Simple and healthy lifesytle - John Robbins interview

[Guest guest]

John Robbins (son of Irv Robbins - co-founder of Baskin Robins) sharing his views on living healthy. Makes a point about leading a simple and healthy lifesytle with positive attitude. Article links (full article pasted below):

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/08/22/103506.php and http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/08/22/214327.php

 

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Author John Robbins discusses aging and remaining healthy. His book, Healthy At 100, is now available in paperback.

With the publication of several notable books — Healthy at 100, Diet for a New America, Reclaiming Our Health, and The Food Revolution — you are an authority on living a longer and healthier life. You also come from the Baskin-Robbins ice cream family. How has your family responded to your work and to your life choices? Starting from scratch, my father (Irv Robbins) and my uncle (Burt Baskin) were extraordinarily successful. The company they founded and ran, Baskin-Robbins (31 Flavors), became the world's largest ice cream company, with many thousands of stores worldwide and annual sales measured in the billions of dollars. We had an ice-cream-cone shaped swimming pool in our backyard, my pets were named after ice cream flavors, and I must have eaten hundreds of gallons of ice cream.

When people nowadays hear that I no longer eat ice cream, they sometimes feel sorry for me. "Please don't," I tell them. "I ate enough ice cream during my childhood for twenty lifetimes." Sometimes I ate ice cream for breakfast.

It was my father's dream that I would someday join him in running the business, and from my earliest childhood he set about grooming me to follow in his footsteps. But when my uncle, Burt Baskin, was only 54 years old he died of a heart attack. A large man, he had always enjoyed the family product. I asked my dad if he thought the amount of ice cream my uncle ate might have contributed to his fatal heart attack. "No," my father said. "His ticker just got tired and stopped working."

I understand why my father would not have wanted to consider the possibility that ice cream might have been involved. By this point he had manufactured and sold more ice cream than any human being who had ever lived on this planet. He didn't want to think that ice cream was harming anyone, much less that it might have contributed to the death of his beloved brother-in-law and partner. Besides, not much was commonly known then, in the late 1960s, about the connection between ice cream and disease.

But I saw the connection, as I did when my dad developed diabetes and high blood pressure, and again years later when Ben Cohen, co-founder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's, needed a quintuple bypass procedure at the age of forty-nine.

A single ice cream cone, of course, isn't going to harm anyone. But even though it tastes delicious, ice cream is very high in sugar and saturated fat. The medical data is overwhelmingly clear that the more sugar and saturated fat you eat, the more likely you are to experience heart disease and diabetes and to become obese.

My father had achieved the American dream, in the material sense. But I was called forth by a different longing. Having enough money so that you can meet your basic needs is necessary and important, but there are other things that also matter a great deal. I wanted to see if I could be part of making the world a healthier place. I wanted my steps to be guided by a reverence for life.

Along with many Americans in the 1960s, I was part of the civil rights movement. I marched and worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I loved and admired him immensely. When this apostle of peace and love was murdered, I felt as though a bullet had gone through my heart, too.

Along with Dr. King and many other Americans, I abhorred the violence and insanity of the war in Vietnam. Only a few months after Dr. King was killed, another man whom many of us viewed as a bringer of hope, Robert F. Kennedy, was also assassinated. These were very dark times, and I was ï¬lled with despair. In a world that seemed increasingly adrift in violence, cynicism, hopelessness, and fear, I wanted desperately to ï¬nd a path to sanity and love. I wanted to be part of a fundamental global transformation, and although I didn't know exactly how to go about a task so huge and idealistic, I did know that, for me, making and selling ice cream was not part of it.

I did not ï¬nd it easy, however, to explain my thoughts and feelings to my father, a conservative businessman who was proud of the many things his great wealth enabled him to buy, and who never to my knowledge went a day without reading The Wall Street Journal. He had come of age during the Great Depression of the 1930s, while I was becoming an adult in the 1960s. Our lives were shaped by very different times. "It's a different world now than when you grew up," I told him. "The environment is deteriorating rapidly under the impact of human activities. Every two seconds a child somewhere dies of hunger while elsewhere there are abundant resources going to waste. The gap between the rich and the poor is increasing. We live now under a nuclear shadow, and at any moment the unspeakable could happen. Can you see that inventing a thirty-second flavor would not be an adequate response for my life?"

