Living Longer
Living Longer – Desirable or Not?
by Rob English
How Long Do You Want to Live?
In this space we’ve already seen that as a class, Latinos live longer than White or Black raced people, the reason for that being the high volume of beans in the basic Latino diet.
Can we extend our lives even further by adding MORE beans to our diet? Would we want to? In a survey, people were asked how long they would like to live. Eighty years? 100 years? 110 years? Most people answered that eighty or ninety years would be enough.
Then the researchers asked the same people how long they would like to live if they could live HEALTHY in all their later years; in other words, if they could age without the maladies that trouble people in their seventies and eighties. If there were no dementia, no diabetes, no heart disease, no weak bones, etc., but if instead there would be added years of good health, sharp minds, easy digestion, dancing, fully interacting with friends and family (think grandchildren and great-grandchildren) and so on. Asked that way, the same group answered that they would gladly live well past 100.
That makes sense, doesn’t it? If we can be healthy beyond ninety and 100 years of age we no longer have to think of death as an escape from pain and loss.
Well, people of all ages are pursuing this age-healthy goal now.
With advice from their doctors, they are doing interval and weight-bearing exercise, avoiding simple sugars and highly processed foods, getting proper vitamins and minerals, avoiding stress, getting enough sleep, and eating a high-fiber plant-based diet (Yay, BEANS!).
Check out Dr. Michael Greger’s Nutritionfacts.org, or Google Dr. Mark Hyman or Dr. Robert Lustig or Dr. Rhonda Patrick, then talk things over with your own medical professional. Show them these resources if they are open to them.
And let us meet on the pickleball court when we are 105 years old!
P.S. – A few weeks back I described how I caught a mouse in my kitchen with a humane trap and let it go outside. A gracious reader of this column wrote to me and suggested a simpler and even more humane way to keep mice away. The secret is to soak cotton balls with peppermint oil and place them where you don’t want mice. Her husband’s truck had been infested with mice until he tried the peppermint oil trick and his truck has been mouse-free for some time. The beauty of this method is that you don’t have to handle the trap, and the mice can find their own safe place to live and not be released in a potentially cold or hostile place. So, Thank you, readers, for writing to me!
About Images: Photos of man with headphones dancing by Andrea Piacquadio, photo of erderly man working out by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz and photo of family eating a healthy diet by Askar Abayev from pexels.com
Rob English is a member of People for Animal Rights, a grassroots organization in Central New York,
Contact People for Animal Rights
PO Box # 401,
Cleveland, NY 13042
peopleforanimalrightsofcny@gmail.com
https://parcny.org/
