During my travels of the last few weeks, I’ve enjoyed reading John Robbins’ Healthy at 100, an intelligent, sensitive book that explores spiritual as well as physical and mental aspects of increasing your life span. An internationally-known speaker on environmental subjects, he has written several other books, including Diet for a New America. I’ve been intrigued by his work for many years because he walks the talk without being self-absorbed: a particularly worthy goal.
Not having any particular aspiration to live to be 100—at least no more aspiration than I had to run marathons before doing it--Robbins’ book nonetheless underscored for me the importance of living healthily to any age. Doing for others is essential to good health, and he provides numerous insights on this process. He shows, for instance, how all societies where people live the longest have strong community, where wealth means nothing unless it is shared, and where the traditions of caring are strong. Conversely, the societies where wealth is concentrated among very few people who do not share are characterized by short life spans among wealthy as well as poor. I figure our North American society is a mixed bag!
As for the nutritional aspects of living a healthy old age, Robbins provides a fascinating discussion of the China Study, called the most comprehensive examination of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease. A cancer survey, initially undertaken at the behest of then-premier Chou En-Lai, involved 880 million Chinese citizens, providing information about the rates of 12 kinds of cancer in different counties of that country. Seven years after his death from liver cancer, the international China Study used this epidemiological base to study the nutrition in in 24 of China’s 27 provinces.
The correlations between eating habits and rates of cancer, heart disease and diabetes were so strong in the more affluent areas where people could afford to eat meat and took to it with gusto, that Dr. T. Colin Campbell, who directed the project, said it would be most accurate to stop referring to “diseases of affluence” and instead call them “diseases of nutritional extravagance.”
Robbins notes: “As a result of the vast amount of information gathered in the China Study, Dr. Campbell came to believe that the scientific evidence indicates a diet based on plant foods with a minimal amount of foods derived from animals as the ideal diet for human beings.”
Sound familiar? That’s Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Might it be that as we become more affluent, we are faced with more choices of relating to our fellow human beings, and that as we share our food choices as well as other ways of caring, we strengthen our society as well as ourselves? In a stronger society, living to 100 healthily could be the norm.
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