>>A lifelong, mostly vegetarian diet of all-natural,
>>organic, pesticide free grains and green vegetables
>>stunted her growth to the point that her twelve year
>>old granddaughter stands a head taller than she.
>>Decades of wholesome physical labor, stooped over rows
>>of rice plants in the fields outlying our town bent
>>her spine so that she walks in a permanent crouch,
>>like a beetle. I've never seen her stand up straight.
>> I don't think she can anymore.
>>
Joanna replied:
This is silly. I know plenty of vegeterians who are neither short nor
stunted, who are quite healthy and long lived.
snip...
**************** Oh yeah...just caught up with my e-mail....and the reason why the Vietnamese Communist Party rules Vietnam is because they lost the war. And the Germans lost WWII, yet the Euro is stronger than the U.S. Dollar. And the French might just as well have stuck with aristos for rulers 'cause "Plus ca change, plus ce la meme chose"...well maybe.
Anyway, here's something on the subject of diet and longevity which makes sense to me.
Your friendly vegetarian, martial-artist, Mike B)
*****************************************************************************
It's hard to say why people here -- poor, poorly served by medicine and mostly ignorant -- live a long life. They don't eat much, and they work like beasts. Vegetables, fruit and sour cheeses are dietary staples. The water 300 miles south of Baku is as clear as the azure skies. The crisp mountain air seems good enough to eat.
Still, when Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union, doctors descended on the place and took a bunch of blood tests. They found nothing conclusive, and most researchers tend to attribute longevity here to a combination of clean, stress-free living and genes that are programmed to last.
Simplicity might also play a role. Look at Saray Nuriyeva. Her family says she is either 114 or 110; it's not clear from documents, and she is getting a little vague when it comes to dates. She lives in the tiny settlement of Mondiga, five miles straight up into the mountains from Lerik. She has been there her whole life, surrounded by her family, living literally on the border of Iran, a country whose existence she is not aware of.
She does know all about Moscow and Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. But she has never been to either place and says she isn't sad about it. To the degree that a life that started before the Soviet Union existed has been consumed by wars, and consists largely of doing nothing but working and sleeping, can be said to be typical, hers has been.
She was engaged at the age of 9 to a boy from a village a mile away. But a series of blood feuds between the villages lasted two years, so she couldn't marry him until she was 11.
"I came here then," she said, again speaking through a relay of family interpreters, "and I have been here ever since."
She had 10 children, seven of whom are still alive. She still walks outside every day, although she is clearly growing frail. She drinks a lot of milk (it's not yogurt, but it's close) and when she feels bad she chews on local herbs.
She has never taken a pill or a drug in her life, her grandson, Vassim Gabayev, the 77-year-old family spokesman, said.
Her husband and his two brothers left in 1941 to fight in World War II. Each was over 50 at the time; none ever returned. Her first son died in 1990 at the age of 80. Since then two other children have died.
Perhaps not surprisingly, with dozens -- or more -- of people living to 100, younger people in this region sometimes get less attention than perhaps they should.
"Come over here a minute, would you?" Novruz Novruzov, the village mayor, asked of an extremely old woman wrapped entirely in black scarves. The woman hobbled toward him.
"May I see your passport?" he asked. She took out a battered old Soviet document that listed her birth year as 1909, which would mean she's not even 90.
"Oh take it back," he said, abruptly returning the passport. "We don't need you. We're only looking for old people."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company full: http://geog.tamu.edu/sarah/humangeog/longlife.html
****************************************************************** Apes....descend from men? Some of us though so; but it is not exactly that. Apes and men are two separate branches that have evolved from a point in common but in different directions....
P. Boulle, "Planet of the Apes."
http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com