HEALTHY AT 100 by John Robbins (but I'd settle for 80-ish)

So now it's happened: I've officially entered middle age because I'm reading books with titles like this one. Most of us don't aspire to living a full century, but seeing what certain diet and lifestyle choices have wrought on the health of my parents' generation, I'm definitely interested in improving the odds for staying well and lucid (please the gods) while I AM here.

Some of you may be familiar with John Robbins, the presumed heir to the Baskin-Robbins empire who gave up his keys to the kingdom when he concluded that all that fat and sugar might not really be enhancing people's lives in the long run. Me, I'm all for a little fat and sugar and I like to eat the occasional animal, too, but this book still had plenty to offer me.

Robbins begins with several chapters about cultures where healthy longevity has been the rule, rather than the exception, and tries to identify what they have in common in terms of diet, activity and social connections. The rest of the book attempts to translate those elements into some workable suggestions that we might incorporate into modern American life. I greatly appreciated his refusal to romanticize these cultures. Instead, he uses their stories to illustrate the point that old age doesn't necessarily have to be what we've come to expect of it.

Obviously, there is no guarantee implicit in this book. But somewhere between the common belief that decrepitude is part of aging (so just accept it) and the equally irrational hope that we can defeat the aging process with the right "recipe," there is a truth. It is that we can educate ourselves about how to best care for our bodies and our minds and then know that, whatever comes, we have lived our lives as well as we could for as long as we could. I think I'd like to start that right now.

~Michelle