You are what you take.
Take pride, not pills.

By Louise Marley

Yesterday I played golf with a woman who told me, with justifiable pride, that she had recently turned seventy. She's a tall, slender woman with great legs. Her back is straight, her hair is thick, and she laughs a lot. She had no trouble keeping up with me, a mere whippersnapper at 61, dashing back and forth across the fairways.
 
I take issue with the image of all of us, as we age, hobbling the streets with bent spines and slumped shoulders. There are some very real disabilities some aging folks deal with, of course, but for the great majority of us, access to good food, reasonable medical care, and a lot of good health information makes this image a worst-case scenario rather than one to accept as inevitable.
 
My sister Nancy, a longtime ER nurse, tells me she has seen elderly patients come into the emergency room with a list of thirty and even forty prescriptions they're taking. No one is measuring the interaction of these drugs. Every drug has a side effect, and often the side effects are being treated with more drugs, which leads to new side effects, and new prescriptions, endlessly.

Nancy has now rebelled against the practice of illness-based medicine to become a naturopath, treating her patients with diet, supplements and alternative therapies. She's seeing wonderful results, and found a number of her patients reducing their prescriptions to only the necessary. But her services, and those of other naturopaths, aren't covered by Medicare.

My husband and I began counting drug commercials one night as we watched a single television program. During one break there were six in a row, drugs meant for chemo patients, for sexual dysfunction, for urinary problems, for depression, for arthritis. It made my skin crawl. Why are drug companies advertising to consumers? How does any consumer — unless she's a physician — understand what these drugs really do?
 
Allopathic medicine, which means traditional Western medical practice, is based on drug therapies. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is that drug companies fund medical schools. The "big pharma" lobby in Washington is a powerful one, burying natural supplements under lawsuits and restrictions while pushing through certain drugs like Celebrex which are known to harm people. There's not a lot of money in vitamins and minerals, because they can't be patented, unless someone figures out how to lock a patent on Mother Nature.
 
European travelers have noticed that the obesity epidemic plaguing the United States was conspicuous by its absence in France and Italy and England — until the fast food franchises reached those countries. Even now, in Italy, there's a movement called Slow Food, a resistance to the proliferation of McDonald's and Burger King. Slow Fooders eat real food, not food processed until all the flavor and nutritional value is gone. 

Researchers are finding that chemicals from food packages are showing up in American's blood work. That can't be a good thing. It's a truism that the "real food" is found in the outer aisles of the grocery store — vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, and dairy, sold in God's packaging, not plastic and paper and cardboard. 
 
A woman physician friend of mine received a plaque from a patient which she keeps on her wall: "Eat right, exercise, die anyway!" It's true, of course. But eating right and exercising can mean we live pretty darn well up until the inevitable conclusion.

Louise Marley is a novelist. Here's her Website.