Living the goodlife, low on the food chain

The second guest blogger on The Daily Blank is Hank Schiffman (Hankster). If you doubt what he has to say, bear in mind he is still running very impressive marathon times at 60. If more of us followed his advice perhaps the health care debate would have been less contentious.

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I’ll be the first to admit that I am over-the-top. Unlike Dennis, I haven’t yet crossed the line to retirement. That’s not to mean approaching the top third of my life has escaped without a point of view. The ideal thing would be to integrate both financial and health strategies. Had I been more diligent on the former, I probably would be spending more time in snow sports right now. Did I mention skiing deep powder is better than sex?

On to the topic of health: it isn’t just about turning up the sweat. You are what you eat. If you eat like a pig, you might end up looking like one. But if you eat pig, perhaps too much pig, you might be risking your health.

Michael Pollan, in his book, “In Defense of Food,” advises to live by this mantra: “Eat food, not much, mostly plants.” He makes a rational appeal to avoid eating those foods your grandmother wouldn’t recognize (by which he means “natural” food as opposed to processed “food products”), eating low on the food chain, and not going overboard on quantity.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a monk and I too have an aversion to “thou shalt not” commands. There is a certain logic to looking at the hourglass running out and choosing prime rib over bean curd, not wanting to deny oneself pleasure while on the deck of the Titanic. However, bean curd might actually slow the sand flowing down the glass. If you think eating tofu is reprehensible, perhaps you might remember your first taste of hooch or drag of cigarette. Some things need time to accommodate. Discounting your great uncle, who died at 95, smoking 3 packs a day while thinking anything green was spoiled meat, it might be time for change.

A friend once said that the very thing, which kept us healthy and alive in the past, will probably end up making us unhealthy and dead in the future. He was referring to our immune system. In health, our bodies work flawlessly, keeping out germs while we go about our lives. In sickness we are a Prius with a broken accelerator pedal. As we age, our systems tend to go out of tune. We need to concentrate on doing everything we can to help keep them running right. We naturally lose our reserve capacity so we need to exercise to build it back up. Our body has a hard time dealing with metabolizing/excreting complex foreign chemicals. We were always designed to make use of natural chemicals in our foods for our immune system and to rebuild cells lost due to natural attrition. Eating complicated, unnatural chemicals confounds our immune system and may deprive our bodies of those nutrients, which we need to thrive.

Logically, eating natural foods, lower on the food chain, allows our bodies to maintain a steady course. One of my teachers once said, “There is a storm blowing out there. The older we get, the more we feel the wind.”