
World's oldest person Emma Morano dies at 117 - uyoakaoma
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39610937
======
acscott
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.

~~~
Baeocystin
You're not wrong, but I bet their genes are.

~~~
static_noise
It's a simple two-step process:

1\. Have good genes.

2\. Don't have bad genes.

If I can do it, everybody can!

------
chriskanan
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.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction)

~~~
openasocket
I doubt it. In my experience the elderly tend to have weird diets, especially
towards the end. I'm guessing it's due to a bunch of factors: trouble
chewing/swallowing means eating is more of an ordeal, reduced need for
calories because of reduced physical activity, and reduced sense of taste and
smell makes eating unrewarding. My great grandmother spent her last year or
two subsisting almost entirely on Kit Kat bars. We used to joke she could have
appeared in a commercial for them, implying the Kit Kat bars were the reason
for her longevity (she was 98).

~~~
notyourwork
She ate this way for 90 years so it sounds like her motivation wasn't lack of
teeth or being old. I'd suggest reading the article before making conclusions.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
The article doesn't say this at all. It says that she used to eat more eggs -
3 raw, plus an omelette at lunch and chicken at dinner. She had cut down to 2
raw eggs a day and had added in some biscuits.

The poster could easily be correct.

~~~
notyourwork
It seems you are also having trouble reading the article so let me paste a
quote directly from the article to help you:

"But it was also down to a rather unusual diet of three eggs - two raw - each
day for more than 90 years."

I'm not sure how else to interpret this statement.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
You should read further. It goes on to say the rest:

It was a regime she took up as a young woman, after the doctor diagnosed her
with anaemia shortly after World War One. She had cut down to just two eggs a
day, and a few biscuits recently. Her doctor of 27 years, Carlo Bava, had told
AFP news agency that she rarely ate vegetables or fruit. "When I met her, she
ate three eggs per day, two raw in the morning and then an omelette at noon,
and chicken at dinner."

I did misquote the number of eggs, but not the fact that she had cut down on
the amount she was eating.

------
dghughes
Imagine being a person so old that all people on earth ~7 billion people are
younger than you.

~~~
saagarjha
Well, at some point in time, _everyone_ was once so young that everyone else
in the world was older than them.

~~~
tlrobinson
Ok, but very few people are ever older than everyone else.

~~~
FlorianRappl
Statistically there has to be one at any point in time :)

------
lacampbell
117\. I can't even imagine that span of time. Seeing fashion change must annoy
you. "Damn hipsters, we did that in the 20s!"

~~~
Pica_soO
I think you withdraw after a time and become deeply cynically. For her trump,
stalin, mao, the duce, hitler, the italian king.. it must all look like
endless repetitions of the same boring theme, broken by endless promises of
learning from past mistakes. All your friends are gone- only you - the relic
dwell on. Even your sons and daugthers are dead. The lonesome george of
mankind.

One of my ancestors comes from a Italian mountain village near Lago di Garda.
Those villages are very poor, but also fascinating. They did a study on
longevity and health - in which they found that farmers whos field would run
up the mountain and down the mountain lived longer then farmers who fields did
not have such height difference.

~~~
PKop
Mao - 40,000,000
[http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Mao](http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Mao)

Stalin - 20,000,000
[http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Stalin](http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Stalin)

Hitler -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_enumerat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_enumerated)

Trump?

Yea, I'm sure she thinks Trump is as bad as the 20th century's most brutal
dictators.

I'm sure she doesn't think the millennial's who think this are embarrassingly
and shamefully naive and exaggerating, if the word exaggerating even captures
the absurdity well enough.

~~~
scrollaway
The parent you're replying to did not draw conclusions, merely talked about
patterns. Kinda like I see a pattern in you, within 48 hours, defending
climate change denial, religious oppression and now Trump.

Humans do that - they look at the world and see patterns all the time. Some
people are worse at it than others.

~~~
Banthum
The weak "you've stated opinions of the wrong tribe in other discussions,
therefore nobody should believe you" character attacks are a boring waste of
time. Please respond to the comment at hand; digging through post history to
find character attack material really isn't great on multiple levels.

~~~
scrollaway
I didn't say "nobody should believe" the poster, I said I'm seeing a pattern.
And I didn't have to dig deep, it's quite literally the last three comments
the poster made.

When I'm replying to someone, I very often look at their other comments. It
gives me more context about who they are, how they think, and more often than
not leads me to other interesting articles. It's an exercise I recommend.

~~~
joenot443
Absolutely fair - but to bring up their past comments in a debate you're
having with them is extremely tacky, in my opinion.

Part of the reason discourse on this website is considered so much better than
reddit is that it's generally considered poor form to dig through users past
comments.

