Ask 104-year-old Sylvia Pospisil to recall her fondest childhood memories and she’ll paint an idyllic picture of life on the family farm. One of six siblings growing up in Wilber, Nebraska, she ate fresh greens grown steps from her front door, bread made from freshly ground grains, pork from hogs butchered and eaten in the same day, and juice and wine from the family grape vines. She ate light, got plenty of exercise, and—through the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and life’s other challenges—kept a loving family around her and a level head about her. Pospisil moved from the farm to a nursing home recently but still enjoys good health. When pressed for advice on how the rest of us might be so lucky, she humbly says, “I don’t have no secret.”

But scientists think the details of Pospisil’s life may provide many clues to longevity. Since 1976, when the Okinawa Centenarian Study began peering into the lives of the longest-lived, Pospisil and others like her have become valuable guides, pointing researchers toward some surprising revelations. With roughly 50 centenarians per 100,000 (as much as five times more than in the United States), Okinawa has been the epicenter for research, along with the Mediterranean island of Sardinia (known for its 100-and-older men), and Nova Scotia, where people have twice the chance of living to 100 as in nearby New England.

Thirty years of research has shown that not only do centenarians live longer, they tend to enjoy better lifelong health. One study of supercentenarians, age 110 to 119, found just 6 percent had ever suffered from vascular disease (including heart disease), 3 percent had diabetes, and 25 percent had some form of cancer (all cured). And of the 1,700 participants in the New England Centenarian Study, 90 percent remained functionally independent into their 90s.

Just how do they dodge disease and mortality? Genes do play a role. The lucky one-fourth of us who possess a variant of the FOXO3A longevity gene are twice as likely to live to 100. But geriatrician Bradley Willcox, MD, who helped discover that gene in 2008 and co-directs the Okinawa Centenarian Study, stresses that genes the other 75 percent of centenarians stay healthy through healthy lifestyle choices about how much and what they choose to eat, and how they fill their days. Listen and learn.

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