Who is the worlds fattest man over 90 years old?

I interrupt this blog for this important question:

Who is the worlds fattest man over 90 years old?
I just read a review of an article from the respected "Science Magazine" that told of a long term scientific experiment with rhesus monkeys. It said that those monkeys on a resctricted diet not only live longer but they show far fewer signs of aging in both their bodies and brains. This got me thinking about finding the oldest person I could find who was at least 300 pounds overweight.

I scanned the internet and found lots of super- heavyweights but they were all relatively young. Think of it. The average life expectancy for men is at least in the middle 70's to 80's. Many people are now living to see 100. And the question is do fat people make it to those higher ages?
Or are many people who live into upper old age those who have changed their eating habits and gotten slimmer? I've looked and I didn't find too many obese elderly in the nursing homes I've visited.

If you know of super-heavyweights in their 90's and above let me know. In the meantime I've posted some exerpts from the review article I saw about the monkeys so you can have another reason, another incentive to get with your diet program and stick to it.

Write me Erwin RF. Send your email to brownbagdiet@gmail.com


Shattering Myths

Many centenarians are remarkably robust. The New England Centenarian Study (NECS), initially a collaboration between Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, now moved to Boston University Medical Center, has found that:
One quarter of the 169 study subjects—all of whom were at least 100—were completely free of any significant cognitive disorders and even surpassed the research interviewers on some mental tests.
Fifteen percent still lived independently in their own homes.
Some still held jobs.
Medical expenses for centenarians are significantly lower than for those in their sixties and seventies.
Most are uncommonly healthy until the very end of their lives.
Conventional wisdom says people inevitably decline into worsening health and senility when they reach their eighties, nineties, and beyond. In reality, centenarians, 80% of whom are women, are actually healthier as a group than people 20 years their junior. They have somehow managed to weather the stresses of life and avoid major threats like heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease.
Good Genes, Stress-Resistance, and Determination
Researchers are beginning to understand how centenarians reach this amazing milestone. In their book describing the NECS, Thomas Perls, MD, and Margery Silver, MD, point to characteristics shared by most of the 169 people they studied:
Good longevity genes
Emotional resilience—ability to adapt to life's events
Resistance to stress—excellent coping skills
Self-sufficiency
Intellectual activity
Good sense of humor, including about themselves
Religious beliefs
Strong connections with other people
Low blood pressure
Appreciation of simple pleasures and experiences
Women tend to have borne children after age 40
Zest for life
Don't currently smoke or drink heavily
Many play musical instruments
Follow an anti-inflammatory diet that has been linked with longevity (eg, Mediterranean diet)

Some Are Genetically Privileged
If any of your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and siblings have lived to extreme old age and if your family has a low incidence of diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and heart disease—congratulations! You are considered to have optimal anti-aging genes and have a great chance to make it to 100 if you take reasonable care of yourself.

Tips for a Longer, Healthier Life
"The average person is born with strong enough longevity genes to live to 85 and maybe longer," Dr. Perls believes. "People who take appropriate preventive steps may add as many as ten quality years to that. The vast majority of baby boomers do a terrible job preparing for old age," he continues. Many consume high fat diets, smoke, drink excessively, and don't exercise.
We have great potential to extend our lives, researchers say, if we just take care of ourselves.

Tune Up Your Attitude
Reduce stress—Try meditation, exercise, or yoga. You can learn to modify your responses to negative situations even if you can't change your basic personality
Stay connected with other people—Social support is vital and maintaining close relationships is associated with better physical and mental health.
Cultivate optimism—A Mayo Clinic study shows that optimists live longer and have better health, because pessimism may lower immune system responsiveness and enhance tumor growth. Good news: an excessively pessimistic outlook on life is changeable. Brief programs can change your thinking about life events and lower the risk for physical illness and even death.

Watch Your Diet
Emphasize fruits and vegetables, whole grains, fiber, and polyunsaturated fats.
Avoid cholesterol, saturated fat, and hydrogenated fat (red meat, egg yolks, fast food burgers, and fries, etc), which are linked to heart disease, breast cancer, and prostate cancer.
Avoid refined sugar and excessive calorie intake.
Avoid processed foods and those supplemented with high fructose corn syrup.
One glass of red wine a day still appears to lower the risk of heart disease.
Drink green tea, which has antioxidants that may fight cancers.
Consider taking antioxidant supplements like vitamin C, vitamin E, and selenium. But if you choose this path, be sure to follow the medical literature on vitamin risks.
Consider supplementing your diet with omega 3 fatty acids.

