Youthful Celebrities Pushing 60

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By Colleen Huber, Naturopathyworks

What do laypeople know about nutrition? Perhaps some know quite a bit as evidenced by the way they keep themselves healthy. On the other hand, Andrew Weil, MD, the famous alternative medicine expert, blasted conventional medical schools earlier this year for not teaching nutrition, and for churning out physicians who are ignorant of basic food-body interactions. Weil said, "The current state of nutrition education of health professionals is non-existent to substandard." As little as our doctors have helped us make good food choices over the years, we have had to learn to make our own best choices.

Fending for Good Nutrition Advice

Having been left to our own inner wisdom for dietary choices, many people have chosen poorly, however many others have chosen well. The problem here is that the anonymous and barely visible "man on the street" is difficult for researchers to observe over many decades. Whatever that faceless man or woman has been eating for his or her entire life is largely forgotten, even by those who are doing the consuming. This is not to mention the fact that the course of his or her health and well being over that time are equally unknowable.

For these reasons, this article is devoted to the food choices of highly visible celebrities.

Famous people make some of the most divergent food choices. And, fortunately, because of their broadly publicized lives, we can watch and learn the effects of their food choices on their bodies, activities and longevity. On one hand, we have seen famous entertainers who eat, drink, smoke and inject some of the most noxious substances available to them, then burn out and expire at an untimely age.

Do the Celebrities Hold the Answers to Staying Young?

Then there are those celebrities, notably Suzanne Somers, Goldie Hawn, Cheryl Tiegs, Christie Brinkley and others, who have maintained great health and amazingly youthful faces and bodies while choosing healthy foods. Fortunately, they have shared their food choices with us.

Hawn and Somers are both 58 years old, Cheryl Tiegs is 56 and Christie Brinkley is 50. All four women avoid sugar and other refined carbohydrates. Goldie Hawn follows a wheat-free, sugar-free and dairy-free diet. Suzanne Somers, in her Somersizing Diet Book explains why sugar, not fat is responsible for weight gain. Like many healthy people, Somers shops the periphery of supermarkets: vegetables, fruits, dairy and meat, and that's it. Her focus is: "keeping myself healthy internally so that it manifests on the external."

Many people, on learning about the negative health effects of sugar, think, "I just can't give it up."

Here is what Suzanne Somers has to say about "can't":

"I will not start any sentence with the words, 'I can't.' If I do, my mind will accept it as so, and then I won't be able to accomplish my goals. Instead I will tell myself, 'I can,' or 'I will.' In this way success will come to me."

Even more remarkably, Somers was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001. She made headlines at the time for choosing homeopathic treatment over chemotherapy and has survived healthfully.

Undoubtedly, her diet played a role, because sugar feeds cancer. In fact, glucose is the number one fuel for cancer and Somers decided to deprive her cancer of it.

Practicing Good Nutrition Doesn't Take a Rocket Scientist

Certainly, the above-mentioned celebrities never attended medical school, nor studied the intricate details of biochemistry to appreciate just how health-destroying sugar is, or how necessary whole foods are. But from the available evidence of their youthfulness into the sixth decade, it's not rocket science to figure out that they've been doing something impeccably correct: They've been treating their bodies in such a way as to enjoy every part of a long life.

To me, their life experiences, the act of putting their own well being on the line and demonstrating the results over decades of public life, makes them much better teachers of nutrition than those conventional doctors who struggled or half-dozed through biochemistry in med school, while never really understanding how nutritional choices impact our lives.

Looking at these photos, it seems clear who the better health experts are.

However, in order to get from here to there, it is often helpful to consult with a naturopathic physician or other natural health care provider, such as Dr. Mercola, who does have an extensive knowledge of nutrition. Together with such a physician, you can determine an eating plan that is right for you while working toward your weight and health goals.

To locate a naturopathic physician near you, consult the database of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians.

Colleen Huber, 46, is a wife, mother and student at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Ariz., where she is training to be a naturopathic physician. Her original research on the mechanism of migraines has appeared in Lancet and Headache Quarterly, and was reported in The Washington Post.

Her double blind placebo controlled research in homeopathy has appeared in Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, European Journal of Classical Homeopathy, and Homeopathy Today. Her website Naturopathy Works introduces naturopathic medicine to the layperson and provides references to the abundant medical literature demonstrating that natural medicine does work.

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