Well I think part of is genes. But there’s more to it than that. Take Gertrude Baines. She’s the world’s oldest living person at age 115. Up until ten years ago, she lived on her own. She likes to indulge on extra crispy bacon and sweets, and enjoys certain television shows (The Price is Right and Jerry Springer.)

What’s the secret to long life? She doesn’t know. It’s not that she’s been without her share of hardships. Her parents were born into slavery. She had a child die of typhoid fever.

But she enjoyed her 115th birthday on April 6th. In this past election, she voted for Barack Obama. Like him, she’s made her mark on history.

Image: sxc.hu.

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Health Secrets at Age 115

A granddaughter-in-law, Hamda Amash, 40, said Mariam is a “healthy, active woman. She walks each day and makes sure she drinks at least one glass of olive oil.”

What I find to be the real feat in this is not the age itself, but that she lived to be that old and seems to be still physically and mentally fit. Afterall, who wants to be old, but bedridden? or old but with flaky mental health?

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Live Long with One Glass of Olive Oil Daily

1. don’t smoke
2. exercise
3. drink alcohol moderately, and
4. eating five servings of fruit and vegetables a day

I don’t smoke, I drink occasionally, I do often eat more than 5 servings of fruit and veggies but I admit I have to move more and get into a serious exercise regimen. How do you fare on this four parameters?

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Four Healthy Habits To Live Longer

The link between caloric restriction and longevity may be mediated by reduced susceptibility to disease, researchers report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists found that calorie-restricted older adult rhesus monkeys have at least 30% more naïve T cells than controls.

Two points I’d like to emphasize: Caloric restriction is not synonymous to starvation, as some headlines make it. Also, I have to agree with co-author Ilhem Messaoudi when he said towards the end of the article that increasing the lifespan is not the end-all and be-all.

“What I’d love to see is how caloric restriction affects hearing, eyesight, muscle strength, wound-healing…If caloric restriction slows down the change in three or four of these systems, then [there is] a strong case that aging is being slowed regardless of how the lifespan data comes out.”

Afterall, what good is it to live for so long, if all your functions have deteriorated?

For those interested in learning more on how diet are thought to influence aging, there’s The Longevity Diet: Discover Calorie Restriction, which has received fairly good editorial reviews and customer feedback, and for those into technical literature, there’s Caloric Restriction: A Key to Understanding and Modulating Aging (Research Profiles in Aging).

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Caloric Restriction and Immune Aging