Exercise: Even a Little Helps
Many of the centenarians in the NECS had lived in second and third floor apartments of three-family houses. This afforded them a perfect opportunity for daily weight-bearing exercise—walking stairs—which builds muscle mass.
Just 15-30 minutes a day of walking or bicycling is enough to gain longevity benefits and reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer. Resistance exercise—for example, walking up stairs or hills—guards against loss of muscle mass and benefits the heart. Exercise also provides a sense of well-being and helps maintain an agile and alert brain.

Use Your Head
According to the NECS researchers, retaining cognitive capacity "most often determines whether people can attain extreme old age while remaining active." Here is a sampling of mental workouts that can keep the brain razor-sharp as you age:
Crossword and jigsaw puzzles
Playing bridge
Learning foreign languages
Playing musical instruments
Learning dance steps
Writing
Sports, including yoga and tai chi
Taking classes
Traveling
Memory training
Experiencing the new and unfamiliar

Floss Your Teeth!
You heard right. Flossing may help prevent heart disease. The last of Dr. Perls' pearls cites preliminary evidence that inflamed gums release substances into the bloodstream that cause clogged arteries. Whether or not it will help you live longer, flossing keeps your gums healthy, prevents tooth loss, and—with all those shining teeth—gives you a nicer smile, too.
DISCUSSION
There are many factors accounting for the longevity of centenarians, inclu ding congenital factors (heredity) and acquired factors such as environment, m ental state, diet and nutrition, physical exercise, life style and behavior. Am ong these factors, diet and nutrition are important in building immunity and in affecting the occurrence of angiocardiopathy, cerebrovascular diseases and malig nant tumors.
As shown in Table 1, the staple foods of the centenarians were low in calories, protein and fat, but high in fiber and rich in mineral substances. Their foods equate to 1419kCal/d, although it suggested that adults taking part in man ual labor need an average 3000kCal/d. According to the FAO/WHO, a 30% decreas e is suggested for persons above the age of 70,£Û2£Ýwhich means that 2100kCal/ d is needed for centenarians. There is a significant difference between these t wo figures (P<0. 01). The daily consumption of protein and fat of cente narians is low (P<0. 01) compared to the standards of modern nutrition. Thi s may be one of the factors which lead to longevity, but its mechanism remains u nknown.
The typical diet of Japanese centenarians shows dried sweet potato slices as the ir main staple food which is very similar to the diet of Chinese centenarians, leading to the question of whether dried sweet potato slices play a role in pro moting good health and long life. Dried sweet potato slices contain low fat, hi gh fiber and are rich in mineral substances. Among various cereals, the sweet p otato is low in calories. This factor may slow down the occurrence of arteriosc lerosis and avoid the ossurrence of life threatening diseases such as angiocardi opathy, cerebrovascular diseases and maligmant tumors.
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Newsweek: How to Live to 100
Newsweek
How to Live to 100Decrepitude isn’t inevitable. New research shows we all have the tools to live longer lives and die faster deaths.June 30, 1997
By Geoffrey Cowley
At 104, Angeline Strandal doesn’t place much stock in doctors. “If they start poking around you,” she says, “they’ll only make you sick.” The Massachusetts centenarian does go in for a physical once in a while, but she hasn’t been seriously ill since the time she came down with appendicitis–in 1925. “People ask me what I eat,” she says. “I’m a vegetarian, more or less. I never smoked. I don’t drink either. That’s one of my good qualities. And I keep my bedroom window open 365 days a year.” Strandal has outlived 11 siblings and a husband, who died back in 1931, but she still cooks every day except Sunday for her 67-year-old daughter and her 69-year-old son. She also catches a daily mass on TV, roots faithfully for the Boston Red Sox and loves nothing more than a good heavyweight fight. “Every day I ask God to give me one more day,” she muses. “And believe it or not, he does.”
We baby boomers may soon find ourselves emulating Angeline Strandal, or someone like her, as devoutly as we once did Jim Morrison. We’ve watched our parents or grandparents die in their 70s–often sick, lonely and helpless–and we’re beginning to sense that life should be longer and richer than that. “When the boomers started turning 50, it was like the start of the Oklahoma land rush,” says Dan Perry, director of the Washington-based Alliance for Aging Research. Surveys by Perry’s organization suggest that today’s 50-year-olds are suddenly serious about living to 100, and keen to get there in reasonably good health.
“They don’t want to spend any time at all in a nursing home,” he says. “The fear of losing independence and the ability to fend for oneself is overwhelming.”
