Grumpy Cat
01-05-2010, 03:31 AM
LUNENBURG, N.S.–William Walker, debonair in a white shirt, ascot and hand-woven wool sweater, answers the door, cane in hand. He leads his guests into his sitting room, a comfortable nest with a thick carpet, books and paintings of sailing ships, and sits in a well-upholstered, Queen Anne-style chair.
Conversation moves easily from his early years in the Ottawa Valley and his decades-long work as a banker in Montreal. His health is good, he says; his recent trades on the stock market, excellent.
The computer, where he day-trades and keeps an eye on his small portfolio, is in the kitchen, which overlooks postcard-perfect, white-trimmed houses and the deep blue of Lunenburg's harbour.
For a better view, he leads visitors up the stairs to the second storey of his 1840 Wedgwood-blue frame house – with leaded glass windows he made himself. From there he can see the masts of the Bluenose II at anchor.
He does his own cooking and shopping, sometimes with the aid of an electric wheelchair. For lunch he made himself a small steak with carrots, mashed potato. He tries to be active by walking. "The more I exercise, it's better."
He's mentally sharp and has a zest for life – he regrets there wasn't enough time to go to a restaurant for lunch.
In August, Walker will be 102 years old.
Even more astonishing, he lives in a part of Canada, the South Shore of Nova Scotia, with pockets of extreme longevity and more centenarians than elsewhere in the country. Across Canada, centenarians average 14.6 per 100,000; in Nova Scotia it's 21 per 100,000. Preliminary studies have shown the rate is higher in places like Lunenburg and Yarmouth – as many as 50 per 100,000, according to one researcher.
Could it be the fresh sea air, a diet high in fish, a less stressful life, strong social networks, religious faith, a genetic predisposition to longevity, or a combination of all of the above?
Walker himself isn't sure. "There may be some reason I'm hanging on," he says. "I don't think I'm anything special, but I think my grandfather and grandmother gave me pretty good genes." His grandmother lived to 99, and his sister, Dorothy, died at 102.
But longevity is determined only in part by genes – no more than 30 per cent, according to a 1996 study of Danish twins. Lifestyle and environment are the main factors, according to Dan Buettner, explorer and author of a new National Geographic book called The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest. The term "Blue Zone" was coined by a Belgian demographer who studied long-lived people, and Buettner has visited four groups of them: in Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica's Nicoya region and Loma Linda, Calif., where there's a cluster of centenarian Seventh-day Adventists. Minneapolis, Minn.-based Buettner considered Nova Scotia as a possible Blue Zone, but for this book, he says, he chose parts of the world where, indisputably, people have a three times greater chance of living to 100 than most North Americans. However, he told the Star in a telephone interview that if he were to pick a Blue Zone in Canada, it would definitely be the South Shore of Nova Scotia
Glenna King is another member of the South Shore's centenarian club. "I was never outside of this place," says the 102-year-old, who was born in Yarmouth. She recalls that one of her aunts lived to 103 and another to 102.
"My health is fine – they can't find a problem with me," says King, who lived alone and managed her own house in nearby Brooklyn until three months ago, when she moved to a seniors' residence. "I wasn't very steady on my feet and everybody worried over me."
Her husband, Victor, lived to 98, and both laboured hard on their small farm. "He worked at everything, carpentry, in the woods, whatever he could find," she says. They raised six children and used a washtub and scrub board to do the family's laundry, until they finally got a washing machine in 1950.
Like Walker, she has religious faith. And she had a drink rarely. But also like Walker, she cannot cite any secret alchemy that has kept her in good health. Maybe it was her no-nonsense but easy disposition. "I wasn't one to worry. I always thought, `That's the way it's got to be.'"
She, too, is busy. King does needlepoint – "I just picked it up for something to do" – and recently finished reading a book on local history. She exercises her mind daily doing word puzzles and crosswords, there's a bin of knitting and crochet needles by her chair, and she points to the afghans she has made since she arrived.
King made bread recently, did a painting, and at the end of a visit, turns to her diary, which she writes in daily. There's no gap in the conversation; you might think she was a woman in her early 80s.
