He is 119 years old and still smiling. Scientists are studying his 3 simple daily habits that helped him outlive almost everyone on Earth

In a wooden house with a tin roof, tucked into a quiet corner of Costa Rica's Guanacaste province, an old man rests his hands on a walker and grins at anyone who walks through the door. His name is José Flores Flores. He was born on July 11, 1907, which makes him, depending on how the paperwork shakes out, the oldest human being alive today, a report by elpais.com stated.

Nobody expected this. Not the doctors, not the demographers, and certainly not José himself, who spent most of his life earning wages too thin to ever own a plot of land. Yet here he is, 119 years old, sharp enough to needle his granddaughter and strong enough to challenge visitors to an arm-wrestling match with his left hand, his stronger one, he insists.

Also Read: Ohio man wins lottery twice in one day after buying back-to-back tickets from same store


As per the report, researchers who study aging keep circling back to three things when they talk about José. He says them himself, almost like a motto he's repeated for decades: work hard, trust in God, and eat well. It sounds almost too simple to explain a life this long. But scientists studying so-called "blue zones", regions of the world with unusual concentrations of centenarians, say simple, repeated habits often matter more than any single miracle gene.

A Childhood Built on Hardship, Not Luxury

José's story doesn't read like a wellness retreat brochure. His mother left when he was a baby. His father died when José was seven. He was raised by his grandmother in rural Guanacaste, and by his early teens he'd already left home to work grueling shifts on banana plantations in the south of the country, the kind of physically punishing labor nobody would call a longevity plan, except that it kept him moving, outdoors, every single day of his young life.

He got married. He had kids. He buried a wife, Ofelia, who died at 71, decades before her husband would reach his current age. Even when the government thought of giving him a plot, he never could afford to buy land of his own. He was pushing 75 by then and officials doubted he could still work it.

The Daily Habits Researchers are Studying

As per elpais report, José Antonio Rabadán, a gerontology researcher from Spain's University of Alicante who has visited more than 70 centenarians in the region, has spent time with José since he turned 117. He describes the case as extraordinary, one science is only starting to make sense of. What strikes Rabadán isn't a single secret ingredient. It's the combination: physical labor sustained across a lifetime, tight-knit family and community bonds, a mostly unprocessed, homegrown diet, and a steady daily rhythm shaped by sunlight and faith.

Neither expert claims to have cracked the code. Rabadán is careful to note that plenty of people who lived through similar hardship, similar diets, similar routines, died decades earlier. Longevity, he says, is less a formula than a long list of ingredients that occasionally line up just right, genetics, movement, food, social connection, with no single variable guaranteed to tip the scale.

Verifying a Record That Might Be the World's Oldest

If José's age holds up under review, he could surpass Ethel Caterham, the English supercentenarian currently recognized as the world's oldest living person, who turns 117 this August. The all-time record still belongs to Jeanne Calment, the Frenchwoman who died in 1997 at 122 years and 164 days old.

Also Read: How a 13-year-old Indian-American student turns peanut shell waste into breakthrough solution to remove pesticides from fruits & vegetables

Costa Rica's civil registry lists José's birth date as reliable, and researchers say they also have a baptismal certificate signed by a bishop in 1907 backing it up. The file is now working its way through the Gerontology Research Group, the organization that formally certifies supercentenarian ages worldwide, a process that may end in José's favor.

Family, Not a Facility

None of this changes how José spends his days. His granddaughter, Hellen, put her own plans on hold to care for him full-time, even as the family gets by on roughly $330 a month, a fraction of the national average income. Along the way, she's discovered a real knack and passion for elder care, and she's now taking courses to formalize it.

She's also blunt about where he'll spend his final years: at home, surrounded by family, not in some institution. José, for his part, doesn't seem too worried about any of it. Most afternoons he's parked in front of the television, watching reruns of the classic 1960s Western series Bonanza, a grin on his face, utterly unbothered by the researchers, the paperwork, or the possibility that he might just outlast the rest of us.