Secret Concoctions of Supercentenarians
Monday, June 15th, 2009
I’ve been doing some research on the world’s oldest living persons and it has been an interesting journey. The person who holds this title is an international celebrity and its passing from one to another is a news item that never fails to capture interest. In January 2009, Maria de Jesus of Portugal died at 115 years of age after a brief reign at the top of the gerontological ladder. She was in good health, able to walk and raised six children. She spent much of her life working in the fields of her agricultural district.
Gertrude Baines, also 115 years of age, now holds the title. She was born in the US in 1894 and I don’t know how she feels about the media attention but I’m sure she, like most of the other centenarians (people over 100 years of age) interviewed, has her particular lifestyle habits she credits for her long lifespan.
Mariam Amash was an Arab Palestinian woman of Bedouin descent who occupied the top spot. Deservedly so, given her 120 years. According to her family she had 10 children and 250 great-grandchildren. A Muslim, she rose at 5am daily for prayers and then went on her daily walk. She made the pilgramage to Mecca five times and attributed her long life to her traditional high-vegetable diet.
Jeanne Calmet, a Frenchwomen, is the world’s oldest person on record and lived to an amazing 122 years. Her lifespan has not been surpassed. A new term has been created to describe people that live to 110 years or more: “supercentenarian”. There are numerous longevity lists that have varying degrees of eligibility. Many birth records cannot be substantiated so candidates make one list but not another, and the titleholders begin to resemble the dizzying maze of boxing champions accredited by the myriad pugilism organisations of today.
Shigechiyo Izumi died in 1986 at 120 years, just days short of Jeanne Calmet’s lifespan. He was a sugar cane farmer for a staggering 98 years and drank brown sugar shochu - an alcoholic beverage usually distilled from rice or barley. He took up smoking at age 70.
If you’ve read my previously posted article on the amazingly long lives of Okinawans (see articles) you’ll know this is a subject I am interested in. You should be too. I don’t know about you but I don’t really want to live as long as these inspirational people, I just want their enviable health for as long as I do live. Ageing is a process that happens to us all, we can only wish for it to be a kind one and not rob us of our good health and vigour along the way. We can all learn something from finding out common life-enhancing factors of long-lived people and benefit from them by applying them to our daily lives.
I started by looking at people by nationality. We know that Japan holds the record for average longevity; more than 28,000 people over 100 years of age live there. The average Japanese lifespan is enviable; 85.3 for women, 78.3 for men.
Clearly, being female is beneficial for long life; being a Japanese woman more so. This is great for them but what about the rest of us? Many of us lucky enough to live in countries with good public health and medical systems can share that with Japanese, and we can always adopt their traditional diet of rice, fish and vegetables.
Having lots of children is apparently no impediment, just look at the prolific Mariam Amash.
OK, where are we? Female, Japanese, fecund…this is not helping me. A list of the world’s verified oldest persons might provide further clues. Consulting it, I expected to see lots of representatives from traditional, non-industrialized countries but remembered that good health care infrastructure seems to a factor in Japanese longevity. What I didn’t expect to see were so many (over 50) of the people from the United States.
Japan, predictably had plenty of names and was next best represented with 18. France (including Algeria) and the UK were next with 8. Canada followed with 4, Italy, Portugal and Puerto Rico had 2 each. One person made it onto the list from Germany, Ecuador, Spain, Denmark, Romania, the Netherlands, Australia, and Cape Verde. This was getting confusing. Shouldn’t Americans, with their industrialized lifestyle, be poorly represented? at least I had learned one thing. Cape Verde was a nation…
Then it occured to me that when many of these Americans were born, much of that nation’s population lived not in the major cities but smaller towns and rural areas. Maybe the America of Norman Rockwell, apple orchards, cider and home-baked cornbread, bandstands and sack races at community picnics represented their apogee of health before the car, TV and fast food came along. After all, one of those long-lived Americans had met Thomas Edison.
Then the light went one. The US has a huge population - more than twice that of Japan - and also has more precise record-keeping than any other nation: the US gave us the Gallup Poll, the Kinsey Report and census statistics that would make your head spin.
Not to take anything away from apple cider and cornbread, but figures on longevity would have to be compared to population to find a trend. The only trend I had detected so far apart from gender, diet and health care seemed to be family and community support and enjoyment of a daily tot of alcohol.