IT'S NOT CLEAR why clusters of Nova Scotians live longer than other Canadians. Although a Dalhousie University geriatrician did some demographic research on Nova Scotia centenarians in 2002, there has been no follow-up.
Dr. Thomas Perls, who heads the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University, says many of the people he's studying have roots in Nova Scotia. And while he maintains it's important to try and discover "what cultural factor or habits do they have in common" – something a perennial lack of funding prevents him from exploring to the degree he'd like – he's also interested in the shared genetic factors that might predispose his subjects to longevity.
Perls believes that among the extremely elderly, genes may play a greater role – more than 30 per cent.
"Some of them had pretty bad behaviour in terms of diet, smoking and not much exercise; they may have genes that predispose them to longer lives."
Some communities in Nova Scotia's South Shore are still home to families who trace their ancestry to early settlers. King says her family is English, Scottish "and I don't what else."
Lunenburg was settled by Germans who stayed on to work as shipbuilders. Villages hugging Nova Scotia's rocky southern coastline are home to French Acadians, settlers who were driven out by the British in 1755 but later returned to the South Shore, where the tricolour Acadian flag still flies.
Driving north from Yarmouth, through tamarack and fir forests, the road is called the Evangeline Trail, after the heroine in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem "Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie," which describes the tragedy of doomed lovers separated in the exodus.
"Another interesting piece of the puzzle," says Perls, "is if you go to Louisiana, there's a significant Acadian population, and researchers down there are wondering if there are increasing numbers of people getting to 100 and older down there."
RECENTLY, THE STAR travelled to Nova Scotia to interview seven centenarians: Walker, King and five other women. Several are physically infirm – lack of steadiness is a common complaint – but their minds are clear and their personalities still distinctive, and they talked movingly about what had been important in their lives.
They were well-dressed, and most of the women had had recent manicures. A seventh woman declined to be interviewed because she was tired of people coming to talk to her just because she was 100.
Physical work – housekeeping, tending gardens, managing livestock – had dominated the younger years of most of the women, and even in their extreme old age, they speak wistfully of those demanding years. "Now everybody waits on me and my meals are cooked," says King. "That was one thing I didn't like – cooking when I was alone. I'd much rather cook for a half-dozen."
"I have this to say," declares Yarmouth resident Eva Pothier, 100, who worked as a housekeeper in Boston during the Depression – several of the women had sought work in the U.S. during those lean times. "Hard work won't kill you, if you are well."
She lived in the fishing village of Wedgeport – which she spells out. "We were real poor people, but we had plenty of food and our garden and a cow and hens." And, she adds, they had fish twice weekly. "I'd like a fish chowder now," she says.
"Sometimes, I say I wish I was home so I could make a nice loaf of bread and wash a load of laundry that I could put out on the line." A nephew calls her every morning, but still she says, she feels alone. "Sometimes I wish I wasn't here. You feel in the way and can't do the thing you want to."
And, she reflects on her future: "You wonder what's going to happen, what's going to strike you and take you away. You worry a lot."
Katheryn Redding, 101, lives in Sunset Terrace, a romantic-looking green clapboard house with a distant view of Yarmouth harbour. She is bemused when she considers her age. "One day went by and then another, and I was suddenly 100 and that was startling. My parents and brother died in their 70s, and that shocks me. Because I go on and on."
Redding, who worked for chartered accountants, never married and relished her independence – to eat out when she felt like it and come and go freely. "It was a good life, especially when I was on my own and could do what I wanted to do. It was just ordinary, though it sounds kind of selfish when I say it."
Her philosophy is to accept what comes her way. "So many people are unhappy," says Redding, a regular churchgoer until recently. "I've learned to take what comes and not let it disturb me."
Long-lived people don't appear to have many things in common, says biochemist Huber Warner, who for two decades worked at the U.S. National Institute on Aging. But the ability to respond to stress may be a factor. "Maybe for some reason these people have higher levels of stress responses," he says from the University of Minnesota, where he is an associate dean of research at the college of biological sciences. "It's in the genes."
On the other hand, Marie-Helene LeBlanc, 101, anxiously awaits a visit clutching her wedding photograph to her chest and admits: "I have no patience."
