What if you could add up to ten years to your life? A long healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits. If you adopt the right lifestyle, chances are you may
live up to a decade longer. So what’s the formula for success? In recent
years researchers have fanned out across the globe to find the secrets to
long life. Funded in part by the U.S. National Institute on Aging, scientists have focused on several regions where people live significantly
longer. In Sardinia, Italy, one team of demographers found a not spot of
longevity in mountain villages where men reach age 100 at an amazing rate.
On the islands of Okinawa, Japan, another team examined a group that is
among the longest lived on Earth. And in Loma Linda, California, researchers
studied a group of Seventh-day Adventists who rank among America’s longevity
all-stars. Residents of these three places produce a high rate of

centenarians, suffer a fraction of the diseases that commonly kill people in other parts of the developed world. And enjoy more healthy years of life. In sum, they offer three sets of “best practices” to emulate. The rest is up to you. In the U.S. the ratio of female to male centenarians is about four to one. In parts of Sardinia it’s more like one to one.

Out in the work shed behind his house in the village of Silanus, 75-year-old
Tonino Tola emerges elbow-deep from the steaming carcass of a freshly
slaughtered calf, sets down his knife, and greets me with a warm, bloody
handshake. Then he takes his thick glistening fingers and tickles the chin
of his five-month-old grandson, Filippo, who regards the scene from his
mother’s arms. “Goochi, goochi goo,” Tonino whispers. For this strapping,
six-foot -tall shepherd, these two things-hard work and family-form the
bedrock of his life. They may also help explain why Tonino and his neighbors
are a hot spot of longevity.

A community of 2,400 people, Silanus is located on the edge of the
Gennargentu Mountains in central Sardinia, where parched pastures erupt into
granite peaks. In a cluster of villages in the heart of a region called the
Blue Zone by demographers, 91 of the 17,865 people born between 1880 and
1900 have lived to their hundredth birthday-a rate more than twice as high
as the average for Italy.

Why the extraordinary longevity here? Lifestyle is part of the answer. By 11
a.m. on this particular day, Tenino has already milked four cows, split half
a cord of wood, slaughtered a calf and walked four miles of pasture with his
sheep. Now, taking the day’s first break, he gathers his grown children,
grandson and visitors around the kitchen table. Giovanna, his wife, a robust
woman with quick, intelligent eyes, unties a handkerchief containing a
paper-thin flatbread called carta da musica, fills our tumblers with
red wine and slices a round of homemade pecorino cheese with the thumping
severity of a woman in charge.

Like many wives here whose husbands are busy tending sheep, Giovanna
shoulders the burdens of managing the house and family finances. Among
Mediterranean cultures, Sardinian women have a reputation for taking on the
stress of these responsibilities.

For the men, less stress may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease,
which may explain why the ratio of female to male centenarians is nearly one
to one in some parts of Sardinia, compared with a four to one ratio favoring
women in the United States.

“I do the work,” admits Tonino, hooking Giovanna around the waist, “my
ragazza does the worrying.’

These Sardinians also benefit from their genetic history. About 11,000 years
ago, hunter-gatherers from ~ Iberian Peninsula made their way eastward to
Sardinia. After several millennia the Bronze Age Nuragic culture arose on
the island’s fertile coastal plains. When military powers such as the
Phoenicians and Romans discovered Sardinia’s charms, the natives were forced
to retreat deeper and deeper into the highlands. There they developed a
wariness of foreigners and a reputation for banditry, kidnapping , and
settling vendettas with the lesoria, the traditional Sardinian shepherd’s
knife.

In their isolation native Sardinians became genetic incubators, amplifying
certain traits over generations. Even today roughly 80 percent of them are
directly related to the first Sardinians, says Paolo Francalacci of the
University of Sassan. Somewhere in this genetic mix, he says, may lie a
combination that favors longevity.

Tonino’s family’s diet is another factor. It’s loaded with home grown
fruits and vegetables such as zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, and Cava beans
that may reduce the risk of heart disease and colon cancer. Also on the
table: dairy products such as milk from grass fed sheep and pecorino cheese,
which, like fish, contribute protein and omega-3 fatty acids. Tonino still
makes wine from his small vineyard of Cannonau grapes , which in this
mountainous part of Sardinia contain two to three times as much of a
component found in other wines that may prevent cardiovascular disease.

