How to Live to a Hundred. Ian Durham
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Название: How to Live to a Hundred
Автор: Ian Durham
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Контркультура
isbn: 9781974994311
isbn:
Wales
Merthyr
I started my search in Merthyr, in the valleys of South Wales. It’s the town where I was born and raised and where much of my family still live today—although, as my family name, Chiappa, suggests, Merthyr is not where we came from. My family moved here from Italy more than 50 years ago to set up in business, and a thing they always talk about is how similar the Welsh and the Italian people are. We both love food, family, and community. But one thing has definitely changed in 50 years, and that is how long we can expect to live.
During my lifetime, life expectancy in Italy has risen by an average of 15 years. And while the same is true of the more prosperous parts of Wales, many towns and valleys throughout South Wales have life expectancies which rank among the lowest in Western Europe.
(Image -Google Maps)
People from Merthyr will live on average ten years less than people living in the country’s capital, Cardiff. What’s causing this? Outliers like Doris Griffiths aside, the statistics are not encouraging: Wales is the most overweight nation in Europe with the highest rates of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. I began my quest to discover the secrets of a longer life by looking at the human face of the problems that prevent us from living longer.
Lee and Leanne Tandem: Dangerous Temptations
I started with Lee and Leanne Tandem. They live with their son, Adam, and six-month-old daughter, Maisy, near Pontypridd in the Rhondda Valley of Wales. Lee works full-time, while Leanne is currently on maternity leave. Both are in their thirties and both are worried about their health. Like the majority of us, they try to eat well. But the combination of a hard-working, busy lifestyle and the temptations of fast food and convenience foods is strong.
“Leanne and I met in a weight-loss group,” Lee said. “We were both doing really, really well. I’d lost almost 30 pounds, and Leanne had lost more than 40. And then we got together, and we got too comfortable, with cozy nights in with carryout and chocolate in front of movies. Well, as for me, I’ve put it all back on and more. We’re both to blame, really,” he admitted. “We’d both be slim now if we hadn’t met, probably!”
Leanne agrees. “You know how it is. You start feeling a bit comfortable with each other. We started eating more fast food and not really sticking to plan. It kind of escalated from there, really. Our lifestyle isn’t very good. To be fair, we could probably do with a bit more exercise.”
“I’ve got a very bad relationship with food,” Lee admits. “Food is something I’ve enjoyed very much—maybe too much—from quite a young age. I suppose food was my first love.”
It’s not that the Tandems can’t cook. They can, and they do rustle up whole meals from scratch. (I watched Lee make some delicious looking egg salad sandwiches.) It’s just that, like so many of us, they regularly fall back on the easier options.
Pulling out items from the Tandem’s freezer, Lee showed me a few of the processed foods they buy. “Hash Browns, Turkey drumsticks, ice cream bars… We eat a lot of processed foods—not proud of it. I like processed food, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not good, and I don’t like giving it to the kids. I like to . . .” and here he had to stop and take a breath. “I’m a bit out of breath just from bending over and wrestling with the packaging. It’s not good.”
Leanne and Lee can cook, but like many of us, life often gets in the way of a healthy diet. Their story definitely spurred me on my journey of discovery. Lee also confided that health problems run in his family. “My father’s side of the family, there’s diabetes, and my dad suffers from angina, on top of a ton of other things. My mom’s had two heart attacks over the last 10 years. I just feel like I could be a bit of a ticking time bomb. I could have a heart attack any day, and I really need to do something to make sure I don’t. My lifestyle has to change.”
La Dolce Vita, or Temptations within Limitations
Is the answer to a long and healthy life really just a matter of cutting out fast food, processed food, and sugary treats? Well, if you’re doing it to excess, absolutely. But by the same token, I am unconvinced that a life of vegetables and salad is a surefire recipe for reaching 100. My family always indulges in a little of la dolce vita. Cakes, cream, mascarpone, wine, pasta, cheese—we’ve never overdone it, but we regularly partake of rich foods a little bit, without any real harm. Reaching our 80s and 90s is a common feature with us Chiappas. So I believe occasionally indulging in rich foods is definitely one of the ingredients in the longevity recipe.
But the only way to begin to work out the true secrets of longevity is to go straight to the source, as it were. Since life is too short to visit all 679 centenarians currently living in Wales, I decided to visit three: Doris Griffiths, Eric Jones and Ronald Prince.
Doris Griffiths: Living Is Easy If You’re Willing to Do It
For Doris, I made my grandmother (Nonna)’s very special crostata recipe. It’s basically a jam tart, but it’s a dish my Nonna always used to have in her kitchen. It was like magic: the minute the last slice would go, another would appear. It was something she always had there on the side for anybody, child or adult: a sweet treat with a cup of tea. Her house was never without a sweet tart or a cake, always home-baked, never store bought, always with homemade jams from well-worn family recipes that I’ll be handing down to my children as they were handed down to me.
As I brought my crostata to Doris Griffiths’ 105th birthday party, it was no surprise to find that, just like my Nonna, Doris has always enjoyed a regular slice of something sweet. Watching her at the party, sprightly and engaged in her surroundings, I wondered if longevity is simply predestined, written in our genes—so I was surprised to learn that Doris was the only one of five children to survive miscarriage and infant death. Educated at Gnoll School in Neath, she entered domestic service at the age of 14 and spent the next 51 years working as a cleaner, a receptionist, and in the kitchens back at her old school. She married Ivor at age 21 and had the first of her four children at 25. Outside of work and family, her life revolved around the chapel where she sang and became a Sunday-school teacher. After her husband passed away in 1976, Doris continued to live in their home for the next 39 years, right up until last year. In every particular, in her life and her upbringing, her story is echoed in any home in any town in the Welsh valleys. So what made Doris the rare exception who made it to this incredible age? I asked her.
“I don’t know if there’s any secret,” she told me. “I live quite cheap and easy. I have what I want to eat, and my favorite breakfast is a nice bit of toast. Sometimes I have a bit of cheese with it, or an egg. Anything goes with me! I eat quite a bit, always at mealtimes. I don’t eat between meals at all; that would be very rare for me.”
I asked her to elaborate. “And your support networks, your family, your friends. Having people that can help you and you can depend on. Do you think that’s an important thing?”