'I'm just livin': 108-year-old woman reveals she drinks one glass of wine every Friday

April 20, 2019  19:27

It's the eve of her 109th birthday, and Annie Wilson is treating herself to a glass of wine - as she does every Friday, and has done for years.

That one small, weekly glass has been something of a ritual for Annie, who scoffs at the suggestion that she might follow a strict health routine to stay well.

Annie, who has spent her whole life in North Carolina, insists there is no secret formula to living this long.

In fact, the one thing she seems set on is taking everything in her stride.

'So many people have asked me that and I don't do anything special. I'm just livin',' Wilson told KHOU 11.

'Just livin'.'

Annie told KHOU 11 she had a simple upbringing with an older sister, seven older brothers, and a younger brother in Matthews, a suburb of Charlotte, where she would cook with her mother and work on the family farm.

'We had a good time, we didn't know anything about being lonesome or bored,' Wilson told KHOU 11. 'We just stuck right there and did whatever was to do.'

She is seeing this year's birthday in with a party at her home, the Brookdale Carriage Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her bevvy of young friends. Her husband passed away in 1993, and her siblings are no longer around.

Her longevity has made her, unsurprisingly, something of a celebrity figure in the area, with people clamoring to know what's special about Annie, the chatty, upbeatm super-centenarian.

She is as nonplussed as the world's top aging researchers, who still can't quite explain why the body degrades as it does in some people, and not in others.

We know women are more likely to hit 110, and nearly 70 percent of the people recorded to have hit that milestone were white.

But we don't know much else.

All of the prevailing theories we've had about super-aging have hit roadblocks in recent years.

We thought super-agers - people who live relatively healthily past 100 - reached a point when they were aging more slowly, driving some scientists to say human life may be limitless.

But that trend - of increasingly aging super-agers - has started to taper off.

In a bid to bottle up the power of longevity, an Australian geneticist and Harvard Medical School professor, David Sinclair, has started taking his own cocktail of the enzyme - and feeding it to his entire family - which he believes could allow him to live until at least 150 years old.

He believes there is no limit on human lifespan, and that humans will one day be able to achieve immortality, and he found in his research that a coenzyme called NAD+, which is abundant in young humans, helps to preserve cells. In one study on mice, Sinclair showed that he could reverse some aging markers by boosting their levels of NAD+.

He has yet to prove its effects in humans, but he is determined to spend his life trying - while Annie sits back, happily, and enjoys her years with a tipple and friends.

Source: The Daily Mail

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