3 lifestyle choices that could help you live healthily to 100, according to scientists

• A new study has found that lifestyle choices can help people live to 100.
• These include not smoking, exercising, and eating a diverse diet. 
• Researchers found that people who did all three were more likely to be healthy into their 100s.

Making three lifestyle choices could help you live to 100, new research has found.

Researchers at China's Fudan University found that never smoking, exercising, and eating a diverse diet were associated with a higher chance of living to 100.

Since people are living longer — life expectancy at birth is now 73.5 years globally and 77.6 years in mainland China as of 2019, according to the study's authors — the researchers wanted to identify what could help people to age as healthily as possible.

The study, published in JAMA Network Open on Thursday, used data from an existing study that collected data on people aged 80 and over from across China between 1998 and 2018. It compared the lifestyles of 1,454 centenarians and 3,768 people who died before they reached 100.

Researchers looked at whether the people smoked, drank alcohol, or exercised, as well as their diet and body mass index. They found that people with the most diverse diets — meaning they often consumed fruits, vegetables, fish, beans, and tea — were 23% more likely to reach 100 than those with the least varied diets.

Those who exercised were also 31% more likely to live to 100 than those who had never exercised. And people who had never smoked were 25% more likely to become centenarians than those who did.

Plus, people in the top categories for diverse diets, exercise, and never smoking were not only more likely to reach 100, but were also 54% more likely to be healthy after their 100th birthday.

A person's weight and how much alcohol they drank didn't appear to affect longevity in the study

Researchers also found that BMI and alcohol use didn't appear to impact the participants' chances of living to 100. They said that moderate drinking was not necessarily linked to worse health, and, at advanced ages, a lower BMI within the healthy range wasn't necessarily better as it could be a marker of malnutrition.

Claire Steves, a professor of aging and health at Kings College London who wasn't involved in the study, told Business Insider that this doesn't mean that drinking alcohol and BMI aren't important factors in longevity — it just means that they weren't statistically significant in this particular study.

For BMI, for example, this could be because the study was done on a Chinese population, who tend to have generally normal/low BMIs anyway, she said.

It's important to note that no amount of alcohol consumption is safe for health, according to the World Health Organization.

Steves said the take-home message from this study is that "if you want to increase your chances of living to 100 (and being healthy when you get there), you should never smoke, do regular exercise, and eat a diverse range of foods."

BI has previously reported on how to exercise for longevity and the benefits of a diverse diet.