If your parents lived to be over 100 years old, there’s a tempting assumption that whatever the secret to being over 100 is already in your genes. Dietary therapy may help at the last minute, but the basics are already set.
For 20 years, researchers have been following adult children of people over 100 years old to find out whether diet is a factor in improving longevity.
It turns out that what the offspring ate depended heavily on something that most longevity studies elude.
Tracking descendants of people over 100 years old
Researchers from Tufts University (Tufts) and Boston University (BU) jointly performed the analysis. First author Erfei Zhao is a postdoctoral fellow at the Gene Mayer USDA Center for Aging and Human Nutrition Research at Tufts.
Data come from the New England Centenarian Study conducted at Boston University since 1995. The survey remains the world’s largest study tracking people who reach the age of 100 and their relatives thereafter.
They started enrolling adult children over the age of 100 in 2005, by which time most of the children were already in their 70s. Previous attempts to reconstruct the lifelong eating habits of 100-year-olds have encountered obvious memory problems.
This round looked at the diets of the descendants of 335 centenarians and 128 compatriots whose families had less longevity. Everyone completed a 131-item questionnaire asking how often they eat certain foods, women made up just over half of the sample, and the average age was nearly 74.
Measuring the diet of centenarian offspring
Until this paper was published, no one had measured what this group of people actually ate. The results showed that the dietary patterns of centenarians were slightly better than their peers and better than the national average. Eat more fish, more fruits and vegetables, less added sugar, and especially less sodium.
Four scoring tools were used. One is based on federal dietary guidelines, another targets chronic disease prevention, and the third is the MIND diet, which was derived from previous papers on cognitive function. The fourth weighed personal health and environmental sustainability.
Offspring scored slightly better on all four measures. Children of parents who live to be 100 years old tend to have slightly healthier eating habits than children born into such strong families.
The largest differences were recorded for fruit, vegetable, and seafood intake. However, absolute numbers remained incomplete, with both groups missing targets for whole grains and dairy products, and added sugar levels were high overall.
Where I failed at dieting
Beans, lentils, peas, tofu. Legume intake was similarly below recommended levels for centenarian offspring and their peers, and the same was true for whole grain intake.
Co-author Andres V. Ardison Collato, a research scientist at the Tufts Nutrition Center, described disparities across the population across income and education classes. Few Americans, regardless of family background, achieve these goals.
The diet most strongly associated with exceptional longevity is not actually what the people most likely to reach very old age eat. This gap is a discovery in itself, and this paper treats it as one.
education twist
But the most striking pattern emerged when the team categorized everyone by educational background. Among those with only a high school diploma, centenarian descendants ate significantly better diets than others.
Once I earned my graduate degree, the difference almost disappeared. Both groups ate well, and family longevity was no longer the factor that differentiated them.
It turns a simple story upside down. Family longevity was not the only factor in improving diet quality; education and income were major factors.
According to a recent paper, genetics only account for about half of the human lifespan. The rest is difficult to quantify. It may come from having access to fresh produce, or it may come from dinner habits learned before they are old enough to make choices.
20 years of data
A 20-year follow-up study revealed a profile of health status. The dietary patterns of people in their 70s matched the results 20 years later. This is the kind of long arc that most dietary studies cannot address. The reduction in disease risk was significant.
“After 20 years of tracking the descendants of centenarians, we found that as a group they had a significantly lower risk of stroke, dementia, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease,” said Paola Sebastiani, professor of medicine at Tufts Medical School and co-author of the study.
The team is currently working on separating the three threads. What does the food itself do? How much will the inherited resilience become? Family customs that are passed down throughout life. That work is ongoing.
Beyond genes
“I think it’s important to recognize that while genetics is presumed to influence longevity, a number of environmental factors collectively have a much larger impact,” Zhao said.
These dietary findings are not limited to people with special family histories. Eating more fish, fruits, and vegetables while reducing added sugar and sodium will lead to better health later in life.
But the educational findings defy any tidy conclusions. If high-income households already eat better because of cost, exposure, and habits, the advice to “add more legumes” ignores why legumes didn’t show up in the cart.
Researchers can now ask which foods are most closely associated with health benefits for these families. The long-term goal is to compress morbidity, moving the worst years of health closer to the end of the lifespan rather than spread out over decades.
This study Innovation in aging.
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