A little work won’t kill you. That’s a life lesson taught early in Sardinia,
where young Antonio Saba helps tend his family’s flock. By keeping active,
many men stay as healthy as Giuseppe Cugusi, who at 85 is still raising pigs-one-handed, if need be. “I’ve been walking and working all my life,
even when I don’t feel great.” he says. “If I stayed home all day, then I’d
be sick….

But with globalization and modernization, even remote Sardinia is changing.
Cars and trucks have eliminated the need to walk long distances. Young
people are more outward-looking and less traditional~. Obesity, virtually
nonexistent before 1940, now afflicts about 10 percent of Sardinians.
“‘Children want potato chips and pizzas. That’s what they see on TV’ says
Tonino. “‘Bread and pecorino are old-fashioned.”

One thing that hasn’t changed: the Sardinians’ dedication to family, which
assures both support in times of crisis and life extending care for the
elderly. “I would never put my father in a retirement home,” says Tonino’s
daughter Irene. “It would dishonor the family:

For Tonino, the workday still includes a late afternoon trek to pasture his
200 sheep. Looking jaunty in his cap, coat, and leather gaiters, he strides
through a narrow opening in a stone wall, counting his sheep as they
follow him. When three sheep try to squeeze through, they knock over a
section of the wall. With disquieting ease, Tonino hoists the heavy rocks
back into place. Then he leans back on a rock outcropping and assumes the
age-old role of sentinel, a routine he bas performed for many decades.

“Do you ever get bored?” I ask. Before the words leave my mouth, I
reali2e I’ve uttered a heresy. Tonino swings around, pointing at me, dried
blood still rimming his fingernail, and booms: “I’ve loved living here every
day of my life.”

===================================

Okinawan seniors have far fewer heart attacks than their U.S. counterparts
and lower rates of breast and prostate cancer.

What is 84-year-old Fumiyasu Yamakawa’s  “reason for living”?
Daily exercise, including yoga , to train for an annual decathlon. His favorite events: high jump and pole vault. For Zen-ei Nakamura, 88, the sea
beckons. “Fishing is my life.” he says. He immerses himself in his work-often skin diving to scare fish into his nets.

The first thing you notice about Ushi Okushima is her laugh. It begins in her belly, rumbles up to her shoulder and then erupts with a bee-haw that
fills the room with pure joy. I first met Ushi five years ago at her home in
Okinawa, and now it’s that same laugh that draws me back to her small wooden
house in the seaside village of Ogimi. This rainy afternoon she sits snugly
wrapped in a blue kimono. A heroic shock of hair is combed back from her
bronzed forehead revealing alert, green eyes. Her smooth hands lie
serenly folded in her lap. At her feet sit her friends, Setsuko and
Matsu Taira, cross-legged on a tatami mat, sipping tea. Since I last visited
Ushi, she’s taken a new job, tried to run away from borne, and started
wearing perfume. Predictable behavior for a young woman, perhaps, but
Ushi is 103. When I ask about the perfume, she jokes that she has a new
boyfriend, and then claps a hand over her mouth before unleashing one of her
blessed laughs. With
an
average life expectancy of 78 years for men and 86 years for women,
Okinawans are among the world’s longest lived people. More important, elders
living in this lush subtropical archipelago tend to enjoy years free from
disabilities. Okinawans have a fifth the heart disease, a fourth the breast
and prostate cancer, and a third less dementia than Americans, says Craig
Willcox of the Okinawa Centenarian Study.

What’s the key to their success? “Ikigai certainly helps,” Willcox offers.
The word translates roughly to “that which makes one’s life worth living.”
Older Okinawans, he says, possess a strong sense of purpose that may act as
a buffer against stress and diseases such as hypertension. Many also
belong to an Okinawan-style moa; a mutual support network that provides
financial, emotional, and social help throughout life. “,

A lean diet may also be a factor. “A heaping plate of Okinawan vegetables,
tofu, miso soup, and a little fish or meat will have fewer calories than a
small hamburger,” says Makoto Suzuki of the Okinawa Centenarian Study. “And
it will have many more healthy nutrients.” What’s more, many Okinawans who
grew up before World War II never developed the tendency to overindulge.
They still live by the Confucian-inspired adage “hara hachi bu-eat until
your stomach is 80 percent full.”

