California’s oldest living person who at 112 credited his longevity to a diet of sausage and waffles has died. But, doctors say it wasn’t due to his junk food diet. In fact, physicians are still scratching their heads in disbelief over the fact that George Johnson survived as long as he did given what he consumed on a daily basis.
“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, told reporters following Johnson’s death last week.
Doctors say the 5-foot-7, 140-pound Johnson died of pneumonia at his home in Northern California (a house Johnson built with his own hands in 1935). Johnson was considered the state’s oldest living person and California’s last surviving World War I veteran. He was also blind and lived alone until his 110th birthday when a caregiver began helping him. But, the introduction of a caregiver didn’t change his diet.
“A lot of people think or imagine that your good habits and bad habits contribute to your longevity,” Johnson’s doctor said. “But we often find it is in the genes rather than lifestyle.”
To test the accuracy of that theory a group of doctors were present at Johnson’s specially designed autopsy that was performed in accordance with a study that further explored the supercentenarian’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,” doctors said. Physicians also noted: “Everything in his body that we looked at was clean as a whistle, except for his lungs with the pneumonia. He had no heart disease, he had no cancer, no diabetes and no Alzheimer’s.”
Doctors consider Johnson’s death somewhat of a mystery: “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.”
It’s no mystery to Johnson’s family members who say the “tough as nails” former post office employee and heating plant manager “lived life the way he wanted.” Family members say Johnson remained in good health and continued driving until he was 102, when his vision began to fail. Johnson outlived his wife, who died in 1992 at the age of 92. The couple had no children, which means we may never know if the sausage and waffles longevity gene could have been passed on.