof? The only famous bad diet attributed to them is drinking the occasional soft-drink (Coca-Cola) and that can hardly qualify as a bad diet.
Unless you have first-hand knowledge on their diets or detailed second-hand sources that go beyond the occasional soft-drink. Your claim about debunking conventional wisdom on diets such as not over-eating or avoiding excess sugar is totally bonkers.
I'm pretty sure they have a healthy diet, avoiding junk food and such but I may be wrong (since I don't have first-hand knowledge) and so better to post sources when making such contrarian claims such as dismissing the entire consensus of healthy and unhealthy eating.
Buffett is famous for his fast-food heavy diet. Here's one article that quotes Bill Gates:
"Warren Buffett's close friend, billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, says Buffett mostly subsists on a diet of hamburgers, ice cream, and Coke. Celebrating 25 years of their friendship in 2016, Gates wrote in his blog, Gates Notes, "One thing that was surprising to learn about Warren is that he has basically stuck to eating what he liked when he was six years old." He recalled a time when Buffett stayed at his and his wife Melinda Gates' house, and opened a package of Oreo cookies for breakfast."
Anyway, I think the medical establishment is very much aware that genes matter more than diet, exercise, or anything else they can do. I had one extremely socially awkward PCP who, upon intake, was like "Asian? That's good, it means you'll live longer. Good genes." The problem is that such comments are both off-putting, potentially illegal, and completely unhelpful, because patients can't control their genes but can control their diet and exercise. There are a lot of statements that are true but useless, and discourse tends to select against them.
My first-hand experience and conventional scientific-consensus is that diet matters, not only for longevity of life but also for quality of life.
My Dad is addicted to sugary drinks and his feet are already showing signs of pre-diabetic nerve damage and he has lost lots of weight while his fraternal twin, who isn't addicted to sugary drinks has no such nerve problems.
The role of diet and genes can actually be tested on identical twins or studied that way and pretty sure any such study will show diet matters for quality of life and length of life.
The grandparent poster said something like "Conventional wisdom on Diet is wrong" is so vague to the point of almost being meaningless.
No one is disputing that genes matter but to draw a logical line from Buffet saying "hamburgers and oreo are not that bad" to "conventional wisdom on diet is wrong" is a mega-leap in logic which the grandparent poster should apply for the Olympics.
Mcdonalds food (in moderation) is not that unhealthy actually, but the grandparent poster is so vague I'm not sure maybe he is actually saying the same thing. My interpretation of his vague comment is that he is saying diet doesn't matter when it comes to health when there is overwhelming evidence of the perils of excess sugar and over-eating to health.
> I think much of conventional wisdom about weight, diet, health is wrong.
If they weren't alive, it would be a few other old people you would use as examples. Even if conventional wisdom on those topics was bang on, you'd still be able to use this reasoning thanks to survivorship bias.
I'm not sure if you mean this in jest, but yes it is.
So if you meant it as dry humor, you made me chuckle. It's almost too on the nose, considering we're talking about the habits of literal survivors being taken out of context.
I'd posit that more important to longevity than diet, is the relation to retirement and work. It may not be much of a coincidence they're working and living until their nineties. I've noticed too many people decline precipitously after retirement when there was nothing in the way anymore of TV and sedentarism, which is the natural state of things in modernity.
