Longevity

For a country in which roughly 200 million people are overweight or obese, scientists today have discouraging news: Even those who maintain a healthy weight probably should be eating less. Evidence has been mounting for years that the practice of caloric restriction -- essentially, going on a permanent diet -- greatly reduces the risk of age-related diseases and even postpones death. It has been shown to significantly extend the lives of yeast, worms, flies, spiders, fish, mice and rats.

Girls born in Japan today are likely to live until 2095, some with a good chance of seeing the dawn of the next century thanks to having the world's longest life expectancy, the World Health Organization reported from Geneva on Thursday. The tiny nation of San Marino boasts the longest average life span for men, at 81 years. The United States lags behind the top nations, with an average life expectancy of 78 for the two sexes combined.

For the first time since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women. In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12% of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study being published today. The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine.

If only cars could last so long. This month, a satellite resembling a shiny spinning drum and orbiting 21,156 miles above Earth celebrated its 41st birthday, astounding engineers and scientists, some of them the children of those who built it. For years, the satellite has served as an emergency communications link for rescue operations, including the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the 1980 Mt. St. Helens volcanic eruption.

Adding to a growing scientific consensus, a large Danish study released Tuesday found that vitamin E and other antioxidant supplements provided no health benefits and might even produce a small increase in the incidence of death. The report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Drinking a small amount of wine appears to extend men's life expectancy by a few years, Dutch researchers said Wednesday in the latest study to find benefits in moderate drinking, presented at an American Heart Assn. conference in Orlando, Fla. The researchers tracked 1,373 men born between 1900 and 1920 who lived in Zutphen, an industrial town in the Netherlands.

My arms ache and my legs feel as if each weighs a ton; they refuse to move faster. But, I gotta keep truckin' and not collapse in the middle of the street as happened to Jim Fixx, my hero. A recent study in Modern Maturity reveals that for those of us over the hill, the key to good health is a good night's sleep, one hour of exercise a day, a diet of fruits and vegetables. Plus vitamin supplements. Plus, plus. \o7Mas, mas.

FOR as long as anyone has kept statistics, and with a range of speculative explanations, what has always been irrefutable is that white people in America live longer than black people. Called the black-white life expectancy gap, it has widened, narrowed and widened again during the last 100 years. Now that gap has narrowed to a historically low level, from a 7.1-year gap in 1993 to a 5.3-year gap in 2003, the latest year for which national statistics are available.

Scientists have known for seven decades that mice, dogs, fruit flies and other animals given diets bordering on starvation tended to live up to 40% longer than their better-fed cousins. Now they think they know why. They identified a gene in roundworms that directly links calorie restriction to longer lifespan, according to a report in the journal Nature.

Boys born in San Marino, a tiny republic surrounded by Italy, are expected to live to age 80, the world's longest male life expectancy at birth, but newborn girls in 31 other countries have even better prospects, the World Health Organization said Friday. Sierra Leone registered the shortest male life expectancy at birth, 37 years -- the same as that of girls in Swaziland, who were at the bottom of the female list -- in WHO's "World Health Statistics 2007."