Jones just turned 116 last July 6, 2015 and was delegated the world's oldest living person by Guinness World Records that month, admitted her bacon habit in an interview distributed for the current week on the New York Post's site Page Six. As such, the Internet is having a field day with this data.I was thinking of going to buy some groceries with a bunch of bacon after reading the article about it. But of course we need to know that bacon is not a fountain of youth. And Jones did not say that it's her secret to long life either she just said that "Bacon makes everything better".
In her interview with Guiness World Records, she credited her good sleeping propensities, and also her forbearance from tobacco and liquor, for her proceeded with great wellbeing.
The world's oldest living person is right in suspecting that her healthyhabits have presumably kept her alive for over a century. On the other hand, it's imaginable that Jones predominantly has her hereditary qualities to thank for her long life, said Dr. Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston Medical Center and professor of medicine at Boston University.
"By no means should anyone, therefore, think that eating bacon is good for them because [Jones] eats bacon," Perls told Live Science. It may be that the Guinness World Record holder has been getting away with doing so only because she has "genes that make up for" her bacon habit, he added.
GOOD GENES
Since 1995, Perls and his associates have been contemplating why a few individuals live more than others. Their investigations of centenarians and supercentenarians (individuals beyond 110 years old) are among the most exhaustive seniority concentrates on the planet.
Perls said there's simply no investigative proof that recommends individuals who eat bacon consistently live more. Actually, the examination on red meat utilization and life span proposes the fact of the matter is an incredible inverse.
For instance, a 28-year investigation of 120,000 individuals directed by specialists at Harvard University observed that eating one serving of natural red meat, (for example, steak or pork cleaves) day by day expanded study members' danger of biting the dust amid the study by 13 percent. Eating one serving day by day of prepared red meat, (for example, bacon) was connected with a 20 percent expanded danger of biting the dust amid the study, the analysts found.
These findings are consistent with a 2010 meta-analysis by a separate group of researchers at Harvard, which found that people who eat processed red meats daily are at much higher risk of developing coronary heart disease and diabetes mellitus than those who do not eat these foods.
But Jones, and supercentenarians like her, are lucky, Perls said. There's an extremely strong genetic component to living this long, he told Live Science.
Living into what most people consider to be "old age" (around 85 to 90 years old) is mostly the reward for a healthy and disaster-free life, he said. People who have a good diet, exercise regularly, don't smoke or drink, and keep their stress levels low might be able to make it this long — a person's genes play a relatively small role in determining whether an individual lives to see his or her mid-80s or 90s.
But past that point, genes play a much bigger role, Perls said.
"It's around 70 percent genetic and 30 percent environment, in terms of what dictates a person's ability to live to ages like hers," he said.
And there is not just one "magic" gene that keeps a person chugging along into a second century on Earth. Rather, there are many genes that each play a small part in longevity, but as a group, can keep a person alive that long, said Perls, who noted that this may explain why you don't meet supercentenarians like Jones every day. Scoring her genetic makeup is as rare as winning the lottery (she's one in about 5 million).
And although it isn't yet clear exactly how "longevity" genes work, research suggests that these genes may be "protective," slowing down aging and decreasing a person's risk for age-related diseases, Perls said.
"And they help you in terms of things like eating a lot of bacon. So she's very lucky. She can eat all the bacon she wants and live to 116."
The oldest person to have ever lived was Jeanne Calment, of France, who lasted to the ripe old age of 122. Calment had an even worse vice than Jones' — she smoked a cigarette a day until she died, in 1997.
Who knows? Perls said — if not for the smoking, perhaps Calment would still be alive.
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