HOW TO LIVE LONG

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 138, 13 June 1931, Page 16

HOW TO LIVE LONG

In the same •week, Dr. Gueniot, of Paris, has told mankind how to live to be 100, and an inmate of Leicester Institution has died at the age of 104, complaining bitterly that he was alone and friendless, having outlived all his contemporaries. That sort of thing makes it extremely difficult for the rest of us to know what to do (writes Mr. Norman B. Collins in the "News-Chron-icle). Few men want to die. But fewer want to bo alone and friendless. And although it is comparatively easy to keep a friend, it is comparatively difficult, judging by the disclosures of successful centenarians, to keep alive. It calk for as much self-denial to become a centenarian as to become a saint. Eating and drinking, it appears, are far more dangerous and deadly than we in our nursery days ever suspected. And to lie in bed, Dr. Gueniot assures us, is merely to accelerate death. Only, in fact, by avoiding all the comforts of human existence can man smear Ifcis portion of life across a full century. The recipes for longevity are diverse and mostly unpleasant. They range from mere abstinence from tobacco and alcohol to thirty-mile walks and a diet of nuts. They are all of them right, for in this world some one can always be found to support anything. Zaro Aga, the 160-year-old Turkish porter, for instance, has never touched tobacco or alcohol in his life and a half. He was immediately pounced upon by the Prohibitionists and exhibited, just as Captain James Smith, of Philadelphia, who lived, to be 124 and was a ferocious walker and smoker (thirty miles and twentyfive cigars a day at 50), was heralded by the peripatetic school. The bit about nuts, I confess, was a little -fiction of my own. But I am reminded of how dangerous it is for fiction to compote with fact by the Adriatic woman who survived well into her, second. century on a fare of suiokodj herrings dipped in strong black coffee. J