Health

Keeping fit and healthy usually involves regular exercise and watching your diet. The assumption is that healthy people live longer. But a recent study by Br. Laurence Branch of Harvard Medical School in the USA, indicates that a healthy lifestyle may not make such a difference once a person passes the age of sixty-five. This does not mean that healthy habits don't matter but it does suggest that the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle take their toll during youth and middle age but not in later years.

This surprising conclusion was based on a study of over 1 200 elderly people living in Massachusetts, USA, published in the American Journal of Public Health. The people involved, all over seventy, were asked for details of life—their habits of eating, smoking, drinking, sleeping and exercise. Five years later, the researchers went back to see how the old people were surviving. They assumed those with healthy lifestyles would have a better survival rate. But their statistics didn't support this conclusion, apart from a slight link between women who didn't smoke and lived a long time.

Dr. Branch is not proposing that all elderly people should "eat, drink and be merry". Although healthy habits may not affect the length of life, some do affect its quality. Staying active and not using tobacco appears to give old people a better chance of being able to look after themselves and live an independent life.

Dr. Branch doesn't know why unhealthy habits don't seem to afreet the length of a person's life after sixty-five. It may be that old people's bio-chemical processes are slower and respond differently to those of younger people. Or perhaps bodies that have been subjected to unhealthy habits for half a century have found a way to cope with them. No one knows. But this study should put an end to claims by certain centenarians that their particular habits are responsible for their longevity. Their habits and lifestyles may have got them to sixty-five but whatever it is that keeps them going on to a hundred remains a mystery!