Food and nutrition for healthy aging: my approach

I always enjoy a healthy home-cooked meal! Here I am helping my daughter shell peas from her garden in Maine!

I like all kinds of food and I love desserts. And I’ve been that way all my life. In the very beginning, living on a farm, we had a variety of food and lots of it, fresh and healthy. Homemade everything, lots of baked things, rhubarb pie, you name it. Big family parties with all kinds of fancy little things to nibble on that I don’t see these days.

Then I went away to university and things changed. I washed dishes in a boarding house for girls and in exchange got free meals. Meals there were actually very good. Then my own family life began and for me it continued on for about thirty years or so. And all the amazing food we had as a family, almost everything homemade and delicious.  Very seldom did we ever eat out.

Food, though, has always been a secondary consideration for me. I like just about everything and I’m not fussy. I like blueberries and other berries and have some almost every day. And I have always believed that a meal has to have a dessert and my favorite is ice cream. So that sort of sums up the subject of food.

There is, though, one other thing that happened many years ago, that actually might account for something today.

"... a gorgeous lady with movie star complexion announced with a flourish that she’d just returned from another trip to Italy to see a famous physician who had discovered the 'fountain of youth'."

Just around the time when I realized at age 30 or so that I should do something about being fit and healthy, we were invited to a society black-tie event with a Lester Lanin-style dance band, a grand piano, on the balcony of a magical castle overlooking a big city. We met a gorgeous lady with movie star complexion who announced with a flourish she’d just returned from another trip to Italy to see a famous physician who had discovered the “fountain of youth”.

He had told her about certain vitamins called “antioxidants” that she had to take. At that time very few if anyone knew what an antioxidant was. I certainly didn’t.

Antioxidants and a few supplements and vitamins have been part of my health-care routine for decades.

But the next day I bought Vitamin E, Vitamin C, Vitamin D3, and a multi-vitamin and have been taking them every day since 1964, that’s about 60 years. That was supposed to be the “fountain of youth”! I’ve added several other vitamins since then.

I have no idea if that has had anything to do with my generally good health over the years. But I’ve always thought it was a pretty good story!