Editorial

Living To Be 100...And Happy Would you really want to? Then what’s your strategy? Editorial Q

Aleksandar Jankov, oncologist with Baptist Medical Group brought the issue to The Memphis Journal Review Club at a recent meeting: How To Live To Be 100.

The thesis: people are happier as they get older, so why not hang on as long as you can, enjoy the ride. He began with graphs, age versus happiness, mostly from the Brookings Institute, showing a U shape curve, trough at age 42, the low point of happiness, increasing thereafter, better and better with age. It’s not the young who are happiest, despite how we venerate youth in our society, in our advertising, in our memory. By this count, we’re happiest in old age.

This of course is predicated on maintaining good health and, no surprise, good finances. Yes money is a strong correlate with health and longevity, not necessarily extreme wealth, but enough to meet basic needs. That presumes you don’t compare yourself to hedge fund managers, real estate magnates, tech company billionaires, colleagues in those high income specialties, a sure road to making yourself miserable. And the venerable Ann Landers surveyed her readers years ago, and found people happiest in middle age, children gone, settled life style, not old age as Brookings says.

So sure, exercise, like Mike Dragutsky in his home gym, luxurious, only surpassed in size by his wine cellar (red wine and health, that’s another story), or like Oakley Jordan, out to the gym by 6:30 in the morning, or Bob Skinner, counting steps on his watch, walking the downtown parks on weekends.

What interested me most was what came next: the importance of fasting in keeping good health, something new to me. So to help control weight, avoid diabetes and hypertenson…fast. However you do it, periodic fasting, fasting 12-14 hours every day (for example, skip breakfast, heresy in itself), fast enough to keep glycogen stores low, keeping blood sugar under control, avoiding hyperglycemia. It’s more complicated than that, but you may get the gist of the argument, sugar loads are the culprit.

Well, you might suspect that not everyone agrees. Cardiologist Frank McGrew sticks to known facts, the party line: exercise to improve vascular tone, diet, avoid red meat, egg yolks, refined sugar, take statins to lower cholesterol level, themselves a revolution in reducing myocardial infarction, add newly approved viscera to lower triglycerides. He finds no support in the cardiovascular literature for a fasting strategy. Live to 100? From what I’ve seen in nursing homes, that may not be for me. But watch your diet. Exercise. And for my money…fast. I’ve done it anyway, a lifelong habit of no breakfast. And one more note. This thread all started at a Journal Review Club meeting.

I noticed that the members, all doctors, when confronted with the choice of fish or red meat…70% went with the meat.

What’s your opinion? Diet? Exercise? Genetics? Fast?

Let us know: tcgdoc@aol.com, acook@mdmemphis.org.

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