Just as a follow-up to my post yesterday about Dr. DeBakey. He was asked about his “secret” for not only long life, but for mental and physical fitness. His answer was eating “a lot of good salads,” intellectual stimulation, and sleeping only 4 or 5 hours a night.

Interesting. He said that he ate sparingly, and mostly salads. I don’t know if he was a vegan or vegetarian, but it sounded like he was close. He rarely drank, and never smoked.

I would be a zombie on that little sleep, but I guess for some people, too much sleep is as bad as too little. It was what his body needed and he went with it. Mother Theresa also rarely turned in before midnight, and was usually up by about 4am to pray and get started on her day.

Keeping the mind active–yes, I’ve read that before. When the brain becomes stagnant, it begins to decay. I see it in people in the 20s and 30s, who do little more than work at a dull job, and go home and watch mindless sitcoms on TV. A nurse I worked with once proudly boasted that she hadn’t been inside a library since nursing school. As if shutting down the mind was something to be proud of.

From his work schedule, it doesn’t sound like Dr. DeBakey got too much physical activity, although standing on your feet operating for hours at a time does take stamina. And he was doing surgery up until the age of 90, which means he was basically free from the tremors that you often see in older people, and his motor skills were still sharp enough to wield a scalpel.

So if you think that ticking off the years means eventual confinement to a nursing home, being bent over with arthritis and popping a thousand prescription pills again, read about the life of this man. Then start cleaning up your diet, start reading, join a club, get online and converse with people who have thoughts to share, and find a goal to live for. That seems to be the key to staving off what we consider the “normal” consequences of old age.