How to live to 100 A growing body
of research suggests that chronic illness is not an inevitable consequence of
aging, but more often the result of lifestyle choices. "People used to say, ’who
would want to be 100’" says Dr. Thomas Perls, an instructor at Harvard Medical
School and director of the New England Centenarian Study. "Now they’ re
realizing it’ s an opportunity." High-tech medicine isn’t likely to change the
outlook dramatically; drugs and surgery can do only so much to sustain a body
once it sr. arts to fail. But there is no question we can lengthen our lives
while shortening our deaths. The tools already exist, and they’re within
virtually everyone’s reach. Life expectancy in the United States
has nearly doubled since a century ago—from 47 years to 76 years. And though
centenarians are still rare, they now constitute the fastest-growing segment of
the U.S. population. Their ranks have increased 16-fold over the past six
decades—from 3,700 in 1940 to roughly 61,000 today. The Census Bureau projects
that 1 in 9 baby boomers (9 million of the 80 million people born between 1946
and 1964) will survive into their late 90s, and that1 in 26 (or 3 million) will
reach 100. “A century ago, the odds of living that long were about one in 500,"
says Lynn Adler, founder of the National Centenarian Awareness Project and the
author of "Centenarians: The Bonus Years." "That’s how far we’ve
come." If decrepitude were an inevitable part of aging, these
burgeoning numbers would spell trouble. But the evidence suggests that Americans
are living better, as well as longer. The disability rate among people older
than 65 has fallen steadily since the early 1980s, according to Duke University
demographer Kenneth Manton, and a shrinking percentage of seniors are plagued by
hypertension, arteriosclerosis and dementia. Moreover, researchers have found
that the oldest of the old often enjoy better health than people in their 70s.
The 79 centenarians in Perls’s New England study have all lived independently
through their early 90s, taking an average of just one medication. And when the
time comes for these hearty souls to die, they don’t linger. In a 1995 study,
James Lubitz of the Health Care Financing Administration calculated that medical
expenditures for the last two years of life—statistically the most
expensive—average 22,600 for people who die at 70, but just ＄8,300 for those who
make it past 100. These insights have spawned a revolution in
the science of aging. "Until recently, there was so much preoccupation with
diseases that little work was done on the characteristics that permit people to
do well," says Dr. John Rowe, the New York geriatrician who heads the MacArthur
Foundation’s Research Network on Successful Aging. Research confirms the old
saying that it pays to choose your parents well. But the way we age depends less
on who we are than on how we live—what we eat, how much we exercise and how we
employ our minds. A century ago, how many lived to, or past 100, within a population of 5 million