Fountain of youth and people celebrating their 200th birthday - How promising are Methuselah fruit flies?

‘Gregory Benford of Genescient talked about their latest work. They have Methuselah fruit flies that live 4–5 times longer. They believe that they have products that could increase human lifespan 10–30% or more:

The genetic overlap between flies and humans is 80%. We separated from them 600 million years ago. We confirmed in the publicly available databases that these are genes associated with longevity.

We focused on cardio genes. Cardio kills over half of us. And the flies just fly around and eat sugar. We’re talking all of those disease groups. The first product will have a cardio set. Not just a few genes, but networks of genes, which we have shown in lab animals. We also have products in the pipeline, about 8 others, that operate on that, and some metabolic problems, and they increase lifespan by 10% to 30% depending on which one you have. The point is that these disorders can be affected by up-regulating gene expression. Eat those vegetables, get some exercise, well that was just my mother. Those things really do up-regulate those genes. What we have is a system for using the genomic information that has been harvested by artificial selection (not natural selection) to produce “nutrigenomic”. It has a role in mitochondrial effects. The rate of aging can be understood in terms of genomics.’

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/gregory-benford-of-genescient-talks-at.html

Hype or helpful? Will we see 200-year-old people in the 21st century?