After the former "World's Oldest Person" Emma Morano died earlier this week, Guinness World Record officials passed the torch to 117-year-old Violet Mosse-Brown — or, as she's better known to her friends and family, "Aunt V."
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Mosse-Brown was born on March 10, 1900 — a decade before her home of Jamaica became a country. This means she's not only the "World's Oldest Person," but she's also the last living subject of England's Queen Victoria and the oldest citizen of the Commonwealth, Metro reports.
And she certainly has lived an incredible life, during which she's seen many of history's most important moments, including the invention of electricity and plumbing, both world wars, and the first cars and planes arriving in Jamaica. Amazing, right?
Today, Mosse-Brown still lives in Duanvale, Jamaica, where her family has lived for 200 years, and she's "doing well," her grandchildren and great-grandchildren told CNN. But how has she gotten to the big 1-1-7? Brown shared her healthy aging secrets with local Jamaican newspapers The Gleaner and the Jamaica Observer:
1. She avoids eating three very specific foods.
"Really and truly, when people ask me [what I] eat and drink to live so long, I say to them that I eat everything, except pork and chicken, and I don't drink rum," Mosse-Brown told The Gleaner.
Rum, pork, and chicken aside, there's still plenty that the bubbly Aunt V will eat.
"She likes fish and mutton and sometimes she will have cow foot," her 97-year-old son Harold Fairweather told the Jamaica Observer in 2016. She also enjoys sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, breadfruit, oranges, and mangoes.
Violet Moss-Brown, 117, is now the world's oldest woman https://t.co/wlCI4Eg03q pic.twitter.com/udixxw1ux9— CNN (@CNN) April 17, 2017
2. She's always been a hard worker.
According to the Observer, Mosse-Brown and her late husband worked as cane farmers until they sold their crop to a larger estate. Her husband went on to become the caretaker at a local cemetery, and she took care of the books.
Mosse-Brown doesn't work that job anymore, but that doesn't mean she's slowed down: "She continues to be very hard-working, even now," her granddaughter Lelieth Palmer told CNN.
The world's oldest human is Jamaican Violet Brown, who was born on March 10, 1900. Congrats Violet. pic.twitter.com/AnjXdHK1Kz— Andrew Holness (@AndrewHolnessJM) April 15, 2017
3. She stays positive.
Mosse-Brown's friends and family "enjoy the company of this positive lady," who likes to regale them with tales of faith and poetry readings, the Jamaica Observer reports. Her favorite poem is "The Vision of Belshazzar" by Lord Byron, which she can still recite by heart.
"You know, sometimes I ask myself, 'Am I really 110 years old?' because I don't feel like 110," she told the Gleaner back in 2010, smiling.
Since earning the title of "World's Oldest Person," Mosse-Brown has echoed that sentiment: "I feel good, I feel happy to be the oldest person [in the world]," Brown told the Observer more recently. "I did not feel I would become the oldest person, I feel I would pass long ago. Thank God for whatever He has given to me."
Congrats, Aunt V — keep on smiling!
