How to Live to 100

All diseases may be by sure means prevented or cured not excepting even that of age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure beyond the antediluvian standard. --Benjamin Franklin, 1780

One doctor who believes that Franklin's dictum can come true is Manhattan's famed Psychosomaticist Flanders Dunbar. But how? It occurred to her that one way to find out was to study men and women who have defied the aging process by living a hundred years or more, see what had made them tick so long. By questionnaire and personal interviews, Dr. Dunbar and her collaborators quizzed some 300 oldsters, 20% of all the living white centenarians born in the U.S. (excluding others because of the difficulty of confirming birth records). Last week, before the Third Congress of the International Association of Gerontology in London, petite Dr. Dunbar reported what she had learned. Among her findings:

>"The highest percentage of centenarians is in parts of the country where the stress and strain of living are supposed to be greatest," e.g., along the Eastern seaboard from Boston to Charleston and along the Mississippi, and not in such havens for the aging as California or Florida.

> "They are slightly above the average income level . . . Few are very rich or very poor."

>"Ninety-eight percent have been married, and about 30% have been married more than once, usually as the result of widowhood rather than divorce . . . Their record for children is startlingly above the usual average of 1.6 . . . It is 4.0."

"A Different Kind." Nearly all the centenarians had always slept well and enjoyed good health. Asked "about how many days of your life have you spent in bed? Give reasons," one old lady crossed out the "about" and wrote: "Exactly 45 days. Reason, nine children." Adds Dr. Dunbar: "Centenarians, as contrasted with sufferers from 'diseases of old age,' appear to be a different kind of human being." Most have reasonably good vision and hearing, some are amazingly active, and many have a number of their own teeth.

As to their emotional makeup, Dr. Dunbar reported: "Centenarians show little tendency toward elation or depression, but they are optimists according to the definition, 'one who believes the future to be still uncertain' . . . They show little need to dominate. They are willing to live and let live. They have many friends and a good sense of humor, and they spend little time prating about 'the good old days.' They are receptive to change . . . and often talk as though they expect to be around for many years."

Underlying this relaxed and healthy emotional attitude, Dr. Dunbar saw one factor as most important: "Centenarians have contrived to avoid or navigate the dangerous age range from 50 to 70"--which she compared to adolescence because of the severity of the changes in the individual's body and in his relationship to the outside world. "The individual beginning his second half-century of living is concerned about the possibility of losing himself sexually and vocationally." Centenarians, having "navigated" this period successfully, keep not only an interest in sex but also their potency.

The Wonder of Apple Pie. The one feature that Dr. Dunbar observed in the lives of all centenarians was that they had kept busy. A banker who turned over his business at the age of 100 to his son immediately became active as an organizer of boys' clubs. A woman of 113 was putting several great-grandchildren in succession through college with earnings from needlework. Reasoned Dr. Dunbar: "Retirement and enforced education in leisure defeat their own goal. Those who remain healthy after age 65 wish to work, and they stay healthy because they work."

Centenarians differ widely in their views of what helped them to live so long. One will say it is because he smoked, drank, and another that it is because he did not smoke or drink. One old lady gave the credit to having had apple pie for breakfast every morning. But most would agree with the 103-year-old man in McHenry, Ill. who said: "If you want to live long, never lose your temper." What do they eventually die of? Not, as a rule, from the diseases of old age. It seems to Dr. Dunbar that most of them "decide when they will die, and usually each dies about the date he has set. Perhaps this is because consciously they are in better control of their psychosomatic machinery than the average human being."

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