Secrets of the Centenarians by John Withington

Author:John Withington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Estelle Winwood.

So, everything was going swimmingly until 2011, when researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City produced their findings on 477 Ashkenazi Jews aged 95 and over, who had been asked questions about what their lifestyles had been like when they were 70. Surprisingly, 60 per cent of the men said they had smoked, as did 30 per cent of the women. Commenting on the results, Dr Nir Barzilai wondered whether it meant the centenarians had special genes that made them less susceptible to the harmful effects of smoking: ‘it’s not that if you want to live to be 100, you can smoke . . . It’s that there are rare people who are going to be 100, and for them it doesn’t matter – they get there anyhow.’ And we know that our genetic inheritance does have an important effect on our survival; identical twins, who share all their genes, have life spans that are more similar than those of non-identical twins, who have just half their genes in common. Sceptics, though, sounded a note of caution about the Yeshiva results, questioning how accurately people could remember their habits of three decades earlier.

Overall, there is not much medical opinion to the effect that smoking will help you live longer, but with drinking alcohol it is a bit different. Although most comment dwells on the harm it can do, we are also used to seeing stories about how, in moderation, it can be beneficial, perhaps in preventing heart attacks, or reducing the risk of breast cancer and diabetes, or even preventing the common cold. And as the TV Eye study hinted, with centenarians too, the alcohol story seems less clear-cut than the tobacco story. Among the record-breakers, we saw that John Evans, Christian Mortensen and Alice Herz-Sommer were all teetotallers, but Jeanne Calment liked red wine, Charlotte Hughes and Henry Jamieson brandy, Fred Hale Senior whisky and Shigechiyo Izumi a redoutable local brew. And a number of centenarians are known to have had special tipples: Vinson Gulliver, once Britain’s oldest man, would take a glass of whisky mixed with orange and honey every day, while Harry Williams, a former Church of England priest, would always have a glass of wine with his lunch, and said he also liked ‘a good brandy’. On the other hand, María Capovilla, an Ecuadorian who was the oldest person in the world when she died aged 116, never drank or smoked. Neither did two African Americans who were both also for a time the oldest living human beings – Gertrude Baines, who survived to 115, and Emma Tillman, who made it to 114.

From her 500 centenarian interviews in the United States, Lynn Adler found that ‘while some never drank, most said they enjoyed only an occasional cocktail or a glass of wine; some still do.’ This time, the Yeshiva study had not dissimilar results. A slightly higher proportion of men in the centenarian group than in a comparison

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