Lu Shizeng lives in Liangshan Village in Wenling, a coastal city in Taizhou in eastern China's Zhejiang Province.

Chinese media widely give his age as 101, but the birth date reported by Hong Kong news site HK01, Sept. 7, 1926, makes him 100 by the international count. He heads a family of four generations, with two sons and a daughter.

Lu eats white rice at every meal and prefers fish, shrimp and crab to vegetables. His live-in caregiver, surnamed Wang, told Wangchao, the official news app of the Taizhou city government, he can manage nearly half a bowl of rice and a whole plate of swimming crabs at one sitting.

He also has a sweet tooth, favoring watermelon, pears and mandarins.

The household keeps whole cases of Coca-Cola and Sprite, according to U.S.-based Chinese-language daily World Journal. Lu likes his Sprite iced, sometimes adds a few drops of baijiu, a Chinese grain liquor, and drinks about half a cup of liquor with meals.

Every five days, Lu takes a rickshaw to the market in town and buys enough fish, shrimp, crab, pork and vegetables to last until the next trip. Stallholders say he looks no older than 80, Wangchao reported.

He rode his own tricycle to the market until last year. After a fall earlier this year slowed him down, his family stopped him from riding and from working in the fields.

Lu told Wangchao that eating well comes first and that most of the savings he has left go on food.

He eats dinner at 5 p.m., falls asleep around 8 p.m. and wakes at about 4 a.m., stretching in bed until he gets up at 6 a.m.

He naps for about 30 minutes in a rattan chair at midday and sits in a massage chair, bought by his daughter-in-law six or seven years ago, for 15 minutes twice a day, HK01 reported.

Lu says he rarely catches colds and has low blood pressure. "Some old people have a stroke after just one fall, but I'm fine," he told Wangchao. "I remember things from my younger days very clearly."

He receives a monthly old-age subsidy of 800 yuan ($119).

Genes or lifestyle?

"Some people are born this way. Their lifestyle is only a minor factor in their longevity," one online commenter wrote, according to the South China Morning Post.

A senior man walking with a cane in Guangdong, China. Illustration photo by Pexels/Eric Cheng

A 2011 study of 477 Ashkenazi Jews aged 95 and older, led by Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, found that their eating and lifestyle habits were no healthier than those of the general population, AFP reported.

Nir Barzilai, the study's senior author, said such people may carry extra longevity genes that buffer them against the harm of an unhealthy lifestyle, but warned that "those lifestyle habits are not good choices for most of us."

About 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide in 2020 were attributable to sugar-sweetened drinks, according to a Tufts University-led study published in Nature Medicine in January 2025.