As futurists get excited by the prospect of engineering ourselves to have longer lives, it's easy to forget that, as well as the high-tech ways, there are very simple ways to live longer.

People in the Mediterranean, who are renowned for their health despite their wine intake, and people in Okinawa, who live longer than anyone else in the world, have not been using gene therapy and nanotechnology to reach old age healthily. They've done it through a combination of low stress, a well-connected community, and healthy food.

Finding out which of those foods is or isn't good for you is another matter. What is folklore and what is just good luck? Even based on scientific evidence, the list of things we should and shouldn't eat keeps changing. Red wine is OK one week, not the next.