We were never meant to live on earth forever but have you ever wondered just how long God meant for human life to exist on earth? We can find the answer in Genesis 6:3, “The Lord said, ‘My spirit shall not remain in man forever, since he is but flesh. His days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years.”    

In the Bible, Joseph the youngest son of Jacob and Joshua the son of Nun both lived to be 110 and Sarah the wife of Abraham died at 127. We know that it is possible even today in the 21st century to live greater than 100 because we have many examples; such as, Jeanne Calvert the French woman who lived to be 122.45 years until her death in 1997. We also have Gertrude Weaver from Little Rock, Arkansas who is officially the second oldest living American in the world at 116 second only to Misao Okawa also 116 who lives in Japan. What is amazing is that these two women are still in fairly good health.  So why can’t we all live to be 100 or at least be in good health at whatever age? The answer is we should, and our first step in achieving old age is to stop blaming our genes for our health problems. 

There was a Dutch woman who lived to be 115 years old who had donated her body to science. Researchers referred to her only as “W115.” It had become perfectly clear to them that she was long-lived even though she had the genetic variants that may predispose people to heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other illnesses. What these researchers found instead was that the woman may have carried other variants that actually protected her from these age-related illnesses.  She had died from a stomach tumor in 2005 and when they examined her brain and blood vessels for signs of disease that often are seen with aging, she had none. There were no signs of the plaques or other degenerative proteins that build up on the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and her arteries were clog-free. “Here was proof of principle that it doesn’t have to happen,” said Henne Holstege, the geneticist of VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam. This team of researchers found that the elderly woman did not have fewer of the common disease-associated genetic variants. This finding is consistent with previous studies indicating that extremely long-lived people probably have “PROTECTIVE” variants that actually help in avoiding or surviving disease. 

In another study done by researchers from Boston University, it too reported that centenarians have just as many disease-associated genetic variants as other people. These researchers also think that the inherited component probably includes versions of genes that again “PROTECT” against age-related diseases.    

So did God make a mistake in creating us with a bad set of genes? Or is mankind’s ways, our poor diets and constant exposure to environmental toxins, damaging the very system that he created to help repair and protect our genes from harm? It is when we better understand how our “antioxidant system” works and what harms it that we will then be able to improve our health so we can avoid illness, disease, and cancer which is all happening in unprecedented numbers today. It is also then that our chances of living to be over 100 will greatly be increased.