When Dr. Nir Barzilai met 100-year-old Helen Reichert, she was smoking a cigarette. Barzilai, director of the Institute for Research on Aging at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, recalled that Reichert said doctors had repeatedly told him to stop smoking. But all those doctors had already died, Reichert noted, and she hadn’t. Reichert lived nearly a decade longer before dying in 2011.
There are countless stories about , and their daily habits sometimes defy conventional advice about diet, exercise, and alcohol and tobacco use. However, decades of research show that ignoring this advice can negatively affect most people’s health and shorten their lives.
So how much of a person’s longevity can be attributed to lifestyle choices and how much is just luck — or favorable genetics? It depends on how long you expect to live.
Continues after advertising
Read more:
Research indicates that reaching age 80 or even 90 is largely within our control. “There is very clear evidence that for the general population, living a healthy lifestyle” actually prolongs life, said Dr. Sofiya Milman, professor of medicine and genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
A study published last year, which analyzed the lifestyles of more than 276,000 male and female US veterans, found that adopting eight healthy behaviors could add up to 24 years to people’s lives. These behaviors included eating a healthy diet, engaging in regular physical activity, sleeping well, managing stress, having strong relationships, and not smoking, abusing opioids, or drinking excessively.
Continues after advertising
If veterans followed all eight behaviors, researchers calculated they could expect to live to about 87 years old. To most people, this probably sounds great; after all, it’s almost 10 years longer than the average life expectancy in the US. But for Milman, who wasn’t involved in the study, the results showed that “even if you do everything right,” you still can’t expect to live to 100.
If you want to become a centenarian, you’re going to need a little help from your ancestors. Because as someone gets older, the more genetics seem to matter.
Generally speaking, scientists believe that how long we live is about 25% attributable to our genes and 75% attributable to our environment and lifestyle. But as people approach age 100 and beyond, those percentages begin to reverse, said Dr. Thomas Perls, professor of medicine at the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine at Boston University.
Continues after advertising
In fact, studies have revealed that many people with exceptionally long lives have no healthier habits than the average American. And yet, they live longer and have lower rates of age-related diseases such as heart disease, cancer and dementia.
In the Long Life Family Study, for example, “We have families where there is a lot of smoking; we have some families that are sedentary,” said Michael Province, a professor of genetics and biostatistics at Washington University School of Medicine, who is leading the study with Perls.
But what these families also tend to have are some special genetic variants that experts believe help them avoid disease and live longer.
Continues after advertising
Some genes can affect how likely people are to develop specific conditions. For example, the APOE gene is known to influence the risk of Alzheimer’s disease: those who carry the APOE4 variant have an increased risk, while those with the APOE2 version have a decreased risk. Province said long-lived families have a higher prevalence of APOE2 than the average population.
Other genes appear to influence the aging process itself. One that has appeared in several studies of centenarians is called FOXO3, which is involved in many fundamental aspects of cellular health. Because these genes affect the biology of aging, it’s possible they could protect against several age-related diseases, Milman said.
A key benefit of these types of longevity genes may be to counteract unhealthy behaviors. A study that Milman and Barzilai conducted comparing the offspring of centenarians with a control population found that among the two groups, those with healthy lifestyles had an equally low prevalence of cardiovascular disease. But among those with unhealthy lifestyles, the offspring of centenarians still had low rates of disease, while the control group did not.
Experts have emphasized that many of these genes are rare, likely occurring in less than 1% of the population. (It’s probably not a coincidence that a similar percentage of people live to be 100.) There is also no single gene that offers protection against all aging-related diseases; it is more likely that there are hundreds that combine to make a difference.
Having the right set of genes to impact longevity is “like winning the lottery,” Perls said. So even if your mother has reached 100, you should still practice behaviors that you know are good for you, just in case you didn’t hit the genetic lottery.
And whatever you do, don’t take health advice from a centenarian. For them, lifestyle probably didn’t matter much, Barzilai said. For the rest of us, it really matters.
c.2024 The New York Times Company
