George Johnson, considered California's oldest living person at 112 and the state's last surviving World War I veteran, had experts shaking their heads over his junk food diet. "He had terrible bad habits. He had a diet largely of sausages and waffles," Dr. L. Stephen Coles, founder of the Gerontology Research Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Friday. The 5-foot-7, 140-pound Johnson died of pneumonia Wednesday at his Richmond home in Northern California.
Coles participated in an autopsy Thursday that was designed to study Johnson's health. "All of his organs were extremely youthful. They could have been the organs of someone who was 50 or 60, not 112. Clearly his genes had some secrets," Coles said. "Everything in his body that we looked at was clean as a whistle, except for his lungs with the pneumonia," Coles said. "He had no heart disease, he had no cancer, no diabetes and no Alzheimer's. "This is a mysterious case that someone could be so healthy from a pathology point of view and that there is no obvious cause of death." The family was in favor of an autopsy. Relatives said Johnson wanted them to allow it if it would help science.
Courtesy Associated Press
Steve - as we have always said, there are exceptions to the rule! :) George Burns lived a very long life of excess. His wife tried to keep up with him and died in her fifties! Quality of life is what we strive to instill in all of our clients. Mr. Johnson was one of those very rare cases of living the life of excess and having the quality of life to boot!
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