On the Importance of Good Parent Selection

DNA, not lifestyle is key to longevity

Healthy centenarians lucky enough to have inherited “longevity genes” can thank their genetic makeup for their long lives. Unlike everybody else, they didn’t have to watch their diet, exercise daily or avoid alcohol to reach that age. They didn’t even have to stop smoking – although tobacco use would certainly harm their descendants.

This was the discovery of a team at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York headed by Prof. Nir Barzilai, an Israeli physician, aging researcher and geneticist. The team studied 477 Ashkenazi Jews aged 95 to 109 who were compared with a control group of Caucasians from the general American population.

Barzilai and colleagues wrote in the online edition of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, released for publication on Wednesday morning, that “people with exceptional longevity are not distinct in terms of lifestyle factors from the general population,” which has to work hard over many years to stay healthy. But they were not healthier at an earlier stage in life, according to measurements of their weight, physical activity and other lifestyle factors. Instead, their genes have protected them and they apparently “interact with environmental factors differently than others.”

In the general population, lifestyle factors play a bigger role in human longevity than genetic factors, and those who lack longevity genes can add up to eight years by living according to these rules.

Those who inherit the good genes don’t have to, Barzilai said, and can escape chronic disorders usually linked to poor lifestyle choices.

Thus, these long-lived souls seem to be “no more virtuous than the rest of us in terms of their diet, exercise routine or smoking and drinking habits, suggesting that ‘nature’ (in the form of protective longevity genes) may be more important than ‘nurture’ (lifestyle behaviors) when it comes to living an unusually long life,” he said.

So some people live into their hundreds regards of their life style, while the rest of us still have to be concerned.  Genetics just ain't fair..