The breakfast diet is her recipe for longevity.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Susannah Mushatt Jones is one of two living people who were born in the 1800s, and she celebrated her 116th birthday on Monday.
Astoundingly, Jones puts her longevity down to eating bacon and eggs every morning for over a century. A sign on her kitchen wall reads “Bacon makes everything better,” according to The Telegraph.
Jones was born Susie Mushatt in Lowndes County, Alabama, to Mary and Callie Mushatt, according to Guinness World Records. Her father was a sharecropper who picked cotton to support his wife and ten children. In 1922, Ms. Jones left Alabama for New Jersey before moving to New York City in 1923, finding employment as a live-in housekeeper and childcare provider.
She never had children but has more than 100 nieces and nephews, reported NBC News.
Back in 2006, when the New York City Housing Authority paid tribute to Jones’ regular participation in community tenant patrols in her neighborhood, during which she remarked, ” “I never drink or smoke. I surround myself with love and positive energy. That’s the key to long life and happiness.”
Per the Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group, which keep a list of “supercentenarians” aged over 110, the only other living person born in the 1800s is Emma Morano, of Verbania, Italy, who is a few months younger.
Europe’s oldest living person similarly attributed her longevity to eating several eggs a day, albeit raw.
The oldest person ever to have lived is also female, Jeanne Calment of France, who lived to be 122-years-old and 164 days.