It is fairly common knowledge that women tend to live longer than men, but researchers are now finding that shorter people tend to live longer than their taller friends. What has been named the Methuselah gene apparently “decreases their cells‘ use of a particular growth hormone: insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1). As a result, these people tend to be smaller and also live a longer-than-average life span.(howstuffworks)” Of course other factors play into life span, such as lifestyle, diet and income level. However some studies like this one conducted by the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, which “began with a group of Ashkenazi Jews, all of them over 95. Researchers asked them why they thought they had lived for so long. “We would get two answers. One was, ‘My mother was 102 and my grandmother was 108′—a strong family history,” says one of the scientists, Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. “Then we would say, ‘Come on, tell us the real reason. Maybe you ate yogurt all your life.’ But hundreds of cases later, we didn’t have any yogurt-eaters. We didn’t have any athletes. Twenty percent of our subjects had smoked for decades. We had one woman who was 105 and had smoked for 90 years. As a population, this group was doing exactly what we tell our patients not to do.” Clearly, then, for the centenarians, the secret to long life wasn’t lifestyle—it was being born with the right genes.(Newsweek)”, have shown that a good pair of genes can make up for a years of unhealthy practices. After a life time of short jokes look who will have the last laugh.
