What is the secret to longevity and old age?

Longevity expert Dr. Leonid Gavrilov was asked five longevity questions by the BBC this week:

Q 1: What is the secret to longevity and old age?

1. To have particularly long-lived parents, as it was first found by American scientist Raymond Pearl in 1930s, and confirmed many times by other researches since then.

2. Being a male hurts, but you can do little about this . Most centenarians are women.

3. We recently found that it helps a lot to be born to a particularly young mother (before age 25 years).

Q 2: Why does certain people live so much longer than others?

This is the same first question put in different words, is not it? What is interesting that even genetically identical laboratory animals living in the same strictly controlled laboratory conditions, still have very different lifespans. This says us that chance events are extremely important.

Q 3: What are your tips for living longer?

Take care of yourself, avoid really bad habits (smoking, heavy drinking, violent conflicts, stresses, etc.). Exercise when you have time, have enough sleep, eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, vitamins would not harm too.Try to find out your risk factors (blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol etc.), and modify your life accordingly to prevent diseases to the extent possible.Do understand that reserve capacity is greatly diminishes with age, so do not make heroic adventures, as if you are 20 year-old.

Q 4: What does science tell us as to who will live longer, is it about genes?

Yes, because longevity runs in families, there are reasons to look for human longevity genes. But they are not found yet in humans, and it is likely that instead of small number of major longevity genes, there may be numerous genes with small longevity effects.

What does science tells us is that early-life childhood conditions do matter for survival 80 years later. It helps a lot to be born in rural rather than urban area, presumably because the load of child infections was much higher in large cities in the past. Surprisingly even the month of birth matters, presumably because of profound seasonal variation in childhood diseases and vitamin deficiency in the past.

Q 5: How important is diet and happiness?

Diet seems to be very important. Trivial things like overeating and obesity can kill you.

As for happiness, not sure. It certainly helps to avoid depression.
But not sure that extreme idiotic happiness would really help to live longer.

The original post has additional sources.

Hat/Tip: Contemporary Retirement