Study: Living a Healthy Lifestyle Will Not Make You Live Longer

Those of you who spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on notions, potions, gym memberships and pills that promise to prolong life, listen up. According to a "longevity expert," you're wasting your time and money, because its all in the genes.

By and large, centenarians can live "unhealthy" lifestyles and get away with it, Prof Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute of Ageing at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, said yesterday.
Those who lived very long lives were genetically programmed to do so, which insulated them from the effects of "environmental" factors like smoking and a poor diet.
The professor studied 500 Jewish people between 95 and 112.
He said: "These people smoked, they are overweight, they have high cholesterol."
Qualifying his remarks, he said about 30 per cent of them were obese, while 30 per cent of them had smoked to the age of 95.
"They are protected from the environment by their genotype," he said.
Living a healthy life might help most people increase their life expectancy by a few years, but it would not help those who wanted to live much longer, he said.

The professor does say researchers are working on pill that mirrors three of the genes in centenarians. "People will take a pill, starting at 40, and their lives will be longer," he said. That pill will begin clinical trials in 2012 and be on market "within five or 10 years."


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