Do you Want to Live to be 100?

Based on a 2022 estimate by the United Nations, there are 593,000 centenarians around the world (my dad being one of them👍👌👏🤗🤗). It’s a fast-growing age group. The United Nations projects there will be 3.7 million centenarians alive by 2050.

Experts predict that the number of centenarians — people who live to be at least 100 years old — will continue to rise in the coming decades. While genetics play a large role in healthy aging, physical activity, social support and where you live also can influence your chances for living a very long life.

The United States and Japan have the most confirmed centenarians and supercentenarians, people who live to be 110 years old or older; and, Japan has the most per capita, according to Robert Young, the director of Supercentenarian Research at the Gerontology Research Group.

Sister André, a French Catholic nun born Lucile Randon, who was the world’s oldest living person, recently died at the age of 118. Now the two oldest living people are believed to be María Branyas Morera, a 115-year-old Spanish woman born in the United States, and Fusa Tatsumi, who lives in Osaka, Japan, who is also 115 but 52 days younger than Morera, according to a database by the Gerontology Research Group.

Some research has suggested that genetics account for around 25 percent of longevity. The other 75 percent relates to your environment — where you live, what you eat, how often you exercise and your support system through friends or family.

…A good public health system “can’t be undersold.” If you have a better health-care system, you’re going to have a higher life expectancy.

For those of us who are not endowed with a set of promising genes, the goal isn’t to push the boundaries of human life expectancy. Instead, researchers want to figure out how people can have full, healthy lives with the time they have.
Jamie Justice, an assistant professor of Gerontology at Wake Forest University

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