Part 17 of my interview with a very healthy octogenarian:
Q: If you do have oncoming disease or if you’re into a disease, there are some things that you can do to help either one, alleviate that disease or at least to have a better quality of life because you’ve made better decisions when it comes to diet and lifestyle. And that leads me, to this next area of questioning, stress and daily living. And I know that in a lot of cases, you might be dealing with a family – a couple, an older couple where maybe one spouse is not sick but the other person already has some issues, whether it be diabetes or arthritis or something, and having to cope with the stress of that and helping each other through that. So is there anything that you could give us for tips on how you do this as a team, trying to figure out how to balance diet and lifestyle to help alleviate or at least make the quality of life better?
A: I think that it’s very important that both people, or an entire family, do and work together. And you have to plan this together. My wife came down with rheumatoid arthritis 10, 11 years ago and we started both studying – she subscribed to the arthritis magazine and we’ve gotten other books on arthritis and found out that, in short order, although the medical profession – and she’s been treated by the medical profession and she still is, they don’t really get into the diet and nutrition part of your treatment.
They prescribed for her to take Methotrexate and within the last year or two, they’ve added Plaquenil to her regimen for medication. But we’ve learned, and she has learned, from being very conscious and conscientious in her diet, that it makes a big difference what you eat. And she too, at the same time that we decided we were going to stop eating meat and dairy products, we both worked to replace those foods with soy products and rice products. Because there is rice milk out there, there is soy milk out there, and there are different – all kinds of, as we said, nuts and foods and plant foods and fruit of all kinds. And there are melons out there, you know, cantaloupe and honey dew melon. And there are several other Caribbean fruits that are available that are excellent to eat. And papaya, for instance, is one of the great foods that you can eat. And mangoes. And there are all kinds of different foods.
But for some reason or other, most of us had not been exposed to that kind of food. So this is new and it’s interesting and we find that she’s a lot healthier. She has not been crippled, she still works in our garden, she walks – we walk everyday practically and her quality of life is excellent compared to there was a time there seven or eight years ago when getting out of bed it was a very, very difficult task. And she just lay on the couch and boy, she was hurting. And especially when there was a storm coming.
The atmospheric pressure, for some reason or other, I know that medical profession says that Oh, that has nothing to do with your pain, but a lot of these people who have serious rheumatoid arthritis, they can tell you when it’s going to rain. They can tell you a lightning storm is going to come. After it happens 15 or 20 times, they get so they’re pretty good at it. But, again, the object is that if you’re going to have any kind of quality of life, you’ve got to change your modus operandi of the way you live and what you did. There are certain things you don’t do and certain things you don’t eat. And you learn by trial and error. And if you don’t learn, well, you’re not here.