And they grow much of their own food. Taking one Look at the gardens kept by
Okinawan centenarians, Greg Plotnikoff, a traditional-medicine researcher at
the University of Minnesota, called them “cabinets of preventive medicine:’
Herbs, spices, fruits, and vegetables, such as Chinese radishes, garlic,
scallions, cabbage, turmeric, and tomatoes, he said. Contain compounds that
may block cancers before they start.”

Ironically, for many older Okinawans this diet was born of hardship.
Ushi Okushima grew up barefoot and poor. Her family scratched a living out
of Ogimi’s rocky terrain, growing sweet potatoes, which formed the core
of every meal to celebrate the New Year, her village butchered a pig. , and
everyone got a morsel of pork.

During World War II, when U.S. warships shelled Okinawa, Ushi and Setsuko,
whose husbands had been conscripted into the Japanese Army, fled to the mountains with their children. “We experienced terrible hunger.” Setsuko
recalls

Ushi now wakes every morning at six and eats a small breakfast of milk,
Bananas, and tomatoes. Until very recently she grew most of her food (she
gave up gardening when she took a job). But her tradition-honored daily rituals haven’t changed: morning prayers to her ancestors, tea with friends,
lunch with family, an afternoon nap, a sunset social hour with friends, and
before bed a cup of sake infused with the herb mugwort. “It helps me sleep,”
she says.

Back in Ushi’s house we’re finishing our tea. Outside, dusk is falling; rain
patters on the roof. Ushi’s daughter, Kikue, who is 78 and finds little
amusement in the attention her mother draws, shoots me a glare that I take
to mean ”you’ve overstayed your welcome’ (When Ushi ran away from
home, she was actually fleeing an argument with Kikue. She packed a bag and
boarded a bus without telling her daughter. A relative caught up with
her in a town 40 miles away.)

Ushi, Setsuko, and Matou take the cue and fall silent in unison. These women
have shared each other’s fortunes and endured each other’s sorrows for
nearly a century and now seem to communicate wordlessly.

What is Ushi’s ikigai, I ask-that powerful sense of purpose that older
Okinawans are said to possess?

“It’s her longevity itself:’ answers her daughter.” She brings pride 10 our
family and this village, and now feels she must keep living even though she
is often tired.”

I look to Ushi for her own answer.

“My ikigai is right here,” she says with a slow sweep of her hand that takes
in Sctsuko and Matsu. “If they die, I will wonder why I am still living.”

==================

Regular SDA churchgoers appear to live as much as two years longer than
non-churchgoers

It’s Friday morning, and Marge Jetton is barreling down the San Bernardino
Freeway in her mauve Cadillac Seville. She peers out the windshield from
behind dark sunshades her head barely clearing the steering wheel Marge who
turned 101 in September, is late for one of several volunteer commitments
she has today, and she’s driving fast. Already this morning she’s
walked a mile, lifted weights, and eaten her oatmeal. “I don’t know why God
gave me the privilege of living so long,” she says, pointing to herself.
“But look what he did.”

God may or may not have had something to do with Marge’s vitality, but her
religion has. Marge is a Seventh-day Adventist. We’re in Loma Linda.
California, halfway between Palm Springs and Los Angeles. Here, surrounded
by orange groves and usually blanketed in mustard-colored smog, lives a
much-studied concentration of Seventh-day Adventists.

The Adventist Church-born during the era of 19th-century health reforms that
popularized organized vegetarianism, the graham cracker, and breakfast
cereals (John Harvey Kellogg was an Adventist when he started making wheat
flakes) has always preached and practiced a message of health. It expressly
forbids smoking, alcohol consumption, and eating biblical1y unclean foods,
such as pork. It also discourages the consumption of other meat, rich foods,
caffeinated drinks, and “stimulating” condiments and spices. “Grains
fruits, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our
Creator,” wrote Ellen White, an early figure who helped shape the Adventist Church. Adventists also observe the Sabbath on Saturday, socializing with
other church members and enjoying a sanctuary in time that helps relieve
stress. Today most Adventists follow the prescribed lifestyle – a testimony,
perhaps, to the power of mixing health and religion.

