People with long-lived parents often follow healthier eating patterns that may support longer, healthier lives. Researchers found higher consumption of fish, fruits, and vegetables and lower intake of sugar and sodium among centenarian offspring.
What if the secret to living to 100 isn’t just hidden in your genes — but also on your dinner plate? According to a new study from the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University, the children of centenarians share one notable habit that may help explain their remarkable health and longevity: they tend to eat healthier diets than people whose parents did not live exceptionally long lives.
The findings offer one of the clearest looks yet at the lifestyle patterns of centenarian offspring, a group that inherits roughly half of their parents’ longevity-related genes while also sharing many of the same lifelong environmental influences. Researchers found that these individuals generally consumed more fish, fruits, and vegetables while eating less sugar and sodium — dietary habits linked to better heart, brain, and metabolic health.
The research drew on data from the New England Centenarian Study, the world’s largest and most comprehensive investigation of centenarians and their families. Founded in 1995 by physician Thomas Perls at Boston University’s Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine, the long-running study has become a major source of insight into healthy aging and exceptional longevity.
Scientists began examining the diets of centenarian offspring in 2005, when most participants were in their 70s. Now, after 20 years of follow-up, many of those same participants are still living well into their 90s — providing researchers with a rare opportunity to study how diet and lifestyle may contribute to longer, healthier lives.
“Having now followed the offspring of centenarians for 20 years, we know that as a group they have experienced significantly lower risks of stroke, dementia, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease,” says Paola Sebastiani, professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, biostatistician and epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center’s Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, and a co-author of the study.
How Diet May Support Healthy Aging
Sebastiani and her biostatistics team at the Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science at Tufts Medical Center led the study’s data analysis efforts.
Living to 100 is often linked to genetics. A recent paper in Science estimated that genes account for about 50% of the variation in lifespan after excluding deaths caused by accidents and other non-biological factors. Researchers believe environmental influences, including diet, also play a major role. They hope lessons from centenarian families can help more people live longer and stay healthier later in life.
The study, published in Innovation in Aging, was conducted in partnership with Boston University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Researchers found that offspring of long-lived parents generally ate diets linked to better metabolic, cardiovascular, and cognitive health. Their eating patterns included more fish, fruits, and vegetables along with lower sugar and sodium intake.
Fish, Fruits, and Low-Sodium Patterns
“These elements may represent behavioral pathways that complement or amplify inherited biological resilience,” the authors wrote in conclusion. In simpler terms, diets rich in fish and lower in sugar and sodium may help longevity-related genes function more effectively.
“Nutrition is an impactful, non-genetic factor that is under someone’s control that could influence how long they live and how long they live a healthy life,” says Erfei Zhao, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow at the HNRCA.
Even so, researchers said both centenarian offspring and comparison groups still failed to meet recommended intake levels for whole grains and legumes such as beans, peas, and lentils.
The study also showed that education and income strongly affected diet quality. Researchers found a clear nutritional gap between centenarian offspring with only a high school education and similarly educated people without long-lived parents.
Education and Income Shape Diet Quality
That difference nearly disappeared among participants with graduate degrees, suggesting that higher education and socioeconomic status helped narrow nutritional disparities.
“I think it’s important to realize that while genetics is estimated to have an influence on longevity, a host of environmental factors together have a far greater influence,” says Zhao. “It isn’t just one food, and it isn’t just nutrition and ‘eating healthy’ alone that will help someone reach that 100-year-old milestone. It’s a variety of environmental and genetic factors that we are just beginning to tease out.”
“When it comes specifically to nutrition, this study shows that we need to do more to help people at all education and socioeconomic levels eat more whole grains and incorporate more beans, tofu, and other legumes in their diet,” says study co-author Andres V. Ardisson Korat, a scientist at the HNRCA and research assistant professor at Tufts School of Medicine.
Ardisson Korat noted that some healthier foods may not fit easily into people’s usual food traditions.“We also need to find ways to make it more affordable and convenient for people to eat more fruits and vegetables, fish, and other healthier foods. That’s important whether a person hopes to live to 100 like their parent did or they aspire to live longer than a parent who died at 75 or 80,” Ardisson Korat adds.
How Researchers Analyzed Longevity Diets
“Our goal is not simply finding ways to help people live longer but helping them find ways to be healthier as they age,” says Sebastiani.
Although centenarian offspring often show health and survival advantages over the general population, researchers previously knew little about their eating habits. To address that gap, Boston University researchers began following participants while they were still in their 70s, allowing for more accurate dietary recall than studies that only interviewed people after age 100.
Participants and their spouses completed detailed 131-item food frequency questionnaires describing their diets. Researchers then evaluated diet quality using four established measures:
- The Healthy Eating Index (HEI): Measures adherence to federal dietary guidelines
- The Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI): Focuses on chronic disease prevention
- The Mind Diet: Tracks foods associated with cognitive protection
- The Planetary Health Diet Index (PHDI): Measures dietary patterns linked to both human and environmental health
Researchers Aim to Compress Morbidity
Researchers compared the results with data from several major long-term U.S. studies, including the Health and Retirement Study 2011, the Health Care and Nutrition Study 2013, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the Nurses’ Health Study 2006, and the Health Professional Follow-up Study 2006.
“We are looking for ways to compress morbidity,” Sebastiani says. “By that I mean enabling people to live to very old ages in good health before experiencing a rapid decline.”
By identifying lifestyle patterns connected to healthy aging, researchers hope to make longer, healthier lives more achievable and affordable for people regardless of their genetic background.
“I believe this study in the years ahead, plus other research we are doing, will help us reach that goal for more people, no matter what is in their genes,” Sebastiani says.
Reference: “Adherence to Various Dietary Quality Indices in the New England Centenarian Study” by Erfei Zhao, Emma Schluter, Naglaa El-Abbadi, Kyla Shea, Stacy Andersen, Thomas Perls, Paola Sebastiani and Andres Ardisson Korat, 31 December 2025, Innovation in Aging.
DOI: 10.1093/geroni/igaf122.2015
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