Their Parents Lived to 100. Does Their Diet Have Clues to Longevity?

A new study from the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University suggests that the children of a parent who lived to age 100 or older tend to have slightly healthier eating habits than those who do not come from such a robust lineage. The research offers one of the first comprehensive looks at the dietary habits of centenarian offspring, a group that shares roughly half of their parents’ longevity genes and many years of their life environments.

The new findings come from data collected through the New England Centenarian Study, the largest and most comprehensive research study of centenarians and their families in the world. Begun in 1995 by physician Thomas Perls, the study is based at Boston University’s Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine, with multiple institutions around the world contributing to and using its data to learn more about the secrets to longevity and healthy aging. 

The dietary study in the offspring of centenarians started at Boston University in 2005, when the adult children were in their 70s, and has now collected 20 years of data. Many are still alive and now themselves in their 90s.

“Having now followed the offspring of centenarians for 20 years, we know that as a group they have experienced significantly lower risks of stroke, dementia, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease,” says Paola Sebastiani, professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, biostatistician and epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center’s Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, and a co-author of the study. Sebastiani and her biostatistics group based at the Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science at Tufts Medical Center leads the Centenarian Study’s data analyses efforts. 

Reaching age 100 is often attributed to “good genes.”  A recent paper in Science suggests that genetics contributes about 50% of the variability in age at death when deaths due to accidents or other non-biological factors are excluded. Researchers hypothesize that a constellation of environmental factors – including nutrition – also contribute. They hope that patterns found in the offspring of centenarians can help everyone, regardless of genetic lineage, live longer lives and decrease the amount of time people live in poor health as they age.

The new study, published in Innovation in Aging, is joint research with Boston University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

More Fish and Produce, Less Sodium and Sugar

The new research indicates that offspring of long-lived parents tend to consume diets that are modestly better for metabolic, cardiovascular, and cognitive health. These include eating higher amounts of fish, fruits, and vegetables, and eating less sugar and substantially less sodium. 

“These elements may represent behavioral pathways that complement or amplify inherited biological resilience,” the authors wrote in conclusion. More simply: a diet high in fish and low in sugar and sodium might be the fuel that allows genes to do their best work.

“Nutrition is an impactful, non-genetic factor that is under someone’s control that could influence how long they live and how long they live a healthy life,” says Erfei Zhao, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow at the HNRCA.

Despite these advantages, there is still significant room for improvement for the offspring. The Tufts researchers noted that both the centenarian offspring and the control groups they were compared with fell short of recommended intakes for whole grains and legumes, such as beans, peas, and lentils.

Education, Socioeconomic Factors

Tellingly, researchers also saw that higher educational attainment and socioeconomic status directly influenced who consumed a healthier diet. When comparing the centenarian offspring with a high school education to those who were not the offspring of a long-lived parent but also had only a high school education, a significant difference in diet quality was observed. This gap nearly disappeared when comparing centenarian offspring to non-centenarian offspring when those in both groups had graduate degrees, suggesting that higher socioeconomic status and education leveled the nutritional playing field.

“I think it’s important to realize that while genetics is estimated to have an influence on longevity, a host of environmental factors together have a far greater influence,” says Zhao. “It isn’t just one food, and it isn’t just nutrition and ‘eating healthy’ alone that will help someone reach that 100-year-old milestone. It’s a variety of environmental and genetic factors that we are just beginning to tease out.” 

“When it comes specifically to nutrition, this study shows that we need to do more to help people at all education and socioeconomic levels eat more whole grains, and incorporate more beans, tofu, and other legumes in their diet,” says study co-author Andres V. Ardisson Korat,  a scientist at the HNRCA and research assistant professor at Tufts School of Medicine. 

In some cases, certain healthier foods may not be part of a person’s nutritional culture. “We also need to find ways to make it more affordable and convenient for people to eat more fruits and vegetables, fish, and other healthier foods. That’s important whether a person hopes to live to 100 like their parent did, or they aspire to live longer than a parent who died at 75 or 80,” Ardisson Korat adds.

“Our goal is not simply finding ways to help people live longer but helping them find ways to be healthier as they age,” says Sebastiani.

Quality Measurements

While many centenarian offspring show survival and health advantages when compared to members of the general public, before this study little was known about their dietary patterns. That’s why BU researchers started the offspring study, capturing participants who were in their 70s, thereby collecting more accurate dietary recall than previous studies that only interviewed individuals once they had reached 100.

Centenarian offspring and their spouses provided significant detail on what they were eating. Each completed a 131-item food frequency questionnaire. To measure the quality of their plates, the team applied four different dietary yardsticks:

• The Healthy Eating Index (HEI): a measure of adherence to federal dietary guidelines
• The Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI): Focused on chronic disease prevention
• The Mind Diet: Specifically designed to track foods that protect cognition
• The Planetary Health Diet Index (PHDI): A newer metric that balances human health with environmental sustainability 

As controls, the researchers benchmarked the offspring’s scores against previously published values from several large, well-respected, long-term U.S. cohort studies, including the Health and Retirement Study 2011, the Health Care and Nutrition Study 2013, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the Nurses’ Health Study 2006, and the Health Professional Follow-up Study 2006. 

Compressing Years of Poor Health

“We are looking for ways to compress morbidity,” Sebastiani says. “By that I mean enabling people to live to very old ages in good health before experiencing a rapid decline.” 

By identifying these behavioral pathways, the researchers hope to make healthy aging more accessible and affordable for everyone, regardless of their genetic makeup. 

“I believe this study in the years ahead, plus other research we are doing, will help us reach that goal for more people, no matter what is in their genes,” Sebastiani says.