- A researcher of aging said we shouldn’t listen to centenarians’ longevity advice.
- Richard Faragher said that centenarians live to 100 because of luck and genetics.
- His tips for living longer include eating fruits and vegetables and exercising.
Centenarians may have plenty of wisdom to share, but an expert on aging said you shouldn’t take their advice on how to live past 100.
Richard Faragher, a professor of biogerontology at the University of Brighton, UK, told Business Insider that 100-plus-year-olds don’t have the key to long lives — “they’re just incredibly lucky.”
He explained why and shared four lifestyle choices people should follow instead for healthier lives.
Centenarians’ lifestyles don’t tell us why they live so long
There are two reasons a centenarian may have lived so long, Faragher said: luck or genetics.
This can be explained by the concept of survivorship bias, he said. Centenarians were the outliers who weren’t affected by the diseases, stresses, or bad luck that other people in their generation died from.
So to find out how to live longer, we’re better off studying why people who didn’t live to 100, and trying to combat those causes, not looking at the people who have been lucky in life or genetics.
He gave the example of the 100-plus-year-olds from Blue Zones, areas of the world where people live longer on average and tend to eat traditional Mediterranean diets.
People assume that they live longer because of their diets, “but if you look at Irish centenarians, their ‘recipe for success’ is pints of Guinness and Irish stew,” he said. “So why are we ascribing meaning to the Mediterranean diet and not the Irish one?”
Essentially, he said, eating a Mediterranean diet doesn’t guarantee that you’ll live as long as the centenarians in Sardinia, or Ikaria — they live longer because of their genes or luck, not because of their diets. Their diet is correlated with their longevity, not necessarily the cause of it.
But that doesn’t mean eating nutritious food isn’t beneficial to our health or help us live longer. Faragher’s point is that people with unusually long lives are “substantially genetically different.”
And although the longevity of Blue Zones residents is likely down to the combination Faragher described, growing evidence suggests a person’s lifestyle could offset the influence of their genes — by 62%, according to one 2024 study.
Exercise, eat your greens, drink in moderation, and don’t smoke to live longer
Faragher said research suggests four things could help you live longer (even if they don’t guarantee you’ll live to 100).
- Not smoking
- Doing enough exercise (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week)
- Eating five fruits and vegetables a day
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Drinking moderately (which the CDC defines as two drinks or fewer for men and one drink or fewer for women per day).
Drinking any amount of alcohol can increase cancer risks, according to a recent advisory by the former US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. But if you want to drink, do so in moderation, an expert in alcohol risk previously told BI.
“The difference between someone who does all four of these things, and somebody who does none of them is about 14 years in terms of life expectancy,” he said, referring to a 2008 study published in PLOS Medicine. It tracked the health of over 20,000 people aged 45 to 79 for an average of 11 years.
He added: “the best kind of exercise is the exercise that you can actually do.”
This chimes with what Nathan K. LeBrasseur, a physiologist, previously told BI: pick an exercise you enjoy because you will be more likely to do it regularly, he said. If you can, he recommended doing a mixture of cardio and strength training.
Faragher added: “The thing that really matters is to do the best you can.”
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