From 1976 to 1988 the National Institutes of Health funded a study of 34,000 California Adventists to see whether their health oriented lifestyle
affected their life expectancy and risk of heart disease and cancer.
The study found that the Adventists’ habit of consuming beans, soy milk,
tomatoes, and other fruits lowered their risk of developing certain cancers.
It also suggested that eating whole wheat bread, drinking five glasses of
water a day, and, most surprisingly, consuming four servings of nuts a
week reduced their risk of heart disease. And it found that not eating red
meat had been helpful to avoid both cancer and heart disease.

In the end the study reached a stunning conclusion, says Gary Fraser of
Lorna Linda University: The average Adventist lived four to ten years longer
than the average Californian. That makes the Adventists one of the
nation’s most convincing cultures of longevity.

I meet Marge at the Plaza Place hair salon in Redlands, where she’s kept an
8 a.m. appointment with stylist Barbara Miller every Friday for the past 20
years. When I arrive, Marge is flipping through a copy of Reader’s Digest as
Barbara uncurls a silver lock of hair. “You’re late!” she shouts. Behind
Marge a line of stylists languidly coif other heads of hair, and in varying
shades of gray. “We’re a bunch of dinosaurs around here,” Barbara whispers
to me. “You may be,” Marge shoots back. “Not me.”

Half an hour later, her hair a cottony tuft, Marge leads me to her car. She
doesn’t walk, quite, but scoots with a snappy, can-do shuffle. “Get in,” she
orders. “‘You can help.” We drive to the Loma Linda adult services center, a
day-care center for seniors, most of whom are several decades younger than
Marge. She pops open her trunk and heaves out four bundles of magazines
she’s collected during the week. “The old folks here like to read them
and cut out the pictures for crafts,” Marge explains. Old folks?

Next stop: delivering recyclable bottles to a woman on welfare who will
later redeem them for deposits. On the way Marge tells me she was born poor,
to a mule skinner father and homemaker mother in Yuba City, California. She
remembers the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. When she was just a toddler,
and the aftershock that reached her family farm and sloshed water out
of the animal trough. She worked as a nurse, put her husband through medical
school, and raised two children as a doctor’s wife. Her husband, James,  died two days before their 77th anniversary. “Of course I feel lonely once
in a while, but for me that’s always been a sign to get up and go help
somebody,”

“The Bible tells you not to eat pork,” says Lydia Newton, who prefers beans,
cheese, bread, and a slice of birthday cake (below). Newton, 112, ranks among the world’s 20 oldest people, three years shy of the list leader.
Super centenarians are redefining how long and well we can live, but it’s
not easy work.  My favorite part of the day,” says Lydia, “is when I take
a nap,”

Like many Adventists, Marge spends most of her time with other Adventists.
“It’s difficult to have non-Adventist friends,” she says. “Where do you meet them? You don’t do the same things. I don’t go to movies or dances.” As a
result, researchers say, Adventists increase their chances for long life by
associating with people who reinforce their healthy behaviors.

At noon, back at Linda Valley Villa, where Marge lives in a community of
retired Adventists, she treats me to lunch. We sit by ourselves, but a stream of neighbors stop by to say hello. Over tofu casserole and mixed
green salad, I ask Marge to share her longevity wisdom.

“I haven’t eaten meat in 50 years, and 1 never eat between meals,” she says,
tapping her perfect teeth. “They’re all mine.” Her volunteer work helps her
avoid the life shortening loneliness suffered by so many seniors-and gives
her a sense of purpose, which imbues the lives of other successful
centenarians. “I realized a long time ago that I needed to go out to the
world:’ she says.” The world was not going to come to me.”

I have a last question for Marge. After interviewing more than 50
centenarians on three continents, I’ve found everyone likable; there
hasn’t been a grump in the bunch. What’s the secret to a century of
congeniality?

“Well. I like to talk to people,” she says. “I look at strangers as friends
I haven’t met yet.” She pauses to rethink her answer. “Then again, people
may look at me and wonder, Why doesn’t that woman keep her mouth shut!”

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