She has been waiting to tell her story. "I married for the first time at 83," she announces from her comfortable chair in the same residence where Glenna King lives. "He lived a few houses from me and when his wife died, I said I'd invite him for dinner. I didn't want him to be lonely and then, we fell in love."
This emerges in a surprising rush. She pauses and says with emotion: "I was so happy!"
When she was 65, she had come home to Wedgeport to care for her parents after years working as a housekeeper and cook in Manhattan. Her mother lived to 98 and her father to 96.
LeBlanc has a little bit of brandy every day. Otherwise, what does she enjoy? "Nothing very much. I find 101 too old. I can't do anything."
Huber also says studies with rats and mice show that reducing food consumption by 30 to 40 per cent delays the onset of age-related illnesses like kidney disease and cancer. "It's not possible to translate that to humans, but obesity is clearly a negative health factor and it's a thing people can control, but choose not to." Studies on calorie-reduced diets are now underway with primates.
From an upstairs room in the sprawling, turreted Villa Saint Joseph du Lac, which looks like a resort on the outskirts of Yarmouth, Fidelis Cameron, who turns 103 on Friday despite having suffered from diabetes for most of her life, plays piano. Her favourites are tunes like "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" and "The Entertainer." Beautifully groomed – earrings, lipstick, foundation, eyeliner and blush, she says: "I'm a little fussy about my clothes."
She attends Mass daily. Reliant on a wheelchair, she finds her memory is failing. But at the electric keyboard, she is note-perfect.
The oldest of the seven, Chantal Thibodeau, 107, spends part of her day listening to Acadian music on the radio. She wishes she could do more. "I loved to work," the Acadian French-speaker says through a translator at a seniors' home in the fishing village of Meteghan.
Thibodeau used to toil in a clothespin factory and also cleaning houses. Now, her vision is no longer clear and her hearing is weak, but otherwise her health is good. She takes no medication except for half a sleeping pill at night.
Like the other women, she misses her active years and isn't entirely comfortable having others wait on her. "They serve me well here, but I find myself too old ... They help me a lot, but I'd like to help them."
http://www.thestar.com/Your%20health/article/439360
--------------------------------------------------------------
I didn't know whether to post this in Canada or Genetics... Genetics because one thing worth noting is that the majority of people over 100 years of age in Nova Scotia are Acadians.
My grandfather was Acadian and lived to be 104.
Conversation moves easily from his early years in the Ottawa Valley and his decades-long work as a banker in Montreal. His health is good, he says; his recent trades on the stock market, excellent.
The computer, where he day-trades and keeps an eye on his small portfolio, is in the kitchen, which overlooks postcard-perfect, white-trimmed houses and the deep blue of Lunenburg's harbour.
For a better view, he leads visitors up the stairs to the second storey of his 1840 Wedgwood-blue frame house – with leaded glass windows he made himself. From there he can see the masts of the Bluenose II at anchor.
He does his own cooking and shopping, sometimes with the aid of an electric wheelchair. For lunch he made himself a small steak with carrots, mashed potato. He tries to be active by walking. "The more I exercise, it's better."
He's mentally sharp and has a zest for life – he regrets there wasn't enough time to go to a restaurant for lunch.
In August, Walker will be 102 years old.
Even more astonishing, he lives in a part of Canada, the South Shore of Nova Scotia, with pockets of extreme longevity and more centenarians than elsewhere in the country. Across Canada, centenarians average 14.6 per 100,000; in Nova Scotia it's 21 per 100,000. Preliminary studies have shown the rate is higher in places like Lunenburg and Yarmouth – as many as 50 per 100,000, according to one researcher.
Could it be the fresh sea air, a diet high in fish, a less stressful life, strong social networks, religious faith, a genetic predisposition to longevity, or a combination of all of the above?
Walker himself isn't sure. "There may be some reason I'm hanging on," he says. "I don't think I'm anything special, but I think my grandfather and grandmother gave me pretty good genes." His grandmother lived to 99, and his sister, Dorothy, died at 102.
