Walter Breuning, aged 114 years 205 days, has died but he left us with many wise words.

The world’s oldest man passed away this past Thursday, April 14th, due to natural causes at the age of 114. Over the course of Walter Breuning’s long life, he experienced the sweeping changes of three centuries. From a childhood without electricity to the rise of radio, through two World Wars, the Great Depression, and everyday since, Breuning maintained a healthy regimen of eating less, working more, and taking care of others, crediting this behavior with keeping him youthful. Over the years, Walter generated a lot of wise remarks, many of which we’ve shared with you before. While his death represents a great loss for the world, we can rest easier knowing this: with the steady march of science, and a little help from Walter’s wisdom, we may all be on the path to become supercentenarians.

“Everybody says your mind is the most important thing about your body. Your mind and your body. You keep both busy, and by God you’ll be here a long time.” —Walter Breuning

Perhaps unsurprising for a man who spent 50 years working for the railroad, Breuning was happy with the steady improvements in life brought on by modern technology. When it came to medical technology, however, he wasn’t in much need. The director of the Rainbow Senior Living retirement home where he was living in Great Falls Montana told the Associated Press Walter never took anything more than aspirin. Maybe Breuning’s two meal a day diet, his active life, and his strong social bonds were enough to sustain him – these same general trends are found among many centenarians around the world. Yet the rest of us may need a bit of boost. Thankfully we live in a world where regenerative medicine continues to have great success from stem cell treatments to growing organs in labs to genetic therapies for major diseases. These technologies will help us sustain our current biology, repairing or replacing parts as they wear out. One day we’ll move on from simply sustaining our bodies to openly improving upon them as well. That upcoming change may seem daunting, but Walter’s words of wisdom are here to quell our fears:

“I think every change that we’ve ever made, ever since I was a child — 100 years — every change has been good for the people…My God, we used to have to write with pen and ink, you know, (for) everything. When the machines came, it just made life so much easier.”

Walter Breuning (September 21, 1896 - April 14th, 2011)

*Note: With Walter’s passing, the oldest living man is Jiroemon Kimura of Japan. The oldest living person is still Besse Cooper of the United States who was born almost a month before Walter Breuning.

[screen capture: Integral Senior]
[image credit: Mike Albans/Associated Press]
[sources: Associated Press]

The oldest person in the world, Gertrude Baines, just died at age 115

In the search for longevity, we tend to focus on healthy lifestyles, miracle supplements, or potential technologies. It’s easy to forget the people who have accomplished that goal seemingly without the intention to do so. Gertrude Baines, the oldest person on Earth, passed away in Los Angeles on Friday September 11, 2009, at the tender age of 115. That, my friends, is old. Her title passes on to Kama Chinen in Japan, age 114, and still going strong. These supercentenarians give us hope that the dream of living longer (maybe forever) is a possible one.

There are ‘Blue Zones‘ on Earth were people live longer, and those populations seem to have much in common. We see simple lifestyles devoid of unnecessary stress, good diets that focus on fruits and veggies (not meats and sugars), and plenty of daily exercise. Supercentenarians, however, are as much about statistical anomalies as they are about trends. They don’t seem to have a lot in common besides agrarian backgrounds (but we’re talking about the 1890s here) and gender (most are women). Apparently one of Ms. Baines favorite foods was bacon and eggs.

Gertrude Baines was born on April 6, 1894 in Georgia, worked for many years as a maid at Ohio State University, and spent the last ten years of her life in a resident home in LA. She took over the reign of oldest person in January of this year when Maria de Jesus (Portugal) died at age 114. Her successor, Kama Chinen (b. May 10, 1895), is only 7 days older than the next runner up, Canadian born US resident Mary Jospehine Ray.

Of the hundreds of thousands of people in the world who reach one hundred years of age, only 1 in a 1000 will make it to the 110 year mark. Of those, 1-2% will make it past 115. Beyond that, every year is like winning the lottery. Sakhan Dosova of Kazakhstan supposedly lived to be 130. Jeanne Calment of France is well documented to have passed 122. Many of these women, and again a super majority of centenarians and supercentenarians are women, lived relatively simple lives often in meager means. As we discussed in an earlier article, Sakhan Dosova’s death may have been indirectly related to her being moved to better conditions.

The human body, or some human bodies at least, can survive long wear and tear for years past the century mark. There’s plenty of evidence that the average person’s longevity could extend into this region routinely. Already, most developed nations enjoy a centenarian rate of more than 100 per million. The US, France, and Japan all have rates near or above 300 per million. Every nation expects those numbers to rise dramatically in the next century. As we explore longevity here at the Hub, it goods to keep in mind that while we may have to fight aging in our bodies, some bodies are already willing to join in on the battle.