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Healthy Changes
Healthy Changes
by Brewster Martin, MD
If you are almost 40, if you are 40, if you are over 40, you should take three minutes to read this.
Statistically, I should be dead. Obviously I am not. I had a very, very high cholesterol childhood. I was born in 1922, and my parents had a difficult time putting food on the table during the Great Depression. My dad bought a tiny farm. Breakfast was two eggs with bacon or home-made sausage, toast with real butter, followed by a bowl of oatmeal (slowly simmered on top of the wood stove during the night), swimming in whole cream, and topped with maple syrup.
Dinner at night was salt pork with milk gravy, roast pork or roast beef trimmed with all of its fat. Desserts were two-crust pies adorned with home-made ice cream. ’Tis a miracle I did not have a coronary as I was sliding into puberty!
The Air Force, college, medical school ... and because at 129 pounds I could not seem to gain weight, I continued on the tasty road paved with cholesterol.
During my 40th year I attended a World Health Organization meeting in New York City. For the first time we were offered an opportunity to have our blood tested for cholesterol. Mine was over 400 (normal range is under 200). I visited an internist in Burlington. After more tests – three days’ worth to be exact – he handed me his recommendations written in longhand obliquely across a death certificate with the admonition that if I did not heed his advice, he probably would sign his name to a similar document with Brewster D. Martin occupying the top line before I reached the menopausal age of 50.
I must (he said): 1. eat a low-cholesterol diet; 2. stop smoking; 3. engage in daily exercise of 1 hour; 4. have minimal alcohol intake; 5. learn how to handle stress more graciously – talk to a “shrink.”
My God! Dry cereal with blue-white fat-free milk, one egg on Easter morning, chicken without its delicious skin, white fish, green salads with vinegar and olive oil, angel food cake with no frosting, and then some more chicken.
The nicotine stain on my index finger disappeared very quickly. My crotch developed a rash from all the sweat produced by being encased in that synthetic athletic apparel. I was bitchy, depressed, and angry. You try bran muffins until you get diarrhea. You eat so much garlic that you dare not put your head under the covers on a bitter cold night because you can’t stand the smell of your own breath.
Despite all that, my cholesterol really did not fall precipitously until I started taking one of the newer drugs which decrease the amount of cholesterol that your own body manufactures.
I’m alive at a few months shy of 80! Two of my brothers died at 58, my father at 60. ’Tis your life, and I truly believe that we do have some control over our own destinies.
Bon appétit!!
Brewster Martin practiced medicine for 40 years in Chelsea and retired in 1993.