The new 50

ESOTERICA

The Courant on this morning of puff pieces prints an article from the AP regarding how Madonna and her chronological peers are strutting their stuff at the half-century mark. The point of the piece is

that aging is not the inevitability that we might have assumed by watching our fathers. Madonna is proof that exercising and eating right at an early age pays off.

I suppose I can agree with this, although why only fathers are seen as guilty of looking old before their time escapes me. Be that as it may, as one who's been a pentagenarian for appreciably longer than Madonna, Ellen DeGeneres, et al, (and as one who unfortunately succumbed to his appetites for a while in his 50s) I'm aware that exercising and eating right is really the only way to go. (In looking at photographs of people two generations before me, I'm always struck by how much older they look at a similar age, but perhaps I'm fooling myself.)

Having said that, it's pretty easy for the Jane Seymours and Alec Baldwins of the world to put off Father Time for a bit. After all, one assumes that they've got trainers and chefs who'll make sure that the sweet chariot doesn't swing too low at least for a while. It's the other pentagenarians that are of concern. With 2/3 of Americans overweight, it hardly seems like 50 is the new 30, or whatever the beautiful people are trying to promote.

And obesity is almost epidemic in scope. That bastion of fried foods, the American south, now has an obesity rate of more than one in four denizens. So the AP can say all it wants about proper diet and exercise; clearly, the message isn't getting through to many people. (I can attest to how difficult it is to keep the pounds off if one frequently eats fried foods. Last night, I made an Emeril Lagasse recipe of fried peppers (recipe is here; we have a surfeit of peppers this time of year), and a serving contained 280 calories. That is, the peppers themselves comprised 20 calories, but add all the other stuff (flour, corn meal, eggs, etc.), and it comes to fourteen times that.)

Finally, I'm always struck by the fact that the average life span in the United States in 1900 was forty-nine, and in 1998 it was seventy-seven. I still remain unconvinced that the species is supposed to live as long as it does. At any rate, eighty is not the new anything; unfortunately, octogenarians still suffer greatly from losses in physical and mental acumen.