Well, it turns out we may have a say in the matter. A growing body of research suggests that chronic illness is not an inevitable consequence of aging, as we’ve long believed, but more often the result of lifestyle choices that we’re perfectly free to reject. “People used to say, ‘Who would want to be 100?’ ” says Dr. Thomas Perls, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and director of the New England Centenarian Study. “Now they’re realizing it’s an opportunity.” So are booksellers and magazine publishers. “Live long, die fast,” the dust jackets urge us. “Dare to be 100.” Many of us will fall short of that number simply through bad genes or bad luck. And high-tech medicine isn’t likely to change the outlook dramatically; drugs and surgery can do only so much to sustain a body once it starts to fail. But there is no question we can lengthen our lives while shortening our deaths. The tools already exist, and they’re within virtually everyone’s reach.
Life expectancy in the United States has nearly doubled since Angeline Strandal was a kid–from 47 years to 76 years. And though centenarians are still rare, they now constitute the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. Their ranks have increased 16-fold over the past six decades–from 3,700 in 1940 to roughly 61,000 today. And the explosion is just getting started. The Census Bureau projects that one in nine baby boomers (9 million of the 80 million people born between 1946 and 1964) will survive into their late 90s, and that one in 26 (or 3 million) will reach 100. “A century ago, the odds of living that long were about one in 500,” says Lynn Adler, founder of the National Centenarian Awareness Project and the author of “Centenarians: The Bonus Years.” “That’s how far we’ve come.” If decrepitude were an inevitable part of aging, these burgeoning numbers would spell trouble. But the evidence suggests that Americans are living better, as well as longer. The disability rate among people older than 65 has fallen steadily since the early 1980s, according to Duke University demographer Kenneth Manton, and a shrinking percentage of seniors are plagued by hypertension, arteriosclerosis and dementia. Moreover, researchers have found that the oldest of the old often enjoy better health than people in their 70s. The 79 centenarians in Perls’s New England study have all lived independently through their early 90s, taking an average of just one medication. And when the time comes for these hearty souls to die, they don’t linger. In a 1995 study, James Lubitz of the Health Care Financing Administration calculated that medical expenditures for the last two years of life–statistically the most expensive–average ">2,600 for people who die at 70, but just $8,300 for those who make it past 100.
These insights have spawned a revolution in the science of aging. “Until recently, there was so much preoccupation with disease that little work was done on the characteristics that permit people to do well,” says Dr. John Rowe, the New York geriatrician who heads the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Successful Aging. Over the past decade, Rowe’s group and others have published hundreds of studies elucidating the factors that help people glide through their later years with clear minds and strong bodies. The research confirms the old saw that it pays to choose your parents well. But the way we age depends less on who we are than on how we live–what we eat, how much we exercise and how we employ our minds.
The Magic of Exercise
Suppose there was a potion that could keep you strong and trim as you aged, while protecting your heart and bones; improving your mood, sleep and memory; warding off breast and colon cancer, and reducing your overall risk of dying prematurely.
Respectable studies have shown that exercise can have all those benefits–even for people who take it up late in life. Experts now agree that most of the physical decline that older people suffer stems not from age but from simple disuse. When we sit all day, year after year, our bones, muscles and organ systems atrophy. But exercise can preserve and even revive them.
When Dr. Ralph Paffenbarger started tracking the health of 19,000 Harvard and University of Pennsylvania alumni back in the early 1960s, many experts thought vigorous exercise was downright dangerous for people over 50. But by monitoring the volunteers’ activity levels and health status over the years, the Stanford epidemiologist turned that wisdom on its head. In a landmark 1986 study, Paffenbarger showed that the participants’ death rates fell in direct proportion to the number of calories they burned each week. Those burning 2,000 a week (roughly the number it takes to walk 20 miles) suffered only half the annual mortality of the couch potatoes, thanks mainly to a lower rate of heart disease.
The alumni study wasn’t set up to gauge the benefits of any particular exercise regimen, but subsequent studies have shown that different activities bring different rewards. Everyone now agrees that aerobic exercise preserves the heart, lungs and brain. And researchers at Tufts University have recently shown that weight lifting can do as much for the frail elderly as it does for high-school jocks. When Dr. Maria Fiatarone got 10 chronically ill nursing-home residents to lift weights three times a week for two months, the participants’ average walking speed nearly tripled, and their balance improved by half. Two had the audacity to throw away their canes.
