Avoiding alcohol and tobacco, eating a low-calorie diet, not having children, and exercising regularly may not sound like a prescription for living that most of us could achieve. But, in a nutshell, they are the keys to longevity according to a 111-year-old New Yorker who has been pronounced the oldest man on Earth.
Alexander Imich told
The New York Times that genetics probably also contributed to his long life, but said he doesn't regard his extraordinary longevity as particularly noteworthy.
"Not like it's the Nobel Prize," he said, sitting in his Upper West Side apartment overlooking the Hudson River. Imich was born in Poland on Feb. 4, 1903, and is the world's oldest validated male supercentenarian (those over 110), according to the Gerontology Research Group of Torrance, Calif.
He attained the distinction when the previous record-holder, Arturo Licata of Italy, died on April 24 at 111 years and 357 days. (Sixty-six women officially outdate him; the eldest, Misao Okawa of Japan, is 116, the Gerontology group reports.)
"I didn't have time yet to think about it," Imich said. "I never thought I'd be that old."
Imich was 10 months old when the Wright brothers invented machine-powered manned flight. He remembers the first automobile in his hometown, fighting the Bolsheviks in the Polish-Soviet War, escaping the Holocaust and surviving a Soviet gulag. He then immigrated to the United States and published a book on the paranormal at 92.
So what are his secrets of longevity?
He and his wife never had children, which he suspects might have helped. He credited "good genes" and athletics. He used to smoke but gave it up long ago. Alcohol? Never, he said. And he always ate sparingly, inspired by Eastern mystics who disdain food.
"There are some people in India who do not eat," he said. Now, his home-care aides said, he fancies matzo balls, gefilte fish, chicken noodle soup, Ritz crackers, scrambled eggs, chocolate and ice cream.