While I was at the airport waiting to board the plane to Orlando, I returned a call from my friend Wendy. She read a couple passages to me from a Wendell Berry book she's been reading. I've thought about the quotes several times since.
To my absolute delight, she posted her thoughts and one of the quotes on her blog.
In case you don't make it to her blog, here's the part that I really want to share:
FROM WENDY:
I borrowed another Berry book of essays from my brother, and in the preface, he addreses the way in which this new age has affected the way we bring up our children. He writes (tongue in cheek):
"The main thing is, don't let education get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don't stay home with them and get in their way. Don't give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don't teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts."
***
This is exactly what I needed to unclog the drain that has been my writing brain tonight.
I discovered The Blue Zones this weekend on NPR. It's a book written by Dan Buettner about people groups (that he discovered with the help of National Geogrpahic) who live the longest, healthiest lives. What impressed me most were the things the author Dan Buettner said about Seventh-Day Adventists in his "Morning Edition" interview:
"In the United States, there's at least one Blue Zone, a small area about 60 miles outside of Los Angeles. Buettner describes the Loma Linda zone as more of a cultural Blue Zone than a geographical one, and says it has the highest concentration of Adventists anywhere.
He says their plant-based diet is inspired directly from the Bible — the book of Genesis tells of God providing his people with grains and seeds — and that every week, they take a Sabbath Saturday they call the "sanctuary in time."
"No matter how busy, no matter how stressed out they are, they'll take that 24 hours and focus on their God," Buettner says. He also points out that most of the Adventists he interviewed said 90 percent of their immediate friends are also Adventists, so their social circle is very much supportive of their cultural habits.
Although the aging process isn't fully understood, scientists do know that there's a complex interplay of genetics and the environment that factors into health and longevity. And Buettner says he was able to identify shared patterns among people who live in Blue Zones.
"They didn't take any supplements or pills or wine extracts," he says. "They tended to live in houses and environments that nudged them into bursts of physical activity in kind of an effortless way.
A couple of things that I need to get out of my head and into some type of written form:
Supplements (in my opinion, of course, this whole blog is my opinion) are unnecessary and can sometimes be harmful. That includes vitamins (most of which are synthetic anyway), expensive juices (that have to be pasteurized in order to maintain a shelf life--and you should know by know how I feel about pasteurization), and health-claim-laden bottles of cure-yourself-of-nearly-any-ailment-BS. Whatever.
We live in such a "take a pill and relieve your symptoms" society that we actually have to fight thousands of messages a day just to get back to "eat real food." Which brings me to this thought:
WHAT IF meat and dairy and salt and fat and even cooked foods are not to blame for heart disease? WHAT IF processed, packaged, convenience foods are to blame? Did you know that before 1900, heart disease was nearly non-existent? Diabetes, obesity, cancer . . . all extremely unusual. Today we face a diseased culture of epidemic proportions. Did our ancestors eat meat and dairy and salt and fat? Most certainly. Did one in three suffer from heart disease or obesity or diabetes? Absolutely not.
Convenience is killing us. Remote controls so you don't have to get up from the couch and turn on the television? The Seventh-day Adventists in CA that were featured in The Blue Zones INTENTIONALLY set up their lives so that they move more. They pursue activity. They embrace it. They understand the need for it. They're healthy and living long lives.
I've stopped looking for the nearest parking space. I purposely live in a house with stairs. I enjoy push-mowing my lawn. I took a 3-mile hike in the woods with my kids today. I'm more active today than I was 8-10 years ago. I'm also a heck of a lot healthier. I haven't been to a general practitioner since my first year of marriage almost nine years ago. I don't take any prescription meds. I don't take any meds, period.
I want to know what truly healthy people are doing to maintain their health. I've begun research truly wealthy people, too. And now I feel as though I'm ready to share the thoughts I've been wanting to share all along. This is quite a preface.
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