This was very difficult for my father. Having worked hard his whole life, he had attained an extraordinary level of ï¬nancial success, and he very much wanted to share his achievements with his only son. He thought I was being hopelessly idealistic, and he warned me sternly that idealists end up poor and miserable. But I did not feel drawn to the life he wanted me to follow. Whether it was hopelessly idealistic or not, I wanted to be part of the effort to bring about a more compassionate and healthy world. I felt called to take a stand for a thriving, just, and sustainable way of life for all.

 

Under the circumstances, I decided that the most courageous and life-affirming thing to do was to walk away from the family business and to leave behind all connection to my family's fortune. This felt like the most honest and liberating choice I could make. It was a choice for my integrity.

It was not a choice, however, that my father could then understand. Sadly, it was a source of distance in our relationship. He did not appreciate the path I was taking, and could not grasp why I would refuse the golden opportunity he was offering me.

I hated disappointing him, but I had to be true to myself. In 1969, my wife, Deo, and I moved to a remote part of a little island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, where we built a one-room log cabin in which we lived for the next ten years. We grew most of our own food, and our gardens were totally organic. The money we needed came from the yoga and meditation classes I taught. We were ï¬nancially poor, in many years spending less than a thousand dollars, but we didn't need a lot. We were profoundly in love. Our time was our own. And we were learning a lot about growing food, about healing, and about ourselves.

In 1973, four years into our time on the island, our son, Ocean, was born, at home and into my hands. As he grew up we continued to spend very little money, so that we could have time for each other and the other things that mattered to us. We understood what Thoreau meant by "I make myself rich by making my wants few." We celebrated simplicity.

As Ocean grew up I naturally had expectations for him, but more important to me than whether he lived up to them was that he be able to listen to himself well enough to know when my expectations were in alignment with his destiny and when they were not. The last thing I wanted to do was to tyrannize him with my own fears and unfulfilled wishes. What mattered was not whether he disappointed me, but that he not betray his own soul.

Eventually we moved back to California, and several of my books about healing ourselves and healing our world became bestsellers giving us some measure of ï¬nancial security. The press took to calling me things like "the rebel without a cone" and "the prophet of nonprofit."

Meanwhile, my father, on account of his diabetes and high blood pressure, was beginning to make major changes in his diet. Gradually he gave up eating ice cream or any other form of sugar, and he greatly decreased his intake of meat. As a result, his health improved dramatically. He liked reminding me that he was "not a card-carrying vegetarian," but he was beginning to have far more respect for the lifestyle choices I had made and the work I was doing.

A year or so after my grand-twins were born, my parents, now in their mid-eighties, came to visit us and stayed for a few days. They saw our three-generation household living together in ways that they were not accustomed to. They watched as we all shared in the joys and challenges of caring for the babies, and saw how we sought to respond to the little ones' special needs with patience and kindness.

The babies, who had been born extremely prematurely, had spent nearly the ï¬rst two months of their lives in a hospital's neonatal intensive care unit, and they had come home from the hospital fragile and terrified of life. Babies born that early are often exceedingly touch-averse. We had been warned by doctors that they might never respond normally to human contact. Our response was to hold the little ones in continuous skin-to-skin contact with us virtually twenty-four hours a day, even allowing them to sleep on our bodies at night. My parents — who were products of a time when beliefs prevailed like "Spare the rod and you'll spoil the child" and "Don't pick up babies or you'll spoil them" — saw how we provided the babies with endless opportunities for physical connection. And they observed the results — the twins were growing into joyful, curious little guys who loved being cuddled.

I expected it to be difficult for my parents to see the very different way we were raising these little ones, and also for them to see how in our home the men as well as the women changed diapers, cleaned house, and made the meals. Perhaps because they were nearing the end of their lives, they seemed more accepting of our differences than I had experienced them before. I didn't realize, though, how deep the acceptance went. At one point, my father took me aside.

"When you left Baskin-Robbins," he reminisced, "I thought you were crazy."