But longevity is determined only in part by genes – no more than 30 per cent, according to a 1996 study of Danish twins. Lifestyle and environment are the main factors, according to Dan Buettner, explorer and author of a new National Geographic book called The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest. The term "Blue Zone" was coined by a Belgian demographer who studied long-lived people, and Buettner has visited four groups of them: in Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica's Nicoya region and Loma Linda, Calif., where there's a cluster of centenarian Seventh-day Adventists. Minneapolis, Minn.-based Buettner considered Nova Scotia as a possible Blue Zone, but for this book, he says, he chose parts of the world where, indisputably, people have a three times greater chance of living to 100 than most North Americans. However, he told the Star in a telephone interview that if he were to pick a Blue Zone in Canada, it would definitely be the South Shore of Nova Scotia
Glenna King is another member of the South Shore's centenarian club. "I was never outside of this place," says the 102-year-old, who was born in Yarmouth. She recalls that one of her aunts lived to 103 and another to 102.
"My health is fine – they can't find a problem with me," says King, who lived alone and managed her own house in nearby Brooklyn until three months ago, when she moved to a seniors' residence. "I wasn't very steady on my feet and everybody worried over me."
Her husband, Victor, lived to 98, and both laboured hard on their small farm. "He worked at everything, carpentry, in the woods, whatever he could find," she says. They raised six children and used a washtub and scrub board to do the family's laundry, until they finally got a washing machine in 1950.
Like Walker, she has religious faith. And she had a drink rarely. But also like Walker, she cannot cite any secret alchemy that has kept her in good health. Maybe it was her no-nonsense but easy disposition. "I wasn't one to worry. I always thought, `That's the way it's got to be.'"
She, too, is busy. King does needlepoint – "I just picked it up for something to do" – and recently finished reading a book on local history. She exercises her mind daily doing word puzzles and crosswords, there's a bin of knitting and crochet needles by her chair, and she points to the afghans she has made since she arrived.
King made bread recently, did a painting, and at the end of a visit, turns to her diary, which she writes in daily. There's no gap in the conversation; you might think she was a woman in her early 80s.
IT'S NOT CLEAR why clusters of Nova Scotians live longer than other Canadians. Although a Dalhousie University geriatrician did some demographic research on Nova Scotia centenarians in 2002, there has been no follow-up.
Dr. Thomas Perls, who heads the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University, says many of the people he's studying have roots in Nova Scotia. And while he maintains it's important to try and discover "what cultural factor or habits do they have in common" – something a perennial lack of funding prevents him from exploring to the degree he'd like – he's also interested in the shared genetic factors that might predispose his subjects to longevity.
Perls believes that among the extremely elderly, genes may play a greater role – more than 30 per cent.
"Some of them had pretty bad behaviour in terms of diet, smoking and not much exercise; they may have genes that predispose them to longer lives."
Some communities in Nova Scotia's South Shore are still home to families who trace their ancestry to early settlers. King says her family is English, Scottish "and I don't what else."
Lunenburg was settled by Germans who stayed on to work as shipbuilders. Villages hugging Nova Scotia's rocky southern coastline are home to French Acadians, settlers who were driven out by the British in 1755 but later returned to the South Shore, where the tricolour Acadian flag still flies.
Driving north from Yarmouth, through tamarack and fir forests, the road is called the Evangeline Trail, after the heroine in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem "Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie," which describes the tragedy of doomed lovers separated in the exodus.
"Another interesting piece of the puzzle," says Perls, "is if you go to Louisiana, there's a significant Acadian population, and researchers down there are wondering if there are increasing numbers of people getting to 100 and older down there."
RECENTLY, THE STAR travelled to Nova Scotia to interview seven centenarians: Walker, King and five other women. Several are physically infirm – lack of steadiness is a common complaint – but their minds are clear and their personalities still distinctive, and they talked movingly about what had been important in their lives.
They were well-dressed, and most of the women had had recent manicures. A seventh woman declined to be interviewed because she was tired of people coming to talk to her just because she was 100.
Physical work – housekeeping, tending gardens, managing livestock – had dominated the younger years of most of the women, and even in their extreme old age, they speak wistfully of those demanding years. "Now everybody waits on me and my meals are cooked," says King. "That was one thing I didn't like – cooking when I was alone. I'd much rather cook for a half-dozen."
"I have this to say," declares Yarmouth resident Eva Pothier, 100, who worked as a housekeeper in Boston during the Depression – several of the women had sought work in the U.S. during those lean times. "Hard work won't kill you, if you are well."
