Lee Kuan Yew On Getting The Best Out of Life

MY CONCERN today is, what is it I can tell you which can add to your knowledge about aging and what aging societies can do.

You know more about this subject than I do. A lot of it is out in the media, Internet and books. So I thought the best way would be to take a personal standpoint and tell you how I approach this question of aging.

If I cast my mind back, I can see turning points in my physical and mental health.

You know, when you’re young, I didn’t bother, assumed good health was God-given and would always be there.

When I was about 57 that was – I was about 34, we were competing in elections, and I was really fond of drinking beer and smoking.

And after the election campaign, in Victoria Memorial Hall – we had won the election, the City Council election – I couldn’t thank the voters because I had lost my voice. I’d been smoking furiously.

I’d take a packet of 10 to deceive myself, but I’d run through the packet just sitting on the stage, watching the crowd, getting the feeling, the mood before I speak.

In other words, there were three speeches a night. Three speeches a night, 30 cigarettes, a lot of beer after that, and the voice was gone. I remember I had a case in Kuching, Sarawak . So I took the flight and I felt awful. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to be an effective campaigner and a lawyer, in which case I cannot destroy my voice, and I can’t go on.

So I stopped smoking. It was a tremendous deprivation because I was addicted to it. And I used to wake up dreaming…the nightmare was I resumed smoking.

But I made a choice and said, if I continue this, I will not be able to do my job. I didn’t know anything about cancer of the throat, or oesophagus or the lungs, etc.

But it turned out it had many other deleterious effects.

Strangely enough after that, I became very allergic, hyper-allergic to smoking, so much so that I would plead with my Cabinet ministers not to smoke

in the Cabinet room.

You want to smoke, please go out, because I am allergic.

Then one day I was at the home of my colleague, Mr Rajaratnam, meeting foreign correspondents including some from the London Times

and they took a picture of me and I had a big belly like that (puts his hands in front of his belly), a beer belly.

I felt no, no, this will not do.

So I started playing more golf, hit hundreds of balls on the practice tee.

But this didn’t go down. There was only one way it could go down: consume less, burn up more.

Another turning point came in 1976, after the general election –

I was feeling tired. I was breathing deeply at the Istana, on the lawns.

My daughter, who at that time just graduating as a doctor, said: ‘What are you trying to do?’

I said: ‘I feel an effort to breathe in more oxygen.’ She said: ‘Don’t play golf. Run. Aerobics..’

So she gave me a book, quite a famous book and, then, very current in America on how you score aerobic points swimming, running, whatever it is, cycling.

I looked at it sceptically. I wasn’t very keen on running. I was keen on golf.

So I said, ‘Let’s try’. So in-between golf shots while playing on my own, sometimes nine holes at the Istana, I would try and walk fast between shots.

Then I began to run between shots. And I felt better. After a while, I said: ‘Okay, after my golf, I run.’

And after a few years, I said: ‘Golf takes so long. The running takes 15 minutes. Let’s cut out the golf and let’s run.’

I think the most important thing in aging is you got to understand yourself.

And the knowledge now is all there. When I was growing up, the knowledge wasn’t there.

I had to get the knowledge from friends, from doctors.

But perhaps the most important bit of knowledge that the doctor gave me was one day, when I said:

‘Look, I’m feeling slower and sluggish.’

So he gave me a medical encyclopaedia and he turned the pages to aging. I read it up and it was illuminating.

A lot of it was difficult jargon but I just skimmed through to get the gist of it.

As you grow, you reach 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and then, thereafter, you are on a gradual slope down physically.

Mentally, you carry on and on and on until I don’t know what age, but mathematicians will tell you that they know their best output

is when they’re in their 20s and 30s when your mental energy is powerful and you haven’t lost many neurons. That’s what they tell me.

So, as you acquire more knowledge, you then craft a programme for yourself to maximise what you have. It’s just common sense.

I never planned to live till 85 or 84.! I just didn’t think about it.

I said: ‘Well, my mother died when she was 74, she had a stroke.. My father died when he was 94.’

But I saw him, and he lived a long life, well, maybe it was his DNA.

But more than that, he swam every day and he kept himself busy!

He was working for the Shell company. He was in charge, he was a superintendent of an oil depot.

When he retired, he started becoming a salesman. So people used to tell me: ‘Your father is selling watches at BP de Silva.’ My father was then living with me. But it kept him busy. He had that routine: He meets people, he sells watches, he buys and sells all kinds of semi-precious stones, he circulates coins. And he keeps going. But at 87, 88, he fell, going down the steps from his room to the dining room, broke his arm, three months incapacitated.

Thereafter, he couldn’t go back to swimming. Then he became wheelchair-bound.

Then it became a problem because my house was constructed that way.