"Yes," I replied. "I remember."

"Well," he said, speaking more slowly now and turning to face me, "I see that time has proved you were right to follow your own star." Hearing him speak this way, I felt, perhaps for the first time, his blessing on my life.

 

Why did you write your latest book, Healthy at 100?

Every one of us, growing older. This is true in every country and among every people throughout the world, but the way different cultures have responded to this reality has varied widely.

For many of us in the industrialized world today, our aging is a source of grief and anxiety. We fear aging. The elderly people we see are for the most part increasingly senile, frail, and unhappy. As a result, rather than looking forward to growing old, we dread each passing birthday. Rather than seeing our later years as a time of harvesting, growth, and maturity, we fear that the deterioration of our health will so greatly impair our lives that to live a long life might be more of a curse than a blessing.

When we think of being old, our images are often ones of decrepitude and despair. It seems more realistic to imagine ourselves languishing in nursing homes than to picture ourselves swimming, gardening, laughing with loved ones, and delighting in children and nature.

In 2005, famed American author Hunter S. Thompson took his life. He was only sixty-seven, and had no incurable disease. He was wealthy and famous, and his 32-year-old wife loved him. But according to the literary executor of Thompson's will, " he made a conscious decision that he ... wasn't going to suffer the indignities of old age. "

It doesn't help to live in a society where there is so little respect for the elderly. Television shows and movies frequently portray older people as feeble, unproductive, grumpy, and stubborn. Advertisements selling everything from alcohol to cars feature beautiful young people, giving the impression that older people are irrelevant. Colloquialisms such as " geezer, " " old fogey, " " old maid, " " dirty old man, " and " old goat " demean the elderly and perpetuate a stereotype of older people as unworthy of consideration or positive regard.

Greeting card companies routinely sell birthday cards that mock the mobility, intellect, and sex drive of the no longer young. Novelty companies sell " Over-the-Hill " products such as ï¬ftieth birthday cofï¬n gift boxes containing prune juice and a " decision maker to assist in planning daily activities " (a large six-sided die, with sides labeled " nap, " " TV, " " shopping, " etc.). Gifts for a man's sixtieth birthday include a " lifetime supply " of condoms (one), Over-the-Hill bubble bath (canned beans), and " Old Fart " party hats.

We may chuckle at such humor, but negative stereotypes about aging are insidious. They attach a social stigma to aging that can affect your will to live and even shorten your life. In a study published by the American Psychological Association, Yale School of Public Health professor Becca Levy, Ph.D., concluded that even if you are not aware of them, negative thoughts about aging that you pick up from society can undermine your health and have destructive consequences.

In the study, a large number of middle-aged people were interviewed six times over the course of twenty years and asked whether they agreed with such statements as " As you get older, you are less useful. " Remarkably, the perceptions held by people about aging proved to have more impact on how long they would live than did their blood pressure, their cholesterol level, whether they smoked, or whether they exercised. Those people who had positive perceptions of aging lived an average of 7.5 years longer than those with negative images of growing older.

I asked a friend recently how he thought he might age. " I'll probably end up in a nursing home somewhere, " he replied with some bitterness, " with a feeding tube in my nose, staring at the acoustic squares in the ceiling, incontinent, impotent, and impoverished. " Sadly, such views are not unusual. I've seen bumper stickers that say " Avenge Yourself: Live Long Enough to Become a Burden to Your Children. " When you distrust the aging process, it's hard to imagine yourself enjoying your older years, doing things like dancing, jogging, or hiking. It can be difficult even to consider the possibility that you might, during every phase of your lifetime, have the capacity for growth, change, and creativity.

It has been said that we can destroy ourselves with negativity just as effectively as with bombs. If we see only the worst in ourselves, it erodes our capacity to act. If, on the other hand, we are drawn forward by a positive vision of how we might live, we can shrug off the cynicism that has become fashionable today and build truly healthy lives. It is extraordinarily important for us today to replace the prevailing image and reality of aging with a new vision — one in which we grasp the possibility of living all our days with exuberance and passion. There are few things of greater consequence today than for us to bring our lives into alignment with our true potential for health and our dreams for a better tomorrow.

