Lynn’s path to beING healthy

I was born in 1940 in Queens [New York City] and stayed there until 1963. 

It was a cleaner NY than it is now and we had a back yard where, like all others, my mother put chemicals on the food she grew to keep the bugs from eating it. 

I had airplanes flying overhead daily as we were in a flight path for Idlewild [now JFK], we had a coal furnace converted at one point to oil, with asbestos all over that furnace and in all the insulation.  My parents smoked and I smoked at 16.  [I quit in January, 1963] 

But the food we ate, chemicals and all, was nutritious enough to counter a lot of the pollution and the other bad stuff.  And I also have half a set of pretty good genes.  My mom died at age 95; my father at 56.

Up to 1950 there were local farms nearby and small mom and pop stores that sold local food and meat.  Even the “chain” stores were more local.  The fruit and vegetables we ate were vine ripened and so for my first 10 years I ate nutritious food. 

Then the post WWII boom started and houses went up all over my Queens neighborhood and that started the housing march all the way to the tip of Long island.  The farms disappeared – but we saw that as progress.  

Fast forward to 1963.  I arrive in Boston and Adele Davis books become the eating bibles for many of my friends and me.  We buy the vitamins and supplements that she suggests and mix the healthy concoctions.   

My friends and I are healthy – but we are called weirdos by others who were claiming that they got all the nutrition they needed from the food they ate.  Others were saying that their physicians told them we don’t need vitamins – all we need do is eat a balanced diet.   As many of my good friends were med students – I knew they got only a short lecture on nutrition in med school so I never trusted an MD to talk to me about nutrition… 

Forward to the later 60’s early 70's and I am now a "real Psychologist" and the buzz is about ADD/ADHD… My psychologist friends and I suggest the researchers look at diet [food dyes, preservatives and other “things” now appearing in food] as possible causes.  But the mantra was prescribe Ritalin!  If it works – that’s all we need to know – <you weirdos>

Jump ahead a decade and I have a son when I am 38½-years-old.  That was considered a high-risk pregnancy back then…it still is.  No real problems and I deliver a healthy baby who grew up with my style of cooking, eating and supplementing.  [Admittedly, for too many years we did what I now think was “too much” fast food as I was a single parent, then in law school….and then life…etc.]

We live in D.C. where the air is dirty and the water system was often on a "don’t drink it" alert.  I tended to filter my water anyway as I don’t like the smell and taste of chlorine but it was the tap water I filtered.  We shop at a local farmers market and I am still buying vitamins and supplements from catalogues. 

Next-to-last fast forward and I am back in New England.  A friend from my Boston days lives nearby and introduces me to a new company that produces supplements.  

I try them and 13 years later I am still taking them.  Why?  I did my own due diligence and found the company produces products that are what I call  “the food we don’t get in food anymore." 

Last fast forward to today where I am happily living in Oregon in a floating home on the Columbia River -  biking, kayaking, skiing, running, dog walking and in great shape.

And – if you do the arithmetic – you'll learn that I am over 70 .