By Denise Winterman
Source: BBC News Magazine
The quest to live longer is one of humanity's oldest dreams and three isolated communities seem to have stumbled across the answer. So what can they teach us about a longer life?
Something remarkable links the remote Japanese island of Okinawa, the small Sardinian mountain town of Ovodda and Loma Linda in the US. People live longer in these three places than anywhere else on earth.
At an age when the average Briton is predicted to die - 77 years for men and 81 for women - inhabitants of these three places are looking forward to many more years of good health. Often they're still working in jobs as demanding as heart surgery.
Okinawa has a population of one million and of those 900 are centenarians, four times higher than the average in Britain or America. Even more remarkably, Ovodda is the only region in the world where as many men as women live to be 100 years of age, bucking the global trend.
But what is even more intriguing is that each community is distinct from the others and raises a different theory as to why residents live longer. In all three communities scientists have dedicated themselves to trying to uncover these unique secrets. So what can we learn from the towns where people live the longest?
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