It is a loss that our medical model has been so focused on illness rather than wellness. Until recently, there has been so much preoccupation with disease that little attention has been paid to the characteristics that enable people to lead long and healthy lives and to be energetic and independent in their elder years. As a result, few of us in the modern world are aware that there have been, and still are, entire cultures in which the majority of people live passionately and vibrantly to the end. Few of us realize that there are in fact societies of people who look forward to growing old, knowing they will be healthy, vital, and respected.

There are many people today who want to live in harmony with their bodies and the natural forces of life. You may be one of them. If so, it's helpful to understand that you are not alone, and that you have elders from whom you can learn how to accomplish your goals. There are cultures whose ways have stood the test of time that can stand as teachers on the path of wellness and joy. There are whole populations of highly spirited, vigorous people who are healthy in their seventies, eighties, nineties, even healthy at a hundred. What's more, they have a great deal in common, and their secrets have been corroborated and to a large extent explained by many of the latest ï¬ndings in medical science. New research is showing that we have all the tools to live longer lives and to remain active, productive, and resourceful until the very end.

This is good and hopeful news. It offers us a much-needed paradigm of aging as a period of wisdom and vitality. Through these healthy cultures, we can ï¬nd a compelling vision of how to mature with pleasure, dignity, purpose, and love. We are being shown that something precious is possible--a far brighter future in which aging is enjoyable and desirable. And we are being shown the practical steps we can take to achieve it.

Aging, of course, is not something that begins on your sixty-ï¬fth birthday. Who you will become in your later years is shaped by all the choices you make, all the ways you care for yourself, how you manage your life, even how you think, from your earliest years, about your future. I wrote Healthy at 100 because I have seen too many people grow old in agony and bitterness while others grow old with vitality and beauty, and I know it is possible to age with far more vigor, happiness, and inner peace than is the norm in the Western world today.

What did you learn that surprised you?No one familiar with my earlier work will be surprised that I am interested in how our diets and exercise can help us to live long and healthy lives. But they may be surprised by some of my ï¬ndings, including the great emphasis I am now placing on strong social connections. I have learned that the quality of the relationships we have with other people makes a tremendous difference to our physical as well as emotional health. Loneliness, I discovered in my research, can kill you faster than cigarettes. And by the same token, intimate relationships that are authentic and life-afï¬rming can have enormous and even miraculous healing powers.

What can readers of Healthy at 100 expect to get out of the book?

 

In Healthy at 100 you will gain clarity about the various essential steps you can take to extend both your life span and your health span dramatically. Reading this book will not only help you add many years to your life, but also help make those added years — and indeed all your remaining years — ones in which you experience the blossoming of your ï¬nest and wisest self.

Even if you've eaten poorly and have not taken very good care of yourself, even if you've had more than your share of hardships and pain, Healthy at 100 will show you how the choices you make today and tomorrow can greatly improve your prospects for the future. It will give you a chance to right any wrongs you've committed against your body. You'll see how to regain the strength and passion for life that you may have thought were gone forever.

Whether you are in your twenties or your eighties or somewhere in between, whether you consider yourself superbly ï¬t or hopelessly out of shape, I believe you'll ï¬nd in these pages what you need in order to regenerate rather than degenerate as the years unfold. This book will show you how to regain, and to retain, more mental clarity, physical strength, stamina, and joy.

I have written Healthy at 100 to offer you ways to enhance and improve both the quality and quantity of your remaining years. In this book are steps you can take to shatter stereotypes and misconceptions about aging and to rejuvenate your mind and body. Here are practices you can start today in order to live with greater health and joy no matter what your age.

In our youth-oriented culture, aging is often a source of great suffering. Older people frequently start to see themselves as collections of symptoms rather than whole human beings. But it doesn't have to be that way. It is within your grasp to realize the opportunities for beauty, love, and fulï¬llment that occur at every stage of your life. It is possible to live your whole life with a commitment to your highest good. I have written Healthy at 100 so that you can learn how to make each and every one of the years of your life more full of vitality and joy, and more worth living, than you may ever have imagined.