She lived in the fishing village of Wedgeport – which she spells out. "We were real poor people, but we had plenty of food and our garden and a cow and hens." And, she adds, they had fish twice weekly. "I'd like a fish chowder now," she says.
"Sometimes, I say I wish I was home so I could make a nice loaf of bread and wash a load of laundry that I could put out on the line." A nephew calls her every morning, but still she says, she feels alone. "Sometimes I wish I wasn't here. You feel in the way and can't do the thing you want to."
And, she reflects on her future: "You wonder what's going to happen, what's going to strike you and take you away. You worry a lot."
Katheryn Redding, 101, lives in Sunset Terrace, a romantic-looking green clapboard house with a distant view of Yarmouth harbour. She is bemused when she considers her age. "One day went by and then another, and I was suddenly 100 and that was startling. My parents and brother died in their 70s, and that shocks me. Because I go on and on."
Redding, who worked for chartered accountants, never married and relished her independence – to eat out when she felt like it and come and go freely. "It was a good life, especially when I was on my own and could do what I wanted to do. It was just ordinary, though it sounds kind of selfish when I say it."
Her philosophy is to accept what comes her way. "So many people are unhappy," says Redding, a regular churchgoer until recently. "I've learned to take what comes and not let it disturb me."
Long-lived people don't appear to have many things in common, says biochemist Huber Warner, who for two decades worked at the U.S. National Institute on Aging. But the ability to respond to stress may be a factor. "Maybe for some reason these people have higher levels of stress responses," he says from the University of Minnesota, where he is an associate dean of research at the college of biological sciences. "It's in the genes."
On the other hand, Marie-Helene LeBlanc, 101, anxiously awaits a visit clutching her wedding photograph to her chest and admits: "I have no patience."
She has been waiting to tell her story. "I married for the first time at 83," she announces from her comfortable chair in the same residence where Glenna King lives. "He lived a few houses from me and when his wife died, I said I'd invite him for dinner. I didn't want him to be lonely and then, we fell in love."
This emerges in a surprising rush. She pauses and says with emotion: "I was so happy!"
When she was 65, she had come home to Wedgeport to care for her parents after years working as a housekeeper and cook in Manhattan. Her mother lived to 98 and her father to 96.
LeBlanc has a little bit of brandy every day. Otherwise, what does she enjoy? "Nothing very much. I find 101 too old. I can't do anything."
Huber also says studies with rats and mice show that reducing food consumption by 30 to 40 per cent delays the onset of age-related illnesses like kidney disease and cancer. "It's not possible to translate that to humans, but obesity is clearly a negative health factor and it's a thing people can control, but choose not to." Studies on calorie-reduced diets are now underway with primates.
From an upstairs room in the sprawling, turreted Villa Saint Joseph du Lac, which looks like a resort on the outskirts of Yarmouth, Fidelis Cameron, who turns 103 on Friday despite having suffered from diabetes for most of her life, plays piano. Her favourites are tunes like "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" and "The Entertainer." Beautifully groomed – earrings, lipstick, foundation, eyeliner and blush, she says: "I'm a little fussy about my clothes."
She attends Mass daily. Reliant on a wheelchair, she finds her memory is failing. But at the electric keyboard, she is note-perfect.
The oldest of the seven, Chantal Thibodeau, 107, spends part of her day listening to Acadian music on the radio. She wishes she could do more. "I loved to work," the Acadian French-speaker says through a translator at a seniors' home in the fishing village of Meteghan.
Thibodeau used to toil in a clothespin factory and also cleaning houses. Now, her vision is no longer clear and her hearing is weak, but otherwise her health is good. She takes no medication except for half a sleeping pill at night.
Like the other women, she misses her active years and isn't entirely comfortable having others wait on her. "They serve me well here, but I find myself too old ... They help me a lot, but I'd like to help them."
http://www.thestar.com/Your%20health/article/439360
--------------------------------------------------------------
I didn't know whether to post this in Canada or Genetics... Genetics because one thing worth noting is that the majority of people over 100 years of age in Nova Scotia are Acadians.
My grandfather was Acadian and lived to be 104.