We see the headlines all the time. A person lives to be 100, and newspapers rush to ask them for their secrets.
Until her recent death, Maria Branyas Morera was the world’s oldest person at 117. When asked how she had lived so long, she said it all came down to “order, tranquillity, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity and staying away from toxic people.”
But, scientists believe that advice like this may not be as helpful as it seems. They first pointed out that genetics can play a significant role in aging. People can have terrible habits like smoking and still live extraordinarily long lives. Scientists believe that living to 100 years may be a combination of luck and genetics.
“She has never gone to the hospital, she has never broken any bones, she is fine, she has no pain,” said Mrs. Morera’s daughter Rosa Moret.
Never breaking a bone speaks more to luck and genes than having a positive outlook on life.
“What you see with most centenarians most of the time – and these are generalizations – is that they don’t take much exercise. Quite often, their diets are rather unhealthy,” said Richard Faragher, a professor of biogerontology at the Univ. of Brighton, noting that some centenarians were also smokers. “The fact that [centenarians] do many of these unhealthy things and still just coast through [life] says they’re either lucky or typically very well endowed [genetically].”
Many centenarians cite greasy food, hard liquor, bacon every day and chocolate as their secret to life. That doesn’t mean any of those things are good for you. Or even that they helped those people survive.
You also have to consider “survivorship bias.” That means taking information from things that survived a process rather than those that didn’t. It can often lead to fixing problems that don’t exist. Often, when people talk of survivorship bias, they use the example of bombers in WWII. The Center for Naval Analyses looked at bombers to see where they took the most damage during fights to reinforce the weak spots. However, they only saw the planes that returned from fighting. Instead of armoring places with damage, they should have been reinforcing the unscathed parts. Because, logically, the places they hadn’t been hit were where the downed ships had been most vulnerable.
We hear about the lives of people who reach 100 but not their peers who didn’t make it. Scores of people smoke, drink and eat unhealthy food. Those habits take years off your lives. Just like only a handful of people who go to Hollywood get famous, only a handful reach extraordinary old ages.
There is also the matter of reverse causation. If you have never broken a bone or been to hospital and you are doing well at 117, you are likely to have a sunny outlook on life. The positive outlook might not cause good health. Correlation doesn’t mean causation.
So, in the end, it’s better to live life listening to health guidelines and not the recommendations of people who live to extraordinary ages. They don’t hold a secret.
