What centenarians share: diet, habits and the genetics debate behind reaching 110

Living past 100 is becoming less rare, but living past 110 — the threshold that defines a supercentenarian — remains extremely uncommon. Two strands of research, one from a Spanish cardiologist and one from a long-running Boston University project, point to different emphases on what separates these extreme cases from everyone else.

The lifestyle case: lean, plant-heavy, low-calorie

Manuel de la Peña, a cardiologist and president of Spain's Instituto Europeo de Salud y Bienestar Social, has examined the health profiles of centenarians, according to a report by Infobae. He argues that people over 110 share one trait above others: they are lean. He links this leanness to a diet that most appear to adopt naturally rather than by conscious choice.

That diet, as described to Infobae, centers on vegetable creams, cereals and fiber-rich fruits containing prebiotics, all relatively low in calories. De la Peña says this pattern supports a "younger" gut microbiota while limiting the build-up of visceral fat, which is linked to cardiovascular and metabolic disease.

He also lists other habits he says recur among the centenarians he has studied: not smoking, controlled blood pressure, favorable LDL cholesterol levels, daily walking, regular listening to music, and what he calls emotional serenity.

The genetics case: it gets stronger with age

The New England Centenarian Study, run from Boston University and led by professor Thomas Perls, offers a different weighting. Its researchers have built a genetic model using 281 markers across roughly 130 genes that, per the university's profile of Perls, predicts with about 85% accuracy who will survive to age 105 or beyond. The same model is only around 60% accurate for predicting who reaches 100, which the researchers say shows genetic influence grows stronger the further past 100 a person lives.

A peer-reviewed paper from the same study group, published and archived on PubMed Central, states that only about 20-30% of the variation in surviving to the mid-80s is explained by genetics, but that this share rises for people who live past 100. The paper identifies 281 single-nucleotide variants across 130 genes associated with exceptional longevity, including genes tied to basic aging mechanisms such as LMNA and WRN, the gene mutated in Werner syndrome, a condition that causes premature aging, alongside a variant near APOE/TOMM40 more commonly associated with disease risk.

The Boston University profile also notes a counterintuitive finding: centenarians are not necessarily free of disease-linked gene variants. According to Perls' research, they can carry just as many disease-associated variants as people who die much younger, which suggests some centenarians carry separate longevity-associated variants that counteract that risk rather than simply avoiding harmful genes altogether.

What the two bodies of research agree and disagree on

Both strands of research agree that no single factor fully explains extreme longevity, and that genetics and environment interact. Where they diverge is emphasis: de la Peña's framing, built on clinical observation of centenarians he has treated or interviewed, puts the greater weight on diet and daily habits for reaching old age generally. The Boston University model, built on genetic sequencing of large centenarian cohorts, finds genetics becomes a larger factor specifically at the most extreme ages, such as 105 and above.

The English-language Wikipedia overview of centenarian research adds further nuance: a 2011 study on exceptionally long-lived individuals found they were not consistently distinct from the general population in physical activity, diet or alcohol consumption, with some long-lived subjects having smoked or drunk alcohol for decades. The same overview cites New England Centenarian Study findings that a sibling of a centenarian is about four times more likely to live past 90 than the general population, and that most centenarians in the study remained functionally independent until an average age of 92.

A caution on the data itself

Verifying extreme-age claims is itself a known problem in this field. The Wikipedia entry on centenarian research cites a 2024 study that reviewed so-called "Blue Zone" longevity hotspots and found that a large share of supposed supercentenarian records in some regions — described as 82% in the areas it checked — turned out to be missing documentation, clerical errors, or cases where the person was confirmed to have already died, raising questions about how reliable some extreme-age record-keeping is.

That caveat does not overturn either the clinical observations from de la Peña's patient cohort or the genetic findings from sequenced, verified centenarian participants in the Boston University study, but it is a reminder that claims about supercentenarians specifically need solid birth-record verification.