When Maria Branyas Morera died last year at 117 years and 168 days old, she held the distinction of being the oldest known person on the planet. Before she passed, she made a special request to her doctors: she wanted them to study her.
Dr. Manel Esteller, chair of Genetics at the University of Barcelona’s School of Medicine, spent three years examining her health and biology. A new study he co-authored, published online Wednesday, concludes that her exceptional lifespan appears to be the result of both her DNA and the way she lived.
“The takeaway is that extreme longevity comes from a combination of what we inherit from our parents and how we choose to live,” Esteller explained. In his view, the balance between genetics and lifestyle could be “about half and half.”
According to Esteller, Branyas carried “very good genes” that seemed to protect her from multiple diseases, including rare genetic variants that had not been documented before. But she also followed consistently healthy habits. She did not smoke, didn’t drink alcohol, and followed a diet rich in fish, olive oil and yogurt. Esteller noted that she ate three yogurts a day.
The yogurt she preferred was plain and unsweetened. Esteller says it likely helped maintain a healthy gut microbiome by supplying beneficial bacteria that combat inflammation. Chronic, low-grade inflammation is considered one of the major drivers of aging and many diseases, he added. These “good bacteria,” he said, can offer a real advantage to human health.
The study highlights a particular group of beneficial gut bacteria, Bifidobacterium. It states that researchers cannot definitively prove that Branyas’ high levels of this bacteria were solely due to her yogurt habit, since that would have required tracking her over many years in a longitudinal study. However, the authors believe it is likely that regular yogurt consumption, by shaping her gut ecosystem, played a positive role in her overall health and unusually long life.
Branyas herself once posted on social media about her enthusiasm for yogurt, saying it “gives life” — and in her case, life was very long indeed. Born in San Francisco in 1907, she moved to Spain at the age of 8. Over her 117 years, she lived through two world wars and two pandemics, raised three children and saw the family expand to include 13 great-grandchildren.
Remarkably, researchers report that she did not suffer from cancer, cardiovascular disease or dementia.
The authors write that the picture emerging from their work shows that reaching an extremely advanced age does not have to go hand in hand with poor health. They argue that aging and disease can be separated and examined independently at the molecular level.
To understand her biology in depth, the team collected samples from four different sources at several time points: peripheral blood, saliva, urine and stool.
Still, the researchers caution against overgeneralizing from a single case. They note that aging and exceptional longevity “are probably highly individualized processes,” and that broad conclusions drawn from one person — even someone as extraordinary as Maria Branyas Morera — should be treated with care.