------
holic
Fun fact: The population of the world grew ~5x in her lifetime, from ~1.6B to
~7.5B.

~~~
cgag
Terrifying

------
acjohnson55
So I'm guessing this means we are officially out of people who were alive
before 1900.

~~~
lisper
Given that it is 2017 I'd say that's a pretty good guess.

------
bkjelden
It's crazy to think how different the world looks today than it did 117 years
ago.

It's even crazier to speculate what it will look like in 117 more.

~~~
Zitrax
At least we know that Halley's comet passes Earth that year (2134).

------
Animats
And that's the last of the 19th century people.

~~~
lovemenot
Technically, the new oldest person was born in the nineteenth century:
Jamaican Violet Brown, who was born on March 10, 1900. And presumably, there
may be others alive who were born before the twentieth century began 1/1/1901.

~~~
interfixus
Yeah, we all remember the worldwide celebrations at the turn of the last
century, 2001-01-01.

~~~
lovemenot
Some people who had to work 1/1/00 or were on call (e.g. for Y2K) did in fact
celebrate the _technical_ new millenium a year later. Probably a few pedants
did too.

------
TwoBit
How would you calculate the average time between deaths of the currently
oldest person, assuming a constant population and constant max age?

~~~
w1ntermute
[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/349155/how-often-
do...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/349155/how-often-does-it-
happen-that-the-oldest-person-alive-dies)

~~~
hashhar
That's a rabbit hole I'll be digging up now. It was quite interesting. There
should be a dedicated website for such obscure things. Reddit helps but
doesn't cover a lot of ground.

------
MisterBastahrd
The world's oldest person is dead. Long live the world's oldest person.

~~~
phamilton
This is pretty solid, and actually makes more intuitive sense than the King
version.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I'd say it makes very little sense. You can say "long live the world's oldest
person" all you want; everyone realizes it's not going to happen.

~~~
iamacynic
that's the point.

------
draugadrotten
The world's now oldest person Saro Dursun - born 1899 june 01 - lives in
Västerås Sweden.

Public record of age:
[https://www.ratsit.se/18990601-Saro_Dursun_Vasteras/qEQWdEbn...](https://www.ratsit.se/18990601-Saro_Dursun_Vasteras/qEQWdEbn2DOKjdDtknCxSpTL76FroMz0ht50iQNqjKE)

~~~
misja111
Now I'm confused. Emma Morano who was the oldest person alive, was born in 29
November 1899 according to the article. Is the article wrong?

~~~
gebe
No, Saro Dursun is a fraudster. I don't remember all the details but she
Imigrated to Sweden in the 60/70s with another persons papers stating she was
65+ when she was in fact 40-something. 65 is the retirement age in Sweden...

------
coldcode
She didn't leave her apartment since she was 97. That is truly amazing. I
can't stand mine for more than a couple days.

~~~
kylehotchkiss
It sounds like she spent 15-17 by herself too (article says she only recently
got care). I can't imagine what that isolation would be like.

~~~
rublev
It is liberating.

------
seanmcdirmid
"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.

~~~
danieltillett
It is one I would not mind having. Sure your future life expectancy is not
great, but the journey getting there is not bad.

------
sixQuarks
Damn, she was able to see the first flight of an airplane (1903), and the
first successful return and relaunch of a rocket (2017) within one lifetime.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Damn, she was able to see the first flight of an airplane (1903)

Well, no... She was alive during it, but remember they didn't have television
back then. ;)

~~~
craigds
Also, she was four.

------
Prad
Dang 117 years. I remember reading an article about her birthday last year.
Rest in peace.

------
kobeya
One more datapoint for the cliff at 120. No supercentennials are able to pass
that age...

~~~
bluedevil2k
Except Jeanne Calment, who made it to 122

~~~
kobeya
The cliff is obviously with some statistical error.

------
seajones
World's former oldest person _

------
Taniwha
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 ...

~~~
Strom
I do know that people keep dieing. I haven't seen anyone surprised about this
though. Is that really a thing that happens often enough that you need to call
a stop to it?

------
reasonattlm
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
Strom
_It is random chance, plus a little genetics._

Looking at the top 43 oldest people alive [1] I can see that 20 of them are
from Japan. That's almost 50%! While not conclusive proof, I think it at the
very least heavily suggests that living long isn't about random chance.
Whatever is going on in Japan seems to be working very well.

\--

[1]
[http://www.grg.org/SC/WorldSCRankingsList.html](http://www.grg.org/SC/WorldSCRankingsList.html)

~~~
chrischen
Japan has a higher standard of living.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Japan didn't 70+ years ago.

~~~
chrischen
Actually they got pretty wealthy pretty quickly after the war.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Yeah but they spent the first 40 years of their life with a lower standard.