Miriam Nelson, another Tufts researcher, has since shown how a series of simple strength-training exercises could help keep women from resorting to canes in the first place. She recruited 40 volunteers–all past menopause, none taking estrogen–and split them into two groups. Half continued life as usual, while the other half went to Tufts twice a week to pump iron. Over the course of a year, the women in the control group suffered a predictable loss of bone density, but the weight lifters enjoyed slight increases. They didn’t lose weight (that wasn’t the goal), but they lost fat, and many ended up measurably stronger than their daughters, who were 30 to 40 years younger. Dorothy Barron, who was 64 when she joined Nelson’s experiment, says the experience not only remodeled her body but gave her more energy and confidence than she had had since her youth. Five years later, she still lifts weights–and she has added power walking, horseback riding and white-water rafting to her hobbies. When people ask why she pushes herself so hard, she replies, “I’m too old not to.”
Eating to Nourish Long Life
We all know that living on fat, salt and empty calories can have a range of nasty consequences, from obesity and impotence to hypertension and heart disease. Yet we seem to forget that there are other ways to eat, and that people who adopt them stay younger longer. George and Gaynel Couron will never forget that lesson. The Sacramento, Calif., couple gave up eating meat back in the early 1920s, when they became Seventh-day Adventists. They eventually strayed from the church and its dietary edicts, but they returned to both in 1943, when George suffered a heart attack. Today he’s 100 years old, and Gaynel is 98. They’ve been married for 81 years and have 14 kids ranging in age from 58 to 80. They have slowed down a bit (they’re not planning any more children), but George still takes great delight in growing and eating his own tomatoes, melons, beets, squash and black-eyed peas. As he puts it, “We’re still perking along.” No one can say exactly what role food has played in the Courons’ good fortune, but the age-reversing effects of a plant-based diet are not in question. In controlled studies, San Francisco cardiologist Dean Ornish has shown that a diet based on low-fat, nutrient-rich foods not only prevents heart disease–the Western world’s leading cause of early death–but can help reverse it. And other studies suggest that dietary changes could virtually eliminate the high blood pressure that places 50 million older Americans at high risk of stroke, heart attack and kidney failure.
“Hypertension is not an inevitable part of aging,” says Dr. Boyd Eaton, an Atlanta-based radiologist who has written extensively on nutrition and chronic illness. “It’s a disease of civilization.” You wouldn’t know that from watching people age in this country. Hypertension afflicts a third of all Americans in their 50s, half of those in their 60s and more than two thirds of those over 70. But preindustrial people don’t follow that pattern. Whether they happen to live in China or Africa, Alaska or the Amazon, people in primitive settings experience no change in blood pressure as they age, and the reason is fairly simple: they don’t eat processed foods. Dr. Paul Whelton of Tulane University’s School of Public Health has spent the past decade tracking 15,000 indigenous Yi people in southwestern China. As long as they eat a traditional diet–rice, a little meat and a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables–these rural farmers virtually never develop hypertension. But when they migrate to nearby towns, their blood pressure starts to rise with age. “Their genes don’t change when they move,” Whelton says. “Their diet does.”
What makes processed food so harmful? Salt is one key suspect. When you subsist mainly on fresh plant foods–as our ancestors did for roughly 7 million years–you get 10 times more potassium than sodium. That 10-to-one ratio is, by Eaton’s reasoning, the one our bodies are designed for. But salt is now showered on foods at every stage of processing and preparation (a 4-ounce tomato contains 9 mg of sodium, 4 ounces of bottled tomato sauce nearly 700 mg), while potassium leaches out. As a result, most of us now consume more salt than potassium. “Modern humans are the only mammals that do that,” says Eaton, “and we’re the only ones that develop hypertension.” Correcting that imbalance takes some effort, but it doesn’t require moving to the bush. In fact a recent clinical study suggests that dietary changes can reduce blood pressure as markedly as drug treatment, and can produce results in as little as two months. In the study (known as DASH, or Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), researchers at several institutions placed volunteers on one of three diets. Those on a low-fat menu that included 10 daily servings of fresh fruits and vegetables, plus two servings of calcium-rich dairy products, reduced their systolic and diastolic readings by 5.5 mm and 3.0 mm, respectively. And those suffering from hypertension got reductions of twice that magnitude. “We suspected this was possible,” says nutritionist Eva Obarzanek of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the federal agency that sponsored the study. “Now we know the size of the effect.”
Researchers have since shown that a simple potassium supplement can bring similar if less dramatic benefits. That’s worth knowing, but keep in mind that potassium is just one of countless age fighters found in real food. The antioxidant vitamins in a tomato or a green leaf can help boost immunity and slow the corrosion of aging cell membranes, and the B vitamins may help protect your heart. By eating plants, you also bathe yourself in cancer-fighting phytochemicals, bone-saving calcium and the fiber needed to maintain the colon and modulate blood sugar. Best of all, you can down them by the bushel without getting fat.

If they do I'd like to find out about it. Send me their stories.