New research suggests a leap in human lifespans, but only if we start taking better care of ourselves… something I’m all too familiar with
I have just eaten lunch. Discerning Telegraph reader as you are, you may well think that to have been the most boring opening sentence to a newspaper article you have ever read. But bear with me.
The lunch consisted of a salad in which there were 10 ingredients. If you include my starter (raw carrot and olives) and my pudding (apple, nuts, prunes and pomegranate), we’re up to 15. My breakfast included a banana and blueberries and my day will end with a large orange and a couple of squares of 90 per cent black chocolate. At least 22 different foodstuffs, each of them (yes, including the chocolate) rated by the experts to be enormously healthy.
This is not a bizarre attempt by me to break some sort of healthy eating record. It’s what I do almost every day and have been doing for as long as I can remember. Not, I should say, because I want to live forever. I’m not quite that bonkers. Just to the age of 124.
Still bonkers? Not according to researchers from the University of Washington, who calculated that human lifespans are about to push into uncharted territory. Not only will someone alive today break the record for being the oldest living human, it’s almost a certainty that “supercentenarians” will start living into their 120s this century. They specified 124. So that’s the target.