Do the most long lived people that you know have healthy lifestyles?

[Bumpitybumper]

I have been listening to a few podcasts lately that have really stressed the importance of healthy living and things like diet and exercise. None of them really have any tolerance for things that I think most of the population enjoy quite regularly like the odd biscuit or cake. They also don't think it's enough to eat a diet that would be traditionally considered healthy with 57
portions of fruit and veg as now the emphasis is on eating the right fruit and vegetables and nuts and seeds etc. You have to do a certain number of days cardio and strength training. It really is never ending.

It got me thinking that the people that I know that have lived the longest in relatively good health have generally been pretty active and eaten well but haven't really got anywhere close to the lifestyle that these health experts advocate. Is my experience unusual or have others found the same thing in their lives?

Mostly a reasonably good and varied diet, (not obsessive), activity built into every day, which might be gym-type activity or might be housework, gardening and walking, and sociability or connectedness and a sense of purpose.

This is an interesting article about the Greek island of Ikaria: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/31/ikaria-greece-longevity-secrets-age
"the real benefit is that the same things that yield this healthy longevity also yield happiness."

My grandmother wanted to live to 100 so that she would be interviewed on the news and say that the reason she lived so long was because she’d been smoking since she was fourteen. She only made it to 97 though. My great aunt died at 106. She didn’t smoke, but she played poker twice a week. I think having a sense of fun is vital.
*Seriously though, as well as health, strong social connections are known to keep people alive longer. Lonliness and depression are huge contributing factors to people’s quality of life and longevity.

I don't think we can compare though really with all the 90 year olds still alive. Most of their years will have been spent in a totally different way to ours. I'm in my 50's and even my childhood was spent pretty much outdoors, no junk food etc. The young people growing up in the last 20 years have lived so differently.

My paternal family are long lived and healthy - grandfather lived to his late nineties. My dad and his three brothers (69 - 83) are all alive and relatively healthy ( no cancer or long term conditions - my dad had hip relacement a few years ago - common for farmers and my uncle has hearing issues).

I think it is mainly genes but other than that all are -

• moderate drinkers
• non smokers
• eat decent, mainly home cooked food - a lot of fruit and veg (farming families)
• Exercise a lot (two of the four are farmers and the other two walk a lot for pleasure).
• Keep active - three of the four are still working in some sort of capacity and all do or did some community or voluntary work.

Most people in my family for the past few generations have lived into their early/mid/late 80s, but for many of them their quality of life for the last 10 or 20 of those was pretty dire: disabled, housebound, multiple hospital admissions, needing carers and so on.

I think decades of smoking and a sedentary/car-dependent lifestyle had a lot to do with that, so I have never smoked and am planning to stay living in places where I can walk to all basic amenities as well as taking purposeful exercise.

The longest lived people I know have all been slim for their entire lives. That seems to be the common theme.

Mr Monkey and I are mid forties and early fifties respectively and have no health issues at all so far (seriously - Mr Monkey didn't even get covid)

We exercise a lot (he is a marathon runner, I kickbox and do daily yoga and we both walk a lot as we have no car)

We eat mainly fresh, home cooked food - lots of fish, fruit and veg.

Never smoked

We do drink (probably a lot more than our parent's generation) but mainly beer or wine and usually not too excess.

We are very social and volunteer.

Time wil tell if we will be as lucky as the generations above.

That said my grandad had a healthy long life and then had a massivre disabling stroke in his early nineties and spent the last five years of his life in a home and cried every day as he ddn't understand why he was there. it was heartbreaking.

My mum is 97, was obese all her adult life, and has had angina since her 40s. She has a myriad of medical issues but pretty much all of them are because of her age, heart failure, kidney failure, etc. However she never drank, smoked, or ate greasy or high fat foods. (her sweet tooth was her downfall weight wise).
She was pretty independent until she turned 90, since then her mobility has decreased dramatically due to arthritis.

So much is also luck of the draw - my mum was healthy - ate well, exercised, didn't smoke, drank moderately - and died suddenly at 46 from a brain tumour.

Nope. Everyone in my family has so far lived well into their 80s - and they're chip-eating, exercise-dodging, booze-drinking smokers to a man. Or woman, in many cases.

Of the two people I've known die prematurely - one was very slim and fit, ate healthily, didn't smoke and wasn't a heavy drinker. Dead at 31 from Non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The other was a non-smoking vegetarian, didn't smoke, wasn't a heavy drinker - lost her to breast cancer at 61.

I hope a healthy helps, as I try to lead one, but I suspect if I do have a long life it'll be as much down to genetics as anything.

I think genetics have a lot to do with it.

Keeping active in general ie walking as much as you can seems to help. My grandad is 92 and has never ate healthy but he’s ate well (if that makes sense, no crappy meals & all home made stuff). He also retired at 55 and lived in Spain for 6 months of the year which obviously has an amazing impact too.

My nan lived to 88 and I think keeping busy kept her going. We was a very close family and we would all visit her most days so she was always making cups of tea for 10+ cousins/kids through the day and pottering about, but she loved doing it.

Depends what you mean by long lived, but no. It's largely genetic. My grandparents are 87 & 90 and both doing well but haven't had healthy lifestyles - my grandad worked in cotton and paper factories most of his life and my gran has been morbidly obese most of her life. She's now in a wheelchair out of the house (due to arthritis) but is otherwise well, my grandad needs a valve replacement but is otherwise very well.

My other gran died of Alzheimer's at 87 but that's a massive genetic factor (in our family and generally). She smoked 20 a day from age 14 but never had any smoking related illnesses.

I work in older adult health care, and some of the most well people I see lead very unhealthy lifestyles.

The longest-lived member of my family (97) had one notable difference from all the others - she remained single and childless!

