The good news is-no, wait, that's now the bad news. The bad news is-no, wait, that's now the good news. Are the conflicting studies about health, vitamins, longevity or the evolution of nose hair making you a little nuts? Welcome to the club.
The latest bit of scientific mystification came out the other day, telling us the theory that if you're parents lived to be 95, the odds are in your favor that you will too, is now yesterday's fable.
A recent article in the New York Times, "Live Long? Die Young? Answer Isn't Just In Genes," by Gina Kolata, points to studies of twins, presumably as genetically identical as you can get, who tend to die 10 years apart.
One set of sisters, the Tesauros, rip a big hole in the genetic theory. Josephine, 92, is "straight backed, firm jawed and vibrantly healthy". She lives alone, works part time at a hospital gift shop and tools around in her 95 Olds to get to her four bridge groups, church and the grocery store.
Her identical twin sister is incontinent, has had a hip replaced, lost most of her vision and has dementia. So much for inheriting great genes.
We started out in the '70s and '80s blabbering on about the environment, a healthy diet, good medical care and lots of exercise. These things would give you a great shot at a long, healthy life.
Then we switched to looking at genes; the theory being that if you inherited the right genes, you could drink bacon grease highballs and still live to be 100.
We all dug back into our ancestry looking for a relative who outlived everyone else, and felt good that we had those golden genes. We were bullet proof, sort of.
Recent studies, however, say that genes may not be the prevailing factor, with the exception of some remarkably long-lived families.
James W. Vaupel, director of the Laboratory of Survival and Longevity at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, says that longevity genes are nothing like the genes that decide your height or the color of your eyes, traits that are strongly inherited.
Your physical characteristics are determined to around an 80-90 percent probability based on inherited genes, but your longevity is only in the 3 percent range.
The deciding factors, notwithstanding a certain president, are a variety of factors, including genetics, disease, nutrition, injuries, accidents and-are you ready for this?-chance.
We humans hate chance. We want the world to be ordered, not run by random occurrences. We don't like shades of gray; we crave pat answers. But the truth is that most of life is a matter of chance.
Whether we get a certain job, catch a cold, or get run over by a marauding camel, usually comes down to chance; in other words, being in the right place at the wrong time, or vice versus.
Humans have been looking for the secret to longevity from the beginning of time. Poems from ancient Babylon, mythical Greek gods, vampires living forever on the blood of victims and, yes, even the belief of a spiritual afterlife, are all efforts by humankind to believe in, and achieve, a degree of immortality.
Why do we keep searching? Because, for most of us, living is more fun than the alternative. Remember, we don't like gray areas. While we may think there's an afterlife, most of us aren't absolutely positive, and for those devout believers, there's always that business about whether you're going to heaven or to hell.
And there's that uncertainty again. Have we lived our life in such a way as to guarantee us a seat on a cloud, or are we headed the other direction, destined to spend eternity in the universe's largest sauna? We don't know, and not having answers causes us to go a little bonkers.
Finding eternal life on earth would eliminate all doubt, thus letting us avoid reaching that proverbial fork in the road.
Well, it looks as if we'll have to keep looking for both the fountain of youth and life everlasting. The great hope for genetic engineering providing us with life spans equally those of the folks in Genesis seems remote for now.
We're stuck with what we know-or don't know. Can we affect our life span with good habits? Perhaps. Can we shorten it with bad habits? Probably.
There's an old saying, supposedly attributable to Native Americans, about taking control of your life. As I recall, it goes something like this: "Trust in God, but paddle away from the rocks."
Sounds like pretty good advice to me. In the meantime, I'm clinging to the studies that say red wine, garlic and chocolate are health food, and hope they don't mess with that one.
Mike Davis is a freelance writer living in Magnolia.[[In-content Ad]]
