The study began with a group of Ashkenazi Jews, all of them over 95. Researchers asked them why they thought they had lived for so long. "We would get two answers. One was, 'My mother was 102 and my grandmother was 108'--a strong family history," says one of the scientists, Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. "Then we would say, 'Come on, tell us the real reason. Maybe you ate yogurt all your life.' But hundreds of cases later, we didn't have any yogurt-eaters. We didn't have any athletes. Twenty percent of our subjects had smoked for decades. We had one woman who was 105 and had smoked for 90 years. As a population, this group was doing exactly what we tell our patients not to do."
