Reaching your hundredth birthday means you become a member of a “special club” of centenarians, Trusted Source. While researchers believe the number of centenarians was very low before 1900, today many more people are able to reach this ripe old age.
As of 2021, there were an estimated 573,000 centenarians globally. The United Nations expects that number to jump rapidly, with a reported estimate of 3.7 million by 2050.
What do centenarians do to help them reach triple-digit birthdays — what is their secret? Medical News Today spoke with six experts to find out what the “secret sauce” behind longevity is.
In 2016, National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner and his team published a study Trusted Source on what they found to be the secrets to longevity.
Dubbed the Blue Zones, Buettner identified five specific areas of the world where people consistently live over 100 years of age. These areas are:
- Sardinia, Italy Trusted Source
- Ikaria, Greece Trusted Source
- Nicoya, Costa Rica Trusted Source
- Loma Linda, California Trusted Source
- Okinawa, Japan Trusted Source.
“These are places where human beings have lived manifestly longest,” Buettner explained to Medical News Today. “They’ve achieved the health outcomes we want: long lives largely free of chronic diseaseTrusted Source. Since only 80% of how long we live is dictated by disease, these people’s lifestyles and environments offer us instructions and clues for how we can set up our lives to live longer.”
Within these five areas, Buettner discovered there were nine common practices that people followed that might explain their slower aging process. Called the Power 9, they include:
- move naturally
- have a purposeTrusted Source in life
- reduce stress
- practice the 80% diet rule, which is to stop eating when 80% full
- favor a plant-based diet
- drink alcohol in moderate amounts
- belong to a communityTrusted Source
- put family first
- keep a social circle that supports healthy behaviors.
Loneliness, said Buettner, is a top risk factor for a shorter life, so preventing that as much as we can could help add years to our lives:
“There’s no short-term fix [or] supplement for longevity,” he added. “Learn plant-based dishes that you like and cook at home. Curate a social circle of three to five healthy friends [who] will care about you on a bad day. Health behaviors are contagious, and friends tend to be long-term adventures.”
As diet makes up a few of the Power 9 learned from Blue Zones, Buettner has also launched the Blue Zone Food Guidelines that feature 11 recommendations reflecting how the world’s longest-living people ate for most of their lives.
“If you want to know what a centenarian [did to live] to be 100, you have to know what they ate during their whole [life],” he said. “Working with Harvard for my book The Blue Zones Kitchen, we collected 155 dietary studies done in all Blue Zones over the past 80 years and averaged them.”
“It was clear that over 90% of their traditional dietary intake came from whole food, plant-based sources [and] was about 65% complex carbs,” noted Buettner. “The pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains, nuts, greens, and other garden vegetables, tubersTrusted Source, and beans.”
Dr. Valter Longo, Edna M. Jones Chair in Gerontology and professor of gerontology and biological sciences at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, developed the Longevity Diet Trusted Source after years of research into aging, nutrition, and disease.
“The Longevity Diet, based on [the] five pillars of longevity, entails all of the everyday and periodic dietary habits that are associated with increased longevity and healthspan,” he explained to MNT.
The main facets of the Longevity Diet include:
- eating a low-protein pescatarian diet until the age of 65–70 years, followed by moderate proteins later in life
- fasting for 12 hours every night
- doing, on average, three cycles of a fasting-mimicking diet per year, each lasting 5 days.
“Because diet [is] intended as ‘how and what we eat’ and not as a method to lose weight, [it] can regulate the genes that regulate the aging process, but also those that regulate the removal of damaged components of cells and the regeneration of parts of various tissues and organs,” Dr. Longo added.
Additionally, previous research suggests that the Mediterranean diet can also provide benefits when it comes to longevity.
A review published in January 2020 concluded that the Mediterranean diet helps slow down Trusted Source the progression of aging and the onset of frailty Trusted Source in older age.
And research published in March 2021 says adhering to the Mediterranean diet may add years Trusted Source to a person’s life.
Why is diet so important for longevity?
According to Monique Richard, a registered dietitian nutritionist, owner of Nutrition-In-Sight in Johnson City, TN, and national media spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, when it comes to eating for longevity, diets like the Blue Zone Diet, Longevity Diet, and Mediterranean diet stand out because of the lifestyle components they share.
“Examples of commonalities observed within these populations include more families and individuals growing Trusted Source and consuming their food [and] eating more whole foods, as in closest to what Mother Nature has made versus derived from a manufacturing plant, industrial farm, or fast food chain,” she explained to MNT.
“Overall intake and composition of these diets include less highly-processed foods, therefore often automatically decreasing levels of sodium, artificial flavors, colorings, and preservatives, fats or added sugar.” Richard noted.
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