Taking Care of Yourself
By Pam Eastlick

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As the Baby Boomers age, more and more of the media’s attention seems to be focused on health issues. There’s more heart disease, more kidney failure, more liver ailments, more diabetes, than there has ever been in human history. Why? Is it air pollution? Toxins in the water? No, there are simply more aging people to develop these conditions than there have ever been.

In ancient times, if a woman didn’t die in childbirth, she likely died of plague, infection, influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria or any of a host of common diseases that either no longer exist today or are easily treatable. One of my favorite strips from the “For Better or For Worse” comic, shows Elly complaining to her friend about the downside of menopause. “How did our ancestors stand it?” she whines. Her friend replies “Most of them didn’t live long enough to have the problem.” And she’s right.

Since so many of us are surviving to old age, we must deal with the problems of an aging body. Seventy or eighty years puts a lot of wear and tear on bones, joints and organs. This is particularly true if the body has endured a lot of abuse like broken bones, hard work and the routine ingestion of toxins.

We blame many of our ills on pollution but many of our health problems are our own fault. For instance, you know what formaldehyde is used for. We all remember those creepy pickled things in the jars in science class. But how many of us know that when your body breaks down ethanol, it converts a significant portion of it to formaldehyde. The liver, the organ that deals with the body’s toxic waste, has to process this formaldehyde and if it’s forced to handle too much, it can be damaged. Ethanol, of course, is the prime ingredient in beer and all other alcoholic drinks. When people say, “He pickled his liver”, they aren’t kidding.

Then, there’s the drugs. And I’m not talking ‘ice’ here. I’m talking about the powerful drugs that many of us get from the doctor. Legally. All the drugs we take every day. The insulin, the heart drugs, the aspirin, the cholesterol drugs. When I look in my own medicine cabinet, I conclude that the war on drugs is over, and the drugs won.

What are all these drugs doing to our bodies? How do the combinations affect us? What if we take over-the-counter drugs or illegal drugs at the same time without telling our doctor? Every week, there’s a new study about how that drug has previously unreported side effects, about how this food contains a substance that’s really bad for you (or perhaps, really good for you), about how bad it is for you to be overweight. We are constantly bombarded by health information, and much of it is conflicting. What is a sane person to do?

Well, for one thing, take charge of your body and educate yourself. Read about diseases and medical conditions and how they affect you. Eat a balanced diet and avoid junk food and alcohol. Remember something very important; you are LITERALLY what you eat. Every cell in your body has to come from somewhere and believe me; they aren’t generated from thin air. Did you really want a body made from rice, finadine, Spam, Budweiser and kelaguen?