Walk through any Mediterranean city and the fast food on sale has nothing to compare with the ideal diet that academics think we eat.  Fast foods are accessible to everyone:  kebabs, burgers, butter and lard pastries, sweets, ice cream, donuts, fried chicken, and sodas are all the opposite of traditional diets. But the world is changing again. The growth of traditional food, inspired by our neighbors the Italians' "slow food" movement has brought back some of the local dishes, mostly from the Arabs. Food based on legumes cooked with garlic and chilies, roasted vegetables, and lean ra ..read more

Why do we have medicine? The answer is obvious that a child can answer. It is to help people. To help them live long and healthy lives.   But does medicine help us live long? Some medicines do, like some vaccines, and most interventions help people live slightly longer.   But people still die. In the last hundred years, we have only improved life expectancy at older age by 6 years. The great improvement in medicine has been in helping children survive childhood. And this was not just medicine it was because of public health. We made great progress in getting clean fresh water to co ..read more

I have been teaching a university course on programs for older people for ten years. Every year I get some of my bright students come back to tell me that the program does not run as it was intended. The program that they interned in (clinical experience) operated differently from how it should have operated. Most reduced their services to make a larger profit. At first, I thought that this was an anomaly, infrequent events. But it happened with many of my students across a broad range of services. At one time one of my students, an ex-military intelligence in his previous life, wrote a critiq ..read more

All scientific discoveries contribute towards a better understanding of the universe that we live in. All of this knowledge reinforces our belief that the universe is orderly and that we are at the center. In contrast, there are some scientific revolutions that change how we think about ourselves, as humans. There are some discoveries that shake up our complacency about our importance in the grand scheme of the universe. Such scientific revolutions deserve special merit since by removing our self-centered bias, we get closer to a more universal truth about us and the universe we inhabit. Since ..read more

Chapter 1 : The Creation of a New Disease Feared more than cancer or heart attack, Alzheimer’s disease has now capture people’s fears and worries. But finding how the disease develops and then progresses has eluded scientists. Going back in time when Dr. Alois Alzheimer observed the new disease provides some evidence and clues to why we have failed to control this disease.  Finding that there were some clamping of neurons, plaques and tangles, in the brain was not a new discovery. But the creation of this new disease relied on other issues at the time. It relied on a belief that certain p ..read more

On their return from visiting a nursing home, my children when we were in kindergarten happily shared with me their impression that the residents “smell.” A nursing home is not the best place to get to know older adults, but the stereotype remains. There are even some fancy scientific theories to explain why this is so. We know that taste and smell diminish with age, but that older people also have a distinct odor is worth exploring. Visiting Japan, one is immediately faced with the strict culture of washing and bad odor is frowned upon. The Japanese even have a distinct name for the body odor ..read more

When talking about gerontology—the study of older people—most people assume that it is a new study as they have not heard of it. The same goes for hospice. If you bring it up in a conversation most people will know of someone who went through hospice, but again they think that this is a current trend, something new. So, it comes as a bit of a shock when people learn that gerontology is as old as writing itself. The first known record of writing is the Sumerian Saga of Gilgamesh about 4,000 years ago. The most famous of the five poems is "Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld." a poem that des ..read more

America is the country for sex, drugs, and rock and roll….well maybe just drugs and rock & roll.  Americans can be very traditional when it comes to discussing sex, but as for drugs we use medication as much as the Japanese. Most Americans are on some kind of medication or illicit drug. During 2015–2016, almost half of the U.S. population, including children, used one or more prescription drugs.  If you include recreational drugs, alcohol, and tobacco then you can assume that nearly everyone is on some kind of mood-altering drug. In addition, nearly everyone takes caffeine, eithe ..read more

We have an image in our minds of how our life will progress. This is usually formed when we were children, so it is simplistic. It goes something like this: we grow up, make lots of money, get married, have kids, and live happily ever after. We quickly find that this story might not be true for us. But even though we might be disillusioned, what this tells us is that with these stories we like to predict. We like to tell a coherent story about our lives. It is part of how we are designed and we like to guess what will happen in the future, and we seem to do it for our own death as well. When w ..read more

 After a long hiatus, more than two years off this blog post, I have decided to return to this medium. It is not that I have not been writing. I have published three books during this break from blogging, but I realize that my blogs reach more people that need to read about these advances in gerontology.  I have also been writing blogs for a Japanese newspaper called the Kenkou to Yoi Tomodachi. I have been writing monthly editorials, so I should start by reproducing them here first. Mario Garrett 2016 ..read more