Reclaim Your Spiritual Power by Ron Roth

Author:Ron Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2011-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Can Lard and Wine Be Good for You?

In 1961, Stewart Wolf, M.D., then a professor at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, investigated Roseto, a town set in an area of eastern Pennsylvania amid the Poconos, where the rate of illness and death from heart disease was less than half the national average and nobody had ever had a heart attack before the age of 45. And yet, astonishingly, the men of the village all smoked cigarettes and drank wine aplenty. On top of that, most of the men worked 200 feet down in the earth in dangerous slate quarries nearby, while almost all of the women worked in local blouse factories with unhealthy conditions.

The people of Roseto favored traditional Italian meals, which were already bursting with cheese and sausage, and modified them with local ingredients that were the last word in toxic food. Although many dietitians recommend olive oil for cooking instead of animal fat, the poor immigrants who built Roseto as a self-contained community after being shunned by the English and Welsh populations in that part of Pennsylvania couldn’t afford to import olive oil from Italy—so they cooked their sausages and meatballs in lard! What possible medical or dietary explanation could there be for these people’s extraordinary good health?

Not surprisingly, it turns out that the healthiness of the citizens of Roseto had little to do with what they ate. What Dr. Wolf discovered was a tight-knit Italian-American community of fewer than 1,600 who lived in an atmosphere of mutual support and common interests in a way that seemed to protect its residents from the stresses of everyday life. In his book The Roseto Story: An Anatomy of Health, Dr. Wolf wrote about a world whose inhabitants tended to live in extended families in which grandparents, parents, and children dwelt in the same house in a system of mutual support and nurturance. “In the evening after supper, most families would walk around their neighborhood and chat and joke with each other,” he said. “They were obviously enjoying each other’s company.” Rosetans also took active roles in more than 20 community organizations and civic groups, from the Italian social club to the PTA and Elks, and, as you might imagine, the Catholic Church. Dr. Wolf labeled the health benefits of living such a community style of life “the Roseto Effect.”

What Dr. Wolf found in Roseto wasn’t an isolated incident. A number of studies over the past 50 years have shown that people who are socially engaged tend to outlive those who aren’t. Many studies have shown that married people live longer than those who are single, and that receiving personal support can lessen the effects of heart disease, increase the longevity of women with breast cancer, and help people recover from longterm addictions.

Certainly Roseto itself offers convincing proof of what happens when extended social and familial support dissipates, which has happened in most of the United States. In the early 1970s, younger people in the community began to work

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