The secrets of a long life - 24 February 1995

Wherever you turn on the TV news channels on Tuesday evening, you saw the face of an old French lady you'd never seen in your life, but who was now overnight, not only an American heroine, but an overnight role model, Madame Jeanne Calment, the oldest living human, who on that day, celebrated her 120th birthday.

I'm sure she was noticed and interviewed in most other Western countries, but in this country – whose people are more and more pounded by the doctrine that death is defeat, and if you don't live to be 100, it's your own fault – Madame Calment was the American dream fulfilled.

True, she can't hear much of anything, she sees badly, but otherwise she says everything's fine. The great thing about her is that at 120 she's sharp as a tack. Isn't her native city Arles the place where Vincent Van Gogh went and painted in 1888,1889? Yes, she said, she met him and he was very ugly and ungracious and impolite and sickly.

How does she enjoy her fame? "I had to wait 120 years for it, I intend to enjoy it as long as possible." And what sort of future does she see ahead? A very short one. Some old people may well pretend to be unimpressed by Madame Calment because they will recall many entries in encyclopaedias, books of records and in the daily press, of men and women, alive at prodigious ages, all of them well over 100, some into their 130s, they were always in some remote village in the Brazilian jungle or the farthest reaches of Siberia. The thing never mentioned at the time, was that all these reports came from countries whose remote regions did not keep registers of births and deaths. The age of these old geezers was calculated by imaginative neighbours.

But there's no question about Madame Calment, she is an authentic 120. The sight, caused a flight of American doctors, gerontologists mostly, to predict quite seriously that most people sometime early in the 21st century will live to be 100 or beyond. Why not, they say, why not? Many reasons. A good one, having to do with people who don't have a family record of long life, a matter of genes as we've come to put it.

The American stories I've seen do mention that Madame Calment's father died at 93 and her mother at the comparatively early age of 86, but that's no encouragement to Americans, who don't want to feel shackled by what former President Bush would call 'the gene thing'. They are searching at all times for the magical formula, the diet, the vitamin, what to eat, what to avoid, as to see you through to a healthier century. They didn't get much satisfaction on that score from Madame Calment. She only recently gave up eating over two pounds of chocolate a week and even chocolate freaks know that chocolate, with caffeine and its sugar, is no recipe for anything positive except tooth decay. Madame Calment does however, abide by one modern prohibition, she gave up smoking years ago, three years ago when she was 117. So the reporters, the Americans at least, are left looking for that magic potion and the secret, and have been, ever since the publication of the famous Mediterranean 'pyramid', famous I should say, so far only among doctors and especially cardiologists heart men.

It's a statistical table, the result of 20 years research about the incidence of coronary heart disease in the populations of 30 countries. It combines many research studies done down the years and has the final imprint or approval of the World Health Organisation. Imagine, an inverted pyramid diminishing from a flat top down to a sharp point. The flat top is the country with the most heart attacks per 100,000 of the population, and just below it is a little shorter horizontal line, which is the next highest number, and so on, shorter and shorter through 28 countries, till we come to the bottom, little more than a tiny square, a point, the country with the least coronary heart disease, Japan.

The bad news obviously starts at the top. I should explain that the figures for men are far more dramatic than for women, but they're not different. In other words, the numbers diminish together at the same rate. Anyway, let's face the music. The top country – 550 coronaries per 100,000 – is Northern Ireland, only slightly behind Scotland, then Finland, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Hungary. England and Wales are in the top third with 450 per 100,000 and so on. The United States is bang in the middle 350.

However, what the gerontologists and the cardiac boys and girls have found most significant about this table, is that the lowest incidents of heart disease, is from Switzerland down through Greece to Spain, Portugal and at the very bottom France. What struck and disheartened Americans about this last revelation, is that France is alleged to eat more fats, to consume more cholesterol, than anybody, and the most striking thing about the whole upside pyramid is that the five countries with the least heart disease are all Mediterranean countries.

And of course everybody, the experts and the media alike, thought first of diet, but there is a team of gerontologists mixed with internists and cardiac men – it's been working for a year or two on a village in the North of Italy – which has a medical record that challenges if not ignores the whole cholesterol theory. In that village, the males have a very high rate of low density lipoproteins which is the bad cholesterol and they also have an astonishing record of longevity. The doctors claim to have traced this tendency as a genetic legacy all the way back to an 18th century family, very prolific and with much intermarrying of cousins and the like.

So, for the time being at any rate, this village and its almost ludicrous defiance of the conventional cholesterol wisdom, is regarded as a freak. So what is it the Mediterranean's have that the northerners don't or tend not too? And the best answer so far is olive oil, without which it's almost impossible to imagine the Italians, the Spanish, the Greeks, the Portuguese and French existing, let alone surviving to a rude age. Which brings us back to Madame Calment.

Unlike most people of a great age, men and women, she holds no theory, she has no explanation for her 120 years. It was offhandedly noticed that she lives in an region where olive oil is a major component of the diet. I don't know if this was brought up with three doctors who were present at her birthday or with a doctor who's been studying her for over 10 years: he's much more dogmatic. "Centenarians," he says "are people who haven't overdone alcohol or tobacco and who temperamentally don't get too excited about unpleasant experiences".

He was asked about the genetic factor. "There isn't one," he said. Which brings me to the interesting and baffling case of a man I know, a friend, who's over 70, has a bad cholesterol rate – higher than any doctor now has ever recorded in the American measurement, 425. Two doctors have told him he's a walking time bomb – they both died. He eats what he likes – which is lots of meat and deserts and potatoes and butter and ice cream, not very fond of vegetables, so what's the answer? There doesn't seem to be one, but the doctors are helped to regain their self-respect by discovering, and wisely noting, that he is of Greek extraction, that his mother lived to be 85 and his grandparents on both sides were respectively 92, 94, 96 and 94. No genetic factor? "No." says Madame Calment's doctor. Well how about alcohol, doctor? I have to hand a distinguished medical journal, printing in its first issue of the year, a review of the top medical stories of 1994, and I quote from the very first article, the very first paragraph: "Just as some years are celebrated for their wines, 1994 will be recalled as a banner year for research about the relation between alcohol and coronary heart disease." Several authoritative long-term studies support a correlation between moderate drinking and a decreased risk of coronary heart disease.

Now as an old Methodist, I ought to say I'm not advocating anything of course, I deplore these studies, but I'm just giving you the facts ma'am. If the French doctor and these recent studies seem to contradict each other, let me tell you about one American who would agree with both of them, and he was the vice president of the United States 60 years ago. A small foxy, or rather a mole of a man, a small burrowing slow talking shrewd monosyllabic Texan, John Nance Garner, an old frontier character whom the President, Franklin Roosevelt called on often for sage advice about what the congress would take and what it wouldn't. "Come Mr President," Garner would say "let us reason together." which meant going off into his office and consuming several snorts of bourbon whiskey.

He always took it with water – branch water as Southerners say – hoping it came from a freshwater branch of a river. When Mr Garner was 90, he was interviewed on the radio: to what did he attribute his longevity? "Bourbon and branch," he said. On his 99th birthday he was interviewed again: to what did he attribute his longevity? He said, "Laying off Bourbon and branch".

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