Longevity

Drizzle on the olive oil, uncork a bottle of wine, and hit the cobblestones -- you may not only reach old age but extend it longer than most, a pair of European studies has concluded. The new research represents yet another victory for those espousing a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, beans, fish and olive oil, washed down with a daily glass or two of wine.

Life expectancy for most Americans remained at a record high and infant mortality reached an all-time low, according to federal figures announced Thursday, but health officials noted that the United States lags behind many other industrialized nations in both areas. Moreover, the life span for black males has shown no improvement during the last half of the 1980s, and, in fact, declined between 1987 and 1988, largely as a result of homicide and the AIDS epidemic, they said.

While many of his teammates were sleep-walking through the first intrasquad game of the spring, Brian Downing was sliding into second and ripping a hole in his pants. Like Tina Turner, Downing never, ever , does anything nice and easy. He has barreled headlong through 17 seasons in the major leagues, surviving with a combination of savvy and brawn, often staggering but refusing to fall.

While science strives to achieve the glamorous goal of increasing our life span, most researchers studying aging are concerned with a more practical problem. Do we really want to live longer? According to a group of researchers who study the consequences of being old, living longer might be of little value unless the extra years are healthy and active.

For 10 years, Joe Cordell has been living a life diametrically opposed to that of most Americans: Instead of eating too much, he's deliberately been eating too little. The 54-year-old St. Louis lawyer was inspired by the science that suggests that calorie restriction of this type could significantly lengthen a creature's life span, as well as ward off diseases of old age. We spoke with Cordell about how he got into calorie restriction, what his daily diet is like -- and what his wife of 21 years and his two teenage daughters feel about it. We asked him what he felt about a new study that didn't prolong the life of calorie-restricted monkeys -- although it did seem to help ward off cancer.

The life spans of the healthiest Americans are more than 30 years longer than those of the least healthy, despite more than two decades of efforts to reduce the disparities, Harvard researchers reported Monday. At one end of the scale are Asian American women living in Bergen County, N.J., who have an average life expectancy of 91 years, according to the report published Monday in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine.

Left-handers tend to die, on average, about nine years earlier than right-handers, according to a surprising and controversial new study published today by California and Canadian researchers. In analyzing data on nearly 1,000 deaths in San Bernardino and Riverside counties over a period of several months, two psychologists found that male and female left-handers were much more likely to die as a result of industrial and vehicular accidents, and somewhat more likely to die from other causes.

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.

Master Sgt. Gilbert Zamora, who at 13 was the youngest soldier in the Army since the Civil War, retired in special ceremonies here Friday. Standing ramrod straight, the 6-foot-4, 275-pound Los Angeles native, now 52, was saluted for his long and colorful career by a military band, 550 marching troops and the commanding general of this huge Army depot. His wife looked on with pride, and wept.

Wrinkles may betray our age externally, but our cells divulge their age -- and chronicle life's toll -- at the tips of our chromosomes. These tips, called telomeres, may also foretell our risk of early death. Telomeres are the protective caps made of repetitive chunks of DNA that keep the rest of the gene-laden chromosome from disastrously unraveling. But they lose bits of themselves with each cell division, so over a lifetime, like a counter, telomeres shorten.