WHO WILL HIT A HUNDRED?

IN THE WORLD’S FIVE socalled Blue Zones, where people live longer and healthier lives than average and many into their hundreds, longevity is associated with a nourishing mix of good genes, good food, physical activity, family and friends. Yet there are intriguing differences. In Sardinia, Italy, where men are as likely as women to live to 100, and on the Greek island of Icaria, drinking wine is common. But there’s no alcohol consumed by the Seventh Day Adventists of Loma Linda, Calif.

Mostly plant-based diets are common to all the zones (the other two being Okinawa, Japan, and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica), as is religion or some form of spirituality. But the New England Centenarian Study has found that being vegetarian does not predict who will live to 100, and neither does religion, money, education or ethnicity. (The centenarians enrolled in the study come from 20 different ethnic backgrounds.)

The tangled links between ethnicity and longevity can be fraught and vary from country to country. In the United States, for example, health care and socio-economic disparities are believed to play a major role in the longevity gap between Black and white people. In January, the Kaiser Family Foundation, an American non-profit, non-partisan health policy analyst organization, reported life expectancy for Black people was 71.8 years compared to 77.6 years for white people. Yet the Office of National Statistics in the U.K. reported in 2020 that data shows Black and other ethnic minorities have longer life expectancies than white people. Black African women had a life expectancy of 88.9 years, and Black African men 83.8 years. For white Britons, life expectancy was 83.1 years for women and 79.7 years for men. People of Asian, Bangladeshi and Black African backgrounds generally lived longest.

Hong Kong, where cancers, cardiovascular disease and car accidents are comparatively low, has recently overtaken Japan as the place with the highest life expectancy. A 2021 report in The Lancet Public Health attributed this to “fewer diseases of poverty while suppressing the diseases of affluence.”

But Japan still holds the top spot as the country with the highest per capita rate of centenarians, a perch experts chalk up partly to low obesity rates and nutrient-rich diets. There are claims of record-high concentrations of centenarians from other parts of the world, including areas in China, South America and the Caribbean, but Perls believes most of these are unsubstantiated.

“I think it’s just to increase tourism,” he says. “There’s been fascination with the idea of living forever, and there can be a tremendous amount of sensationalism associated with that.”

The traits centenarians do have in common in the New England study include not being obese, not having a substantial history of smoking, handling stress well, not being neurotic, being extroverted and being female. About 85 per cent of centenarians are women, and they make up about 90 per cent of those aged 110 and older. Yet centenarian men are usually in better health than their female counterparts.