“The older you get, the healthier you have been.” That is the mantra Tom Perls has devised, after almost ten years of studying people who have lived to age 100. Most of these centenarians, it turns out, have not so much overcome life-threatening diseases as avoided them.
Dr. Perls, a geriatrician and researcher now at the Boston University Medical Center, last week shared with a small but enthusiastic audience some of the insights he has gained from his dealings with people who have broken the century barrier.
Perls started his medical career believing, like most other doctors, that the older you get, the sicker you are. However, after getting to know two centenarians, residents at Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale, he began to change his mind.
By now he feels enthusiastic about life in extreme old age. The 800 centenarians he has had contact with thus far have taught him so much that it has affected the way he lives his own life.
He attaches great importance to continuing to learn, especially acquiring new skills. It’s a way of building cognitive reserve that can protect against decline in brain power. The links between two telephone poles are improved by adding new wires; if we learn a new instrument or a new language, we are, in a sense, adding new wires to our cognitive capabilities.
Dr. Perls also considers nutrition vitally important. And yet he is not a fanatic about food: rather, he believes in achieving and keeping a balance. If restricting your intake of calories is going to make you miserable, it’s not going to be good for you and you will not long keep doing it.
But Perls is dead set against being overweight. He confesses having been in that condition himself until he determined to stop eating two bagels a day along with several chocolate bars each week. He now takes special care to ration the carbohydrates in his diet.
He credits Walter Willet, a prominent researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, with seeing that the famous food pyramid put out by the United States Department of Agriculture should be turned upside down.
Instead of carbohydrates being the largest item, at the base of the pyre, they should be on top. Fruits and vegetables should replace them as the nutrients of choice with carbos being carefully controlled. Fats are not always what they seem: they do not pose the same threat of obesity as do carbos. Carbos make the pancreas produce insulin that stores fat in the body.
Since some 70 percent of Americans are overweight, the importance of these nutrition issues is evident. Besides bad nutrition, another reason for this unhealthy situation is our lack of exercise. Only 15 percent of people over 65 exercise regularly, a factor that lessens chances for increased longevity.
Many of us who do exercise do not realize the importance of strength training, such as stretching arms and legs. Unlike aerobic exercise that boosts endurance, strength exercise aims to build muscles. Amazingly enough, strength training of this sort can increase one’s brain power. To make sure his patients take it seriously, Dr. Perls writes prescriptions for strength training.
Certain common traits tend to characterize people who have reached 100. “Centenarians tend not to dwell on things,” says Perls. “Also, they tend to be a gregarious, funny group.” What this means is that they manage stress very well.
A couple of other characteristics run through them as a group. “Religion seems to be quite prevalent among centenarians,” Perls says. Having some form of faith has led them to discover a reason behind things. Prayer seems to reduce stress, especially forms of repetitive prayer like the rosary.
Another trait is having social networks and enjoying other people. “I have come across only two or three curmudgeonly centenarians,” says this researcher into their ways. Most of them are gregarious and they have the good sense and the ability to bring young people into their lives, people to receive help from them.
Despite his enthusiasm for the centenarians he has known, Tom Perls does not see getting to 100 as some kind of life goal. Rather, he is interested in the quality of life, in extending one’s life to its full span while enjoying good mental and physical health. He supports the “compression of morbidity” ideal, whereby the time when we are seriously ill at the end of life is reduced to the shortest time possible.
As for the so-called anti-aging purveyors who see aging as a sickness and doing away with the limits to life as a goal, he judges them dangerous. “There are hucksters out there that are doing no different than what the snake oil salesmen of the 1800s were doing. When they are selling human growth hormone, it’s the same as ground-up goat testicles. Injecting yourself with this stuff is buying yourself an aggressive form of cancer 20 years down the road.”
Richard Griffin