So my brother – who’s a doctor and had a flat (one-level) house – took him in.

And he lived on till 94. But towards the end, he had gradual loss of mental powers.

So my calculations, I’m somewhere between 74 and 94. And I’ve reached the halfway point now.

But have I?

Well, 1996 when I was 73, I was cycling and I felt tightening on the neck.

Oh, I must retire today. So I stopped. Next day, I returned to the bicycle.

After five minutes it became worse.

So I said, no, no, this is something serious, it’s got to do with the blood vessels.

Rung up my doctor, who said, ‘Come tomorrow’. Went tomorrow, he checked me, and said: ‘Come back tomorrow for an angiogram.’

I said: ‘What’s that ?’

He said: ‘We’ll pump something in and we’ll see whether the coronary arteries are cleared or blocked.’

I was going to go home.

But an MP who was a cardiologist happened to be around, so he came in and said: ‘What are you doing here?’

I said: ‘I’ve got this.’ He said: ‘Don’t go home.

You stay here tonight. I’ve sent patients home and they never came back.

Just stay here. They’ll put you on the monitor. They’ll watch your heart.

And if anything, an emergency arises, they will take you straight to the theatre.

You go home. You’ve got no such monitor. You may never come back.’

So I stayed there. Pumped in the dye, yes it was blocked, the left circumflex, not the critical, lead one.

So that’s lucky for me. Two weeks later, I was walking around, I felt it’s coming back.

Yes it has come back, it had occluded. So this time they said: ‘We’ll put in a stent.’

I’m one of the first few in Singapore to have the stent, so it was a brand new operation.

Fortunately, the man who invented the stent was out here selling his stent.

He was from San Jose, La Jolla something or the other. So my doctor got hold of him and he supervised the operation.

He said put the stent in. My doctor did the operation, he just watched it all and then that’s that.

That was before all this pr`oblem about lining the stent to make sure that it doesn’t occlude and create a disturbance.

So at each stage, I learnt something more about myself and I stored that. I said: ‘Oh, this is now a danger point.’

So all right, cut out fats, change diet, went to see a specialist in Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital.

He said: ‘Take statins.’ I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said: ‘(They) help to reduce your cholesterol.’

My doctors were concerned. They said: ‘You don’t need it. Your cholesterol levels are okay.’

Two years later, more medical evidence came out. So the doctors said: ‘Take statins.’

Had there been no angioplasty, had I not known that something was up and I cycled on, I might have gone at 74 like my mother.

So I missed that decline. So next deadline: my father’s fall at 87. I’m very careful now because sometimes when I turn around too fast, I feel as if I’m going to get off balance.

So my daughter, a neurologist, she took me to the NNI, there’s this nerve conduction test, put electrodes here and there.

The transmission of the messages between the feet and the brain has slowed down.

So all the exercise, everything, effort put in, I’m fit, I swim, I cycle.

But I can’t prevent this losing of conductivity of the nerves and this transmission. So just go slow. So when I climb up the steps, I have no problem.

When I go down the steps, I need to be sure that I’ve got something I can hang on to, just in case. So it’s a constant process of adjustment.

But I think the most important single lesson I learnt in life was that if you isolate yourself, you’re done for. The human being is a social animal – he needs stimuli, he needs to meet people, to catch up with the world.

I don’t much like travel but I travel very frequently despite the jetlag, because I get to meet people of great interest to me, who will help me in my work as Chairman of our GIC. So I know, I’m on several boards of banks, international advisory boards of banks, of oil companies and so on.

And I meet them and I get to understand what’s happening in the world, what has changed since I was here one month ago, one year ago. I go to India, I go to China.

And that stimuli brings me to the world of today. I’m not living in the world, when I was active, more active 20, 30 years ago. So I tell my wife.

She woke up late today. I said: ‘Never mind, you come along by 12 o’clock. I go first.’

If you sit back – because part of the ending part of the encyclopaedia which I read was very depressing –

as you get old, you withdraw from everything and then all you will have is your bedroom and the photographs and the furniture that you know,

and that’s your world.

So if you’ve got to go to hospital, the doctor advises you to bring some photographs so that you’ll know you’re not lost in a different world, that this is like your bedroom.

I’m determined that I will not, as long as I can, to be reduced, to have my horizons closed on me like that.

It is the stimuli, it is the constant interaction with people across the world that keeps me aware and alive to what’s going on and what we can do to adjust to this different world.

In other words, you must have an interest in life. If you believe that at 55, you’re retiring, you’re going to read books, play golf and drink wine, then I think you’re done for. So statistically they will show you that all the people who retire and lead sedentary lives, the pensioners die off very quickly.

So we now have a social problem with medical sciences, new procedures, new drugs, many more people are going to live long lives.. ….

