Maria Branyas Morera died on August 19 at 117, in the Catalonia nursing home where she’d spent her last twenty years. Guinness World Records ranked her the eighth-oldest person in recorded history. She left two children, 11 grandchildren, and a family of great-grandchildren, and she left the internet doing what it always does with the very old: hunting for the trick.
Her life didn’t need one to be remarkable. Born in the United States, she crossed the Atlantic back to Spain with her family in 1915, into the middle of the First World War. She married Dr. Joan Moret and raised three children, outliving her eldest son, who died at 86. She lived through both World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the Spanish Flu, then watched a second pandemic arrive in her final years and outlasted that one too. Her hearing and mobility faded near the end. Her mind didn’t. She celebrated her 117th birthday sharp enough to enjoy it.
Still, the question followed her everywhere: what’s the secret? And here’s what makes her answer better than the headlines it generated. She refused to sell one.
“I think longevity is also about being lucky. Luck and good genetics,” she wrote on X in December 2022. On diet: “Many people ask me what diet I follow to live for so many years. I have always eaten little, but everything, and I have never followed any regime.”
The science of extreme old age agrees with her. Research on supercentenarians consistently finds that lifestyle does its real work getting people into their 80s and 90s; past 110, genetics dominates, and exceptional aging tends to run in families. No single food has ever been shown to extend a human life.
Which brings us to the yogurt, because yes, there was yogurt. Maria ate it daily for two decades, a local Catalan brand called La Fageda, and she loved it the way some people love a hometown or a football club. She called it her “heavenly manna” and “the best yogurt in the world,” and praised it as “a lifelong food with an infinite number of positive properties for the body.” She’d even cite a Bulgarian study and a Persian tradition about Abraham when making the case for it.
It’s a wonderful detail, told with more charm than any nutrition influencer manages. But notice what she was doing: sharing a pleasure, not writing a prescription. The woman who ate the yogurt every day is the same woman who said the real answer was luck and genes. Both things were true in her, and she never confused them.
What she did recommend costs nothing at the supermarket. Stay close to family and friends. Spend time in nature. Stay calm, skip the worrying and the regretting, keep a positive outlook, and keep your distance from negative people. From someone who watched a century of chaos come and go, that reads less like a wellness tip and more like a verdict.
So eat the yogurt if you like it. It’s good food, and she’d approve. But if you want what Maria Branyas Morera actually left behind, it was simpler and harder: order in your life, and distance from drama. No one sells it, and she gave it away for free.
what’s the best piece of long-life advice an elder in your family ever gave you? Tell us in the comments.
This article is for general information and is not a substitute for professional medical advice.
Source: Daily Mail
