“many centenarians suffer ill health and frailty associated with old age,— Most are wheelchair or bed-bound, many suffer from dementia, muscle loss, hearing loss, eyesight loss and lack control of their orifices.”

But not nearly all. There have been many people who reached the age of 100 still highly functional in most significant ways relating to living a worthwhile life — certainly Jeane Calment was one such.

“Centenarians .… are old people who happen to suffer the damages of ageing a bit longer than others.”

From my readings about centenarians and supercentenarians, it is not true that the years of dysfunction and dependence on others is lengthened, certainly not as a percentage of the age to which they live. In fact It is my impression that such duration of poor life quality is generally shortened. Very few people live very long after they get highly dysfunctional and no longer enjoy life — in spite of all the efforts of modern medicine, family and nursing homes.

“Like the rest of us, centenarians are governed by the “law of mortality”, which simply states that no matter who you are or where you live the chances of you dying double every eight years.”

While this is true statistically, it must always be remembered that there are outliers who are exceptions (the number depending on the variance or standard deviation of the data). Perhaps those who lie in the upper 10 percentile are doing things either intentionally or accidentally which are causing them to be there. But in any case, statistics cannot be directly applied to an individual to in some manner determine that s/he must necessarily die by a certain age.

“This doubling of our mortality rate starts from the moment we are conceived until our inevitable demise. And with each eight-year period we accumulate more damage generated by the process of sustaining our life (our metabolism). Initially, during youth, the damage is limited and doesn’t affect our health and well-being but as we get older the damage starts to accumulate and our probability of dying from any given disease of ageing increases exponentially.”

These statistical assertions are only valid for the population as a whole. But since “we” are longevity-oriented individuals who intentionally try the best actions that we know in order to live a long healthy life, they do not apply to us — although some other statistical results would, given sufficient time to audit our lives and collect the data. If the authors are not part of such a longevity oriented group, then my question is why not? and my retort about their article is, in short, “speak for yourselves”.

“Lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise do not significantly reduce the mortality rate of a normal person.”

False. This is simply not yet proven or falsified, even statistically, let alone for individual persons.

This is all the time that I have for this response but my own conviction (from studying all the science involved for over 2 decades) is that even now with all the scientific evidence available to be employed, it is *not* simply a “choice between healthy life and long life with ill health”.

See the summary description of my developing project at: http://live120plus.com for how it should be possible by optimally using all such evidence to achieve both a healthy functional life and a long lifespan.