Then Dominica popped up on an un-verified list. This small, mountainous island in the Caribbean has a rate of centenarians per 10,00 of population that exceeds both the US and Japan. 128 year-old Elizabeth (Ma Pampo) Israel is one of 21 centenarians on Dominica that boost the per 10,000 figure to 3; the US and Japan rate only 2. (2005 figures). She is the daughter of slaves and therein lies the difficulty in verifying the birth dates of Dominica’s spritely elderly. Poor record-keeping and the confusion of name changes keep the island’s centenarians out of the record books, but Ma Pampo has no doubt about the source of her longevity. “Lots of dumplings and bush tea”, she told the BBC, adding that she worked hard on a plantation for most of her life.
A brief snapshot of this verdant island in the Lesser Antilles described wordlessly by Christopher Columbus crumpling a piece of paper and throwing it onto a table gives us clues to many of its residents’ long lives. Roads were not built there until the 1960s and its mostly rural people got about by long daily walks over steep terrain.
102 year-old Rudolph Edward Georges told the BBC about his life: growing his own food, and indulging in his “Sunday Special” - a concoction of beer, milk, eggs, sugar, lime and nutmeg. Like a disturbing number of centenarians, he divulged his secrets in between puffs of tobacco.
One of the illuminating things from my research was that Dominica’s centenarians, and those of most nations represented on the longevity list were born at a time in the late 19th century when they could enjoy many benefits of a pre-modern lifestyle but lived long enough into the post-WWII world to garner the benefits of modern public health, such as clean water, more hospitals and clinics as well as advances in medicine. They had the best of both worlds. Not that many of our champions needed the medicine. They had their own remedies.
108 year-old Dominican Violet Wilfreda Joseph started her day with a drink of coconut water with a drop of gin and a banana until her family pressured her to leave out the gin after her 100th birthday.
Dominican centenarian researcher Dr Noel Boaz’s findings lean more to diet and lifestyle than genetics. Forced to walk over rugged mountainous country for most of their lives, rural Dominicans ate a typical diet rich in tropical fruits and vegetables and foraged for natural herbs and medicines in the forest.
Sadly, that is changing. Younger Dominicans are now part of a global culture of fast food, car ownership and TV. Working the land is an unpopular job option compared to higher incomes working in the towns. I have no statistics to indicate their health is suffering or that in the long term Dominica will slip in the longevity ratings. I just hope those young people are still hiking into the forest for an occasional dip into their forbears’ medicine cabinet.
Conclusions?
It seems we may have reached a peak for long-lived persons. They were born and lived at a time that conferred the benefits of both the pre-industrial and industrial worlds. They worked hard and ate a more natural diet but came to enjoy better housing and sanitation. In 1837 the world’s oldest recorded person was 108 years. That advanced age does not entitle one to join the large ranks of supercentenarians today.
Many of today’s supercentenarians were very active in their youth, usually due to their working lives. Many drank alcohol (mostly in modest amounts) and plenty of them smoked. Perhaps they would have lived even longer had they not. Almost all espouse a healthy diet high in vegetables. Family and community contact is often cited, and most confess to a secret concoction, from sucking fish bones, to spiced beer, to bush tea, to coconut and gin.
We’ll let Jeanne Calmet, the grand record holder at 122 years have the last word. Though born to a bourgouis lifestyle in France, she was active in tennis, cycling, swimming and roller-skating in her younger days. At age 85 she took up fencing and was still riding her bicycle at 100. Her secret concoction was lots of olive oil poured on her food and rubbed into her body. Her diet included garlic, vegetables, chocolate, red wine and port. She regarded a sense of humour as her best ally against ageing. Oh yes, she smoked until she was 117.
It’s been an interesting and sometimes contradictory path through the lives and ages of long-lived peoples for me, and I hope for you too. Keep exercising, keep laughing, eat a healthy, pre-industrial diet, and enjoy a tipple. Smoking has killed hundreds of millions of people in the last century and will kill many more in the future. Perhaps those lucky supercentenarians had the fortunate genetic make-up to make it through the Russian Roulette that smoking represents, so avoid that habit.
Find a concoction that concentrates beneficial compounds from nature and consume it daily. I whizz up herbs, walnuts, anchovies, chillies, capers, lemon rind and garlic into a paste, store it in a jar in the fridge and use it in almost everything I ccok. Maybe someone will ask me for the recipe in another 53 years.
