Lighten up, live forever

Will live forever.

Researchers have found that personality traits like being outgoing, optimistic, easygoing, and enjoying laughter, as well as staying engaged in activities, may be part of the longevity genes mix.

"When I started working with centenarians, I thought we'd find that they survived so long in part because they were mean and ornery," said Nir Barzilai, M.D., the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair of Aging Research, director of Einstein's Institute for Aging Research and co-corresponding author of the study. 

"But when we assessed the personalities of these 243 centenarians, we found qualities that clearly reflect a positive attitude towards life. Most were outgoing, optimistic and easygoing. They considered laughter an important part of life and had a large social network. They expressed emotions openly rather than bottling them up." 

In addition, the centenarians had lower scores for displaying neurotic personality and higher scores for being conscientious compared with a representative sample of the U.S. population.

The scientists wouldn't say it, but I will: jerks will die off more quickly. I've got a list.

The really big story of the past century

Look to your left. Look to your right. Without advances in agriculture and medicine, one of you would not be alive today. We're not only living longer; we're also getting taller and heavier.

The average adult man in 1850 in America stood about 5 feet 7 inches and weighed about 146 pounds; someone born then was expected to live until about 45. In the 1980s the typical man in his early 30s was about 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighed about 174 pounds and was likely to pass his 75th birthday. 

For nearly three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel has  researched what the size and shape of the human body say about economic and social changes throughout history, and vice versa.  “In most if not quite all parts of the world, the size, shape and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia,” he writes.


This “technophysio evolution,” powered by advances in food production and public health, has so outpaced traditional evolution, he  argues, that people today stand apart not just from every other species, but from all previous generations of Homo sapiens as well.

 “I don’t know that there is a bigger story in human history than the improvements in health, which include height, weight, disability and longevity,” said Samuel H. Preston, one of the world’s leading demographers and a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Without the 20th century’s improvements in nutrition, sanitation and medicine, only half of the current American population would be alive today, he said.

Eat your Wheaties, boys and girls.

The secret to a long life

Don't worry, be happy ain't it. Neither is the proper proportion of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in your diet.

Leslie R. Martin, a psychology professor at La Sierra University in Riverside, who participated in a 20-year study, says:

"One of the findings that really astounds people, including us, is that the Longevity Project participants who were the most cheerful and had the best sense of humor as kids lived shorter lives, on average, than those who were less cheerful and joking. It was the most prudent and persistent individuals who stayed healthiest and lived the longest."

Part of the explanation lies in health behaviors – the cheerful, happy-go-lucky kids tended to take more risks with their health across the years, said Howard S. Friedman, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California - Riverside, who led the study.

While an optimistic approach can be helpful in a crisis, "we found that as a general life-orientation, too much of a sense that 'everything will be just fine' can be dangerous because it can lead one to be careless about things that are important to health and long life. Prudence and persistence, however, led to a lot of important benefits for many years. It turns out that happiness is not a root cause of good health. Instead, happiness and health go together because they have common roots."

"Some of the minutiae of what people think will help us lead long, healthy lives, such as worrying about the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the foods we eat, actually are red herrings, distracting us from the major pathways," Friedman said. "When we recognize the long-term healthy and unhealthy patterns in ourselves, we can begin to maximize the healthy patterns."

"Thinking of making changes as taking 'steps' is a great strategy," Martin says. "You can't change major things about yourself overnight. But making small changes, and repeating those steps, can eventually create that path to longer life." 

The first step, Friedman and Martin say, is to throw away the lists and stop worrying about worrying.

I'm going to put that on my to-do list, right after eating more cabbage.

Eat right, exercise, live forever

German researchers say you will age slower if you exercise, eat healthy foods, and have a good lifestyle. In fact, they have determined how many years more, on average, you will live if you do those things.

Elderly people who exercise, eat well, and generally have an active lifestyle will live around four (4) years longer than their counterparts that don’t exercise, don’t eat well, and generally have a sedentary lifestyle. People who lived a sedentary and unhealthy lifestyle for most of their lives can begin to live a healthier (and longer) lifestyle if they start to exercise regularly and eat healthy foods later in life.

To reach this conclusion, Dr. Dieter Leyk of German Sport University Cologne looked at a group of physically active people composed of 900,000 marathon and half-marathon runners from the age of 20 to 79 years.

Kinda common sense, no? Here's something to get you started. First, the food pyramid:

And an exercise pyramid:

Worship the sun, live forever

My neighbor: she'll outlive me

Women who sunbathe regularly live longer and enjoy health benefits which outweigh the risk of skin, according to research presented at the Swedish Society of Medicine's annual conference.

Studies of the sun exposure habits of 40,000 women in southern Sweden have found that the health benefits of spending extended periods in the sun outweigh the negatives, such as the increased risk for skin cancer.

Researchers claim that exposure to the sun is attributed to helping against blood clots, which are twice as common in the darker periods of the year than in the summer, the newspaper reported.

Furthermore the incidence of type 2 diabetes also shows seasonal variations, with the winter boom in cases attributed to a lack of vitamin D.

Chief physician Håkan Olsson at the division of oncology at Lund University argued that he was not alone in claiming "that there can be other factors other than the sun which affect the risks for developing malignant melanomas," and that exposure to the sun could help protect against a slew of other conditions.