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It on your goal.
By Dana G. Smith
When Dr. Nir Barzilai met 100-year-old Helen Reichert, she was smoking a cigarette. Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, recalled that Reichert said doctors continually told her to stop doing it. But those doctors were all dead, Reichert noted, and they weren’t. Reichert lived for approximately a decade before passing away in 2011.
There are countless stories about people who reach 100, and their daily habits sometimes flout conventional advice on diet, exercise, and alcohol and tobacco use. Yet decades of research shows that ignoring this advice can negatively affect most people’s health and cut their lives short.
So how much of a person’s longevity can be attributed to lifestyle choices and how much is just luck — or lucky genetics? It depends on how long you’re hoping to live.
Research suggests that reaching 80, or even 90, is largely within our control. “There is very transparent evidence that, for the general population, a healthy lifestyle” extends life expectancy, said Dr. Sofiya Milman, a professor of medicine and genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
A study published last year, looking at the lifestyles of more than 276,000 U. S. veterans, both men and women, found that adopting eight healthy behaviors can improve people’s lives for up to 24 years. smart sleep, stress management, strong relationships, and smoking, opioid abuse, or excessive drinking.
If the veterans complied with all eight behaviors, the researchers calculated that they could expect to live around 87 years. For most people, this probably sounds pretty good; after all, that’s at most 10 years longer than the average life expectancy in the United States. But for Dr. Milman, who wasn’t involved in the study, the effects showed that “even if you do everything right,” you can still not expect to live to 100.
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