From eating red food to gossiping, how to ramp up your very own anti-ageing gene

IN A few weeks I will be 67 years old, more than twothirds o f m y w ay t o m y g oal of reaching 100, and,h opefully, getting a birthday card from the monarch. But how l ikely i s i t t hat I — o r a ny o f us — will reach this milestone?

Although average life expectancy in the U K h as s oared o ver t he l ast c entury — up from just 46 in 1900 to an average of 81 now (79 for men; 83 for women) — it has recently flat-lined and begun to decline. that’s the average: many of us can expect to do better than that — and, o f c ourse, m any w ill d o f ar w orse.

Anobviousstepistolookatyourp arents: m y f ather d ied o f h eart f ailure at the age of 74, while my grandfather died of the same condition when he was just 66. My mother on the other hand, who is about to celebrate her 94th birthday, is still going strong.

In fact, as I discovered recently while making my tV series, Secrets Of the Superagers, what determines your longevity is a mixture of genes and lifestyle — b ut y our g enes b ecome m ore important the older you get.

As part of my research I went to Okinawa, an island off the coast of Japan. It’s been dubbed ‘the land of the immortals’ because it has the h ighest proportion of centenarians anywhere in the world.

I m et C raig W ilcox, a p rofessor o f p ublic health and gerontology at Okinawa International U niversity, w ho r uns a r esearch p rogramme t hat’s e xamined more than 1,000 centenarians in the region. He told me twin s tudies have shown that whether or not you reach the age of 80 in good s hape, i s 7 5 p er c ent d own t o lifestyle and 25 per cent to genes.

BUt if you’re hoping to reach 1 00, t hen i t’s g enes that r eally m atter — a nd one gene in particular, FoxO3, which he described as ‘the antiageing gene’.

We all have this gene, but there is a special longevity version, whichseemstobeparticularlybeneficial: if you inherit one copy from a parent, it doubles your chance of hitting 100, while if you inherit t wo c opies ( one f rom e ach parent), it triples your chances.

Professor W ilcox h as b een t ested and found he has one copy. I’ve also been tested. I have none. Which is a bit of a blow. (tests for such g enes a re a vailable p rivately.) Professor W ilcox t hinks t he v ariant mainly works by reducing chronic inflammation, which is behind many c onditions o f a geing, i ncluding h eart d isease a nd d ementia.

He tried to cheer me up by explaining that even if you inherit just the ordinary FoxO3 genes, there a re w ays t o a ctivate t hem s o they behave more like the p rotective version. these include intermittent fasting (such as with my 5:2 diet), regular exercise, stress reduction — and more s urprisingly, consuming plenty of red and purple foods, such as r eddish-purple sweet potatoes, shrimp a nd s almon.

these brightly coloured foods contain powerful antioxidants that h elp p rotect u s a gainst h eart disease and stroke.

Numerous animal studies have shown that calorie restriction, if done while eating a nutrient-rich diet, is linked to a longer life, and recent r esearch h as s uggested t his is also true of humans. the idea that i t m ight w ork, a t l east i n p art, by activating your FoxO3 genes is relatively n ew, b ut t his h as r ecently been s hown i n a nimal s tudies.

It could also explain why Okinawa h as s o m any c entenarians: when t he g eneration o f O kinawans who are now in their 90s and 100s were growing up after World War II, they lived on a very low-calorie diet (under 1,700 calories a day), but one packed with vegetables, (such as sweet potatoes) and seafood, with very little meat or rice, which d oesn’t g row r eadily t here.

Professor W ilcox t hinks g oing o n a low-calorie diet that’s rich in vegetables and foods containing a ntioxidants helps activate genes such as FoxO3 that play a part in healthy a geing.

Indeed, a s tudy b y t he U niversity of Hawaii in 2017 showed that giving mice a supplement of astaxanthin (an antioxidant found in reddish foods such as salmon) b oosted a ctivation o f t he FoxO3 gene by 90 per cent.

Sadly, younger Okinawans have largely given up the traditional Okinawan d iet i n f avour o f a m ore Western-style o ne, a nd a s a r esult are not living anything like as long a s t heir p arents. A verage l ife expectancy on the island is now 83, down from 86 in the 1980s — and l ower t han i s t ypical i n J apan (where it is 85).

One f inal l esson I l earnt f rom t he Okinawans was the value of s omething they call Moai, a g athering of friends who meet r egularly t o g ossip o r s hare a dvice and f inancial a ssistance a s n eeded. these groups often start in c hildhood and can last a lifetime. Sometimes t hey j ust f orm t o h elp support a friend who is going through a hard time.

I went to a Moai that had been created to support an elderly c ardiologist whose wife had died. Once a week his friends would gather a t h is h ouse t o s ing k araoke (which he loved), eat, dance and chat. It was a lovely atmosphere and you could see how much it meant t o t hem a ll.

Research has shown that the richness of our social connections is probably the most important factor when it comes to leading a long a nd h ealthy l ife. W orth b earing in mind, if you’re hoping to get that b irthday c ard f rom r oyalty.