Today, the average person in the United States lives for nearly 78 years. But what about those people who beat the average? Why do some men and women defy the chronological odds to live longer and in good health?
Increasingly, the scientific community is shifting its focus to this elite group, these “successful agers” who seem to be doing a better job of getting old than the rest of us.
And what they’re finding isn’t what you’d expect.
Some of the reasons people age well are obvious. For years we’ve been told that the best way to stay healthy is to eat the right foods, maintain a healthy weight, exercise &endash; and hope you have good genes. While all of that is true, a voluminous body of aging research shows that some of the most significant enemies of old age are far more insidious than a penchant for fried food or a couch-potato lifestyle. Instead, how well we age might be intrinsically tied to our most basic personality traits, the social relationships we have formed and &endash; perhaps most important &endash; our ability to cope with stress.
“We now know that aging is about a body that doesn’t deal well with stress anymore,” says Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neuroendocrinologist and a leading stress researcher.
Scientists estimate that the maximum potential life span of the human body is about 120 years, give or take. They came to this conclusion after observing the oldest ages achieved by a variety of organisms, noting that aging, no matter what the species, seemed to follow a consistent mathematical formula. The maximum age achieved by any species appears to equal about six times the number of years from birth to biological maturity. So humans, who take about 20 years to reach maturity, have the potential to live six times as long as that &endash; or about 120 years. Notably, the oldest well-documented human age is 122.
Genetics likely plays some part in the ability to reach an extreme old age, and scientists are on a heated quest to identify longevity genes. But genetics can only take you so far. Studies of Swedish twins who were raised apart showed that only about 30 percent of aging can be explained by genes. In other words, successful agers aren’t still around simply by luck of the genetic draw. They have far more control over the aging process than once thought.
