101-year-old man credits his long life to daily doses of Coors Light

It’s not every day that you get told that cracking open a cold one could be keeping you alive. More often than not, doctors/parents/sensible people are constantly advising against the dangers of excessive drinking. Given the science, we can hardly blame them. But, as the case of a centenarian veteran from McMurray, Pennsylvania is apparently proving, sometimes science doesn’t know everything.

World War Two Air Force serviceman Andrew E. Slavonic is a remarkable 101-year-old. Despite celebrating the start of his second century on December 1st, the ex-Flying Fortress nose gunner still makes his own breakfast and lunch, reads that day’s paper and works through any admin he might have to attend to. The key to this extraordinary longevity? The can of Coors light that he enjoys each and every day, without fail.

According to Andrew’s son Bob, who moved back in with his father in 2016 in order to assist with more heavy-duty chores such as mowing the lawn and shovelling the driveway, “He gets up at 8:30 every day and gets dressed and goes into the kitchen ready to cook his own breakfast. Later, after he makes his own lunch, he goes into his home office and reads through the daily newspaper. Around 4:00 p.m., he tells me that it is 4:00 p.m., and it is time for our beer. He gets his Coors Light from the garage beer fridge and enjoys a nice cold one. The bluer the mountains are on the can, the better.”

If the correlation between Andrew’s long-life and his beer habit can be proven, it would certainly be a remarkable coup for Coors. In an interview with Fox, son Bob revealed that “In 1996, he actually started drinking regular Coors beer. He switched to Coors Light beer about 15 years ago. I think I am the one to blame for the switch because that is all that I have been drinking for about the past 25 years.” Though the evidence connecting the company is obviously scant, it’s still tempting to jump to all sorts of exciting conclusions about what beer can actually do.

Shockingly, Andrew isn’t the only person to attribute their long-life to something alcoholic. The Daily Meal report that a 100-year-old from Plymouth, England believes that Guinness is the answer to her own durability, whilst 111-year-old Grace Jones swears by a daily shot of whisky.

Even more surprisingly, Andrew isn’t even the only centenarian using Coors as their fountain of youth. Fox News report that centurion Clotilda Kort believes that her endurance is almost entirely down to her taste for another of the company’s signature products, Miller 64. As surprising as it may seem, long life doesn’t necessarily have to be about constant vegetables.

Whether there is any scientific basis for the belief in the theory that beer can increase your lifespan is, obviously, a matter of some dispute. If anything, it feels like alcohol may be more of a placebo than anything concrete. But regardless, Andrew’s story proves that we can still enjoy life’s little pleasures, no matter how old we get.