My grandpa who still legally drives turned 100 last year. He loves to eat meat (rare to raw), rich foods, and wanted to share with me his stash of liver pate in the refrigerator on my last visit. When I asked him about how he could hook me up to connections while he bragged about his successes he replied "They're all dead!!!". He's said that happiness is a racket and myth; that success is different for each person; that you should never say you are sorry; that you should put your track shoes on early, run like hell, and never look back. There's more. But I think, the long-lived, are not the best sources of information on how to live long.
Her diet of only 3 eggs and some biscuits a day, made me wonder if any of her longevity can be credited to having a severely calorie restricted diet [0]. Assuming that's true that means she was probably ingesting 600 calories a day or less.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction</a>
It's crazy to think how different the world looks today than it did 117 years ago.<p>It's even crazier to speculate what it will look like in 117 more.
The world's now oldest person Saro Dursun - born 1899 june 01 - lives in Västerås Sweden.<p>Public record of age: <a href="https://www.ratsit.se/18990601-Saro_Dursun_Vasteras/qEQWdEbn2DOKjdDtknCxSpTL76FroMz0ht50iQNqjKE" rel="nofollow">https://www.ratsit.se/18990601-Saro_Dursun_Vasteras/qEQWdEbn...</a>
"World's oldest person" sounds like such a depressing title to have. Most people don't hold the title for even a year, with Jeanne Calment being the exception.
You know this headline shows up every year or so - dying seems to be something that world's oldest people keep doing - it's probably time we stopped being surprised ...
Trying to understand why someone lived this long is something of a pointless endeavor. It is random chance, plus a little genetics. If genes double your odds of making it past 100, then that is still 2% odds for people reaching that age now. By 117, with ~50%+ yearly mortality past 110, well, the odds are not good whatever your diet and past lifestyle might have been.<p>Running around analyzing the genetics of supercentenarians isn't really all that useful from the point of view of making people live longer. Doubling a tiny chance is still a tiny chance, and their longevity has a lot more to do with randomness than with anything else.<p>Perhaps more interesting is asking why these people die, what are the causes. Different ages are characterized by a different prevalence of disease; cancer hits a maximum mortality rate and then fades as a major cause in the oldest old, for example. From the few autopsies performed, supercentenarians appear to predominantly die of senile systemic amyloidosis, a clogging of the cardiovascular system with misfolded transthyretin that appears to play a lesser role in heart failure in younger old age.<p>If we want to ask why human life span seems to have a rough upper limit (though 50%+ yearly mortality for any combination of causes is going to look a lot like a hard limit when stretched over 20 years), then this form of amyloidosis seems to be one of the places to look.<p>Interestingly, this form of amyloidosis has an inherited version that shows up in young people, so despite the institutional reluctance to work on medicine to treat the causes of aging, there are actually a number of therapies in development and trials, some of which can selectively remove this form of amyloid. At some point the research community will wake up to this form of amyloid being a contributing cause of heart failure (a process underway judging by recent papers on the topic), at which point we might well see a leap in the observed upper limit to human life in the decades following more widespread use.