Description: Secrets of living to 100, direct from the lives of the world's centenarians
Maysie Strang caused some excitement in the media recently when she reached the age of 102 despite a lifetime of heavy smoking . Maysie started as a teenager and smoked 20 a day. Her son Sandy, 65, says: “The house was a fug of smoke. She was a secretary and was always smoking at her typewriter.”
But that story – the ‘ultimate health paradox’, as Sandy describes it – overshadowed what might otherwise have been trumpeted as Maysie’s unusual longevity secret: bananas . Sandy said: “She’s mad on bananas. When she was working at the newspaper [Maysie was at the Daily Express] she was often eating lunch on the hoof, so she used to have a banana. She is a fanatical banana eater, she still eats a couple a day.”
Maysie is not the first centenarian to have their longevity associated with bananas. Salustiano Sanchez-Blazquez, who at 112 died in New York as the world’s oldest man , also put his long life down to bananas ( and aspirin ) .