Living Longer – The Secret To A Long Life

Everyone wants to know the secret to living longer, and many, many answers to that question are tossed around in the news media and on social media every day.  This is an important issue to most Americans. It is a matter for critical thinking, making sure the proposals pass the test of common sense, for perspective, making sure the potential gain is worth the investment, for economic understanding, knowing that a dollar spent on this pursuit cannot be spent elsewhere, and for discipline, having the ability to stick to a plan for the long term. (Note: any secret to longevity that has no long-term component doesn’t pass the critical thinking test.)

The next three or four installments of this page will cover an investigation of a few of these secrets to longevity. So where shall we start – how about with taking more vacations?

A news article about a study in Finland that, curiously enough, got to Yahoo News by way of India, tells us that men who take vacations live longer. Specifically, “compared with those who took more than three weeks, men who took three weeks or less annual leave from their regular work schedule were found to be 37 per cent more likely to die early.”

The study included 1,222 middle-aged executives, who were randomly assigned to a test group or a control group. Every four months they gave the test group advice on healthy living, including subjects like diet, exercise and not smoking. The control group was left alone. “Shorter vacations were associated with excess deaths in the [test] group,” but made no difference in the control group. They concluded: “stress reduction is an essential part of programmes aimed at reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases.” 

Wow, where do I start? To be fair, I couldn’t find a link to the paper presented, so have no idea about how long the study lasted – hopefully, it was more than a few years, or how they defined excess deaths. But there are other flaws in the reasoning.

First, the sample was a decent size, but they cut it in half for no apparent reason. They assigned men randomly to each group. Randomization is a good course of action when you have no idea about the background of the subjects, but with more information it is preferable to assign similar people to each group to try to balance out what researchers call confounding factors. Some of those factors may have been family or work situations that could make taking vacation more stressful or impossible, such as divorce or personal/corporate bankruptcy. So randomizing into two groups is puzzling.

Then I wonder if vacation time was the only variable they tested for – that would seem odd given that they also provided healthy living information to only one group. Otherwise they may have been testing for a number of variables and found an “association” only with vacations. I have written elsewhere about how this practice can lead to some unreliable, even crazy results.

And who funded the study? Was it the Finnish tourism industry?

 Finally, the conclusions they reached cannot be applied to any large population – of Finland or anywhere else. They tested only male executives. It is comparable to a college professor testing a group of undergraduates, called a sample of convenience, and publishing the results as if they applied to ordinary citizens across the country. No can do! Do male Finnish executives have anything in common with female Detroit autoworkers? In fact, the conclusions did not even apply to their own so-called control group. How does not receiving healthy living information affect how stress-reducing a vacation is? Half their experiment backed their findings and the other half didn't!

I’m sure it made the news because everyone would like to exercise a little confirmation bias and latch on to a scientific study telling them what they want to hear: that not taking a three-week vacation can be a health hazard. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

So, if we want to live longer, we must look elsewhere, like to those magic pills, foods or beverages packed with vitamins and minerals – right? Not so fast! A word or two about that next time.