Stat of the Week Winner: March 30 – April 5 2013

Congratulations to Nick Iversen for his humorous nomination of “Sex basically doubles your life span” winning this week’s Stat of the Week competition:

“The anti-ageing benefits [of frequent sexual activity] are amazing. It basically doubles your life span once you get to your 60s and 70s.”

The article obviously get correlation confused with causation but that’s not why I’m posting it here.

The reason for the post is that the statement about life span is so obviously blatantly wrong that I don’t see how any intelligent person could make it.

The average life span of people in their 60s and 70s is (funnily enough) at least 60 or 70. Doubling this means that sex extends your lifespan to 120 or 140.

OK so she really means “remaining lifespan.” For those in their 60s remaining lifespan is about 20 to 25 years. So frequent sex doubles that to 40 to 50 years.

Just doesn’t sound at all reasonable to me. If sex makes that much difference to life expectancy it far outweighs any contributions due to diet, exercise etc and would have been noticed centuries ago.