'Julia Child lived longer than Doctor Atkins'

This was a comic in the Lockhorns strip when Loretta was criticizing Leroy about his dinner. And it's true, and ironic when you think about it, Julia Child cooked with real ingredients, real butter, real eggs, real sugar, all the stuff today they say is bad for you, and she and her husband (who you can be sure ate her cooking) lived to their 90s, and Dr. Atkins, what was it, hits his head ice skating and dies in his 50s or 60s?

Another ironic fact occurred to me the other night:

Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle:




250-300 pounds his adult life, granted it was mostly muscle (and how do you get 300 pounds of muscle?), but the fact remains he was a big man and no doubt today everybody would be screaming obese.


Bruce Lee:



160 pounds at his heaviest, very fit and could do pushups on his fingers AND with a man Fatty's size on his back. So it kind of looks obvious where this would be going, BUT, Fatty Arbuckle lived 14 years longer than Bruce Lee. Just goes to show that being 'healthy' doesn't necessarily mean anything in the grand scheme of life. Is there a point? Maybe not, but I'd consider this the next time I heard anybody going on with that crap of to be healthy you must cut out carbs, no sugar, no dairy, no meat, no fat, no cholesterol, blah blah blah.

There are exceptions to every rule. There are 80 year old smokers who have been smoking since their 20's.

Even though I'll admit I don't always do it myself there is validity to eating healthy. In this country particularly we eat too much processed, sugary, fatty junk food. Bruce Lee's death was due to cerebral edema & Atkins was due to "blunt impact injury". So those deaths had nothing to do with diet & and of course people who are vegetarian & never smoked will still get sick. As far as people who smoke & eat food that is pretty much the equivalent of garbage their entire lives, genetics probably plays a big role in that. The comparisons between Fatty Arbuckle & Bruce Lee have less to do with indicating diet doesn't matter but everything to do with proving shit happens.

^ What She Said!

You can't make an actuary chart using anecdotal information. You take how many thousands obese ppl die of heart attacks etc, compared to the same number of ppl on low fat diets. That is were the statistics come from.

Yeah I'm sure you can find an occasional obese 100-year-old. My great grandfather who died in the late 1930s was 100 and fat AND he did it the hard way - eating lard all his life. But that is anecdotal. Who knows, had he eaten healthy he may have made it to 110.

Much is tied in to genetics and how well our bodies process foods.

Myself, I don't eat that healthy, and my "bad cholesterol" ~ though it's okay ~ is not where my doctor wants it. And yet I've always had very low triglycerides. Go figure.

My father had a massive heart-attack in '51 and was given only months to live. No stints or bypass (thought he got a pacemaker in the 60's), and he lived another 20 years.

And that's the point, we like to think that a long life is guaranteed if we 'follow the rules' that the doctors have, but it isn't. So while I'm all for eating healthy, you have to eat something real too; if you think about it, they've got it fixed so everything except about tofu and bean sprouts is bad for you in one way or another, so what're you supposed to eat?

Think about it, for breakfast they say no eggs, cholesterol, no butter, fat, no sausages or bacon, cancer, no bread, weight gain, no cereals with more than 5 grams of sugar, and then who's going to eat that? About the only thing that leaves that you can eat in the morning is oatmeal, but then what do you put on your oatmeal? Sugar, white sugar, brown sugar, some kind of sugar, I don't know anybody that just eats plain oatmeal. The only time plain oatmeal is good is in cookies!

You go through the list of foods that everybody eats and most of it doctors can find something unhealthy about: potato salad, fried chicken, hot dogs, pizza, hamburgers, French fries, ice cream, potato chips, tacos, burritos, etc. And now, if it's not weight, they say citrus fruits which are supposed to be good for you are bad for your teeth. Eating has become a catch-22 just about, and for what?

On one hand some people would consider any kind of a life to be good so long as you have life, but then what's the point in living long if you can't enjoy it? And we don't eat just for the sake of staying alive, we eat stuff we enjoy, that tastes good and that according to doctors, is bad for us. And we don't always exercise as much as we should and we probably don't work all of our muscles to their full potential like some people do/did, like Jack LaLane, but the fact remains a lot of other people made it to 96, the same age as he did, without giving up sugar and dairy for 84 years either.

So many people put a value on thinness, losing weight, etc., saying that THIS will help you live longer, MAYBE, and maybe not. Eating healthy is okay but I have a big problem with all these ads they have that make it sound like you're a bad person with no regards for your health if you have a brownie or a candy bar or a donut. My mother's always saying if you can't have ONE brownie, what is the point? And I agree, there has to be a 'healthy' balance somewhere but the bottom line is nobody knows when our time's going to come, or how it will, so I can't see any point in killing ourselves for the sake of being healthy.

Shale wrote:^ What She Said!

You can't make an actuary chart using anecdotal information. You take how many thousands obese ppl die of heart attacks etc, compared to the same number of ppl on low fat diets. That is were the statistics come from.

Yeah I'm sure you can find an occasional obese 100-year-old. My great grandfather who died in the late 1930s was 100 and fat AND he did it the hard way - eating lard all his life. But that is anecdotal. Who knows, had he eaten healthy he may have made it to 110.

^ Yeah. What he said she said. George Burns made it to 100 and you never saw him without a cigar.

In my opinion, a good doctor/health professional will preach moderation instead of abstinence when it comes to the "bad" stuff. It is idealistic to think people are not going to eat something "sassy" once in a while. People who truly believe it is only ok to eat the very bland basic stuff are not being logical.