She wasn't ultra-healthy by any means - overweight with type 2 diabetes for most of her life. But she was active and very sociable. She worked full-time all her adult life until retirement. She retained her full physical and mental capacity until about 3 years before she died.

DF-i-L is the longest lived person I know. Well into his nineties and completely compos mentis. Still lives at home with no carers. He has always eaten quite a lot of UPF, drives everywhere, drinks in moderation, doesn't really exercise. Bt he does keep busy, always has. He worked into his seventies, did complex voluntary work well into his eighties, cared for his wife until her death, plays his keyboards, sees friends, does puzzles and games, and is red-hot on technology. I love the man.

My maternal family are fairly long lived and (more importantly to me) have a good quality of life in terms of living independently.

They are mostly women (lots of maiden or widowed aunts post ww2). They were active in terms of walking, swimming, moving for pleasure. Moderate in their diets and by necessity ate seasonally. Not overweight, liked a drink but only one or very occasionally two, no/light smoking that was given up easily. All keen gardeners. All close to each other and good friends and neighbours.

My dads family were similar but with more drinking and smoking and a genetic tendency to be a bit chunkier. They tend to
Last 5-10 years less but still have a good quality of life until the end.

I am a type 2 here.....

No.

My chain smoking, alcoholic, never exercised in his life, eats crap FIL is 80 years and gave a speech right in front of me about his unhealthy lifestyle and how well he is and how he's going to continue and ignore the drs.

I was dx with stage 4 bowel cancer at age 44 being for (exercised and ran regularly), vegetarian for 16 years, never smoked, didn't drink much.

I mean 🤷🏼‍♀️

Yes there are things/lifestyle factors that can influence cancer risk but as my consultant said I was just bloody unlucky.

My mother is 97, and lived independently until last year. She put her long, healthy life down to wartime diet in her formative years and having to walk everywhere. She continued to walk everyday (until the dreaded fall), refusing to have a newspaper delivered as it forced her out even when the weather was bad, sometimes popping out twice when she fancied a sausage roll from the bakers for lunch. She ate a healthy (but not obsessively so) diet with mainly home cooked food, but plenty of cream and butter, and a croissant for breakfast each day. Now in a care home she has a cooked breakfast in a “what the fuck does it matter” kind of way.

She was always very sociable and was a very merry widow for for well over 30 years, we (her children) used to joke we had to make an appointment to see her, and still plays bridge though failing eyesight is hampering her enjoyment. She did find the social isolation of covid very hard indeed, though she and 3 fellow nonagenarians met for covert bridge sessions once a week.

I can’t help thinking though that having a number of aunts who also lived into their 90s (funnily enough on her father’s side, not mother’s) may well have had imbued her with excellent genes.

My relatives who made it to 90+ (that's how I'd categorise long lived if you take the average as 80, were very active and stayed active until the end.

Diets had no junk food. Good solid meat and 2 veg dinners every night. Porridge breakfast. No takeaways.

Did smoke and drink but those things seemed outweighed by the above.

My late relative (passed away recently at 98) was fit and healthy, and living independently right up until she fell down the stairs and broke her hip a few months before she died. She had always eaten a healthy diet with loads of fruit, veg, wholemeal bread & cereal etc, and loved the outdoors, and was still going on long walks well into her 90's. Never drank much, and didn't smoke.

My Ukrainian grandmother died at 93. She lost her son (my uncle) the previous year, and I think she just gave up. She was born in 1925 and grew up extremely poor. At one point, they had no food and had to forage. Later on, she worked in a bakery and then a factory in England.

She and my grandfather grew vegetables in their small garden. The food they ate was mainly homemade, but they did like their packet soup. She only learnt to drive in her fifties, and even then, would walk into the nearest town to go shopping and carry everything home. She never smoked or drank, but her husband did, and he only lived to 86! She was also quite deeply religious, and I think this helped her cope with leaving all her family behind in Ukraine.

MIL, 90! Has been overweight for years. Eats a lot of cakes, sweets, and loves a drink.

DF 85, loves a fry up, stopped smoking in his 50s. Doesn’t eat salad or vegetables.

I think it’s genetics, not diet.

All of my relatives on my mother's side lived into their nineties. They were relatively slim, all obsessed with gardening until they were in their eighties. Ate in moderation, but loved cream cakes, pastries etc as a treat. None of them drank, apart from an occasional glass of wine at a party.

Good genes.
Being physically & mentally active.
Being sociable.
Not smoking, not drinking alcohol.
Having a dog?! (Maybe meaning they have a purpose / a responsibility?)

My grandmother on my mothers side is almost 90, both of her parents lived to be in their 90s. I think there is definitely something genetic at play there. Now my grandmother doesn't really drink and has never smoked, she eats a very basic diet branflakes or eggs and toast for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch and a meat and 2 veg type of dinner with a 'treat' of some sort for supper like a kitkat or something. She is still quite active now at almost 90.

Take my dhs mothers side of the family then and cancer is rampant, all of his 5 uncles have had/have prostate cancer, his grandfather died from it. 2 of his aunts also died from cancer and did his grandmother, all of this was in their 50s or 60s so not long lived by any means. Again that would scream genetic to me.

Both of our dads sides of the family are fond of the drink and wouldn't be as health conscious as our mother's sides and seem to have pretty average life spans.

I think there is a happy medium there, exercise, and eat healthy in the main but I don't think doing any of those things obsessively will have a massive outcome on your health.

We joke that I can't ever move from our current house as all our neighbours are very old ladies in their 90s who still live independently. Property only comes up when these folk eventually die.
Family wise my grandparents all died in the 1960s in their late 70s to mid 90s. Parents were late 70s and mid 80s. I'm convinced if they had given up smoking earlier it would have made a difference. Dad lived longer than mum unusually, think this was partly due to how active he kept.