If the mindset is that when I reach retirement age 62, I’m old, I can’t work anymore, I don’t have to work, I just sit back, now is the time I’ll enjoy life,

I think you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.

After one month, or after two months, even if you go traveling with nothing to do, with no purpose in life, you will just degrade, you’ll go to seed.

The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge.

If you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real torture.

So when I read that people believe, Singaporeans say: ‘Oh, 62 I’m retiring.’ I say to them: ‘You really want to die quickly?’

If you want to see sunrise tomorrow or sunset, you must have a reason, you must have the stimuli to keep going..’

STRESS RELIEF. Is salt bad for hypertension?

What is bad for hypertension is iodized salt, which is a fake salt. It is made up of only 3 synthetic chemicals, sodium, chloride, iodine. It takes long to dissolve in water (glistens like diamonds), does NOT dissolve in the body, does not get through the kidneys, gives kidney stones, and raises blood pressure. However, it is the salt favored by the synthetic drug-based doctors who say it is very clean and sanitary, pointing to how white it is and how it glistens like diamonds.

The fake salt is man-made in a factory. The true salt, which comes from the sea and dried under the sun and commonly called rock salt , has 72 natural minerals including natural sodium, chloride, iodine. It dissolves in water, absorbed in your body, does not produce kidney stones, and best of all brings down blood pressure and stops/prevents muscle cramps, numbness, tingling.

If you get muscle cramps in the lower legs at night, just take ½ teaspoon of rock salt and a glass of water, and the cramps with its horrific pain will be gone in 5 minutes. The highest BP that came my way was in a woman who had a BP of 240/140 and came to my house at 10:30 pm on what she said was a matter of "life and death" because thehigh BP was already giving her a crushing headache, especially the back of her head. She could not walk up the 6 shallow steps to my porch. Two men had to help her, one on each side, in addition to the cane that she needed to prop herself up.

I muscle tested her and found that underlying her BP of 240/140 and the crushing pain in the head, her body's water content was only 6% (normal is 75%), salt content was zero, potassium was 96% deficient, and cardiac output (blood flow from the heart) was only 40% (normal is 100%). So the blood supply to the head was 60% deficient.

I gave her one 6" long green hot pepper, 1 raw ripe  banana, 1/2 teaspoon of rock salt and 3, 8-oz glasses of tap water. The pepperi was to normalize cardiac output and shoot blood to the head, the saba banana was for the potassium deficiency and to have food in thestomach because pepper will give a stomach ache if the stomach is empty, and the rock salt and the water were the first aid for her severe dehydration which was causing her arteries to be dry and stiff and her blood to be thick and sticky, because they were dehydrated. After 5 minutes, she said, "The pain in my head is gone." We took herBP, it was 115/75, and cardiac output was up to 100%. She walked out of the house to her car without the men helping her and without the cane.

She has been taking 2.5 teaspoons of rock salt, 15 glasses of water, Saba bananas and 3 of the long peppers daily since the beginning of September 2009, and her BP and cardiac output have been normal since then.

Two months later, in November, at a PCAM round table forum on hypertension in Club Filipino, she gave her testimony, followed by her brother who said that she grew 2", because the salt and the water had refilled her compressed disc spaces in her vertebral column. The disc spaces had become compressed because they had become dehydrated since the fluid filling up these discs are 95% water.

Why salt? Because without salt the body cannot retain water no matte how much water is drunk. You will still be dehydrated because you will just keep urinating and sweating the water out.

This is not an isolated case. When BP is rising high but there is little or no headache but there is stiffness of shoulder and neck muscles, all you need to normalize the BP and remove the stiffness and the pain in 5 minutes is 1/2 teaspoon of rock salt and 3 glasses of water. If there is crushing pain in the head, it means blood supply to the head is lacking, and you will need the hot peppers to normalize it and shoot blood to the head and remove the extreme pain.

PLEASE SHARE, IT MAY HELP SOMEONE DR.JOSEPH A. ANTONY (FRCS(C); FICS; FAAS) Urologist & General Surgeon Consultant: St.Philomena's Hospital, Florida, USA. Former Professor: St.John's Medical College, California, USA. Former Medical Director: St.Philomena's Hospital, Florida, USA. 1715, BRUNTON ROAD., FLORIDA.

The NEW CPR - Important! Watch this ...

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Vitamin Pills Are Not Food - They Have Side Effects.

In addition to refined foods, markets are flooded with all kinds of
synthetic vitamin supplements. There are many people who don't have enough time to prepare nutritional meals but think that they can swallow some vitamin pills to obtain enough nutrients.

Can vitamin pills really replace natural foods and provide all the nutrients that the body needs? There was the biggest scientific, clinical experiment in this century performed by the Finland government a few years ago. They have spent 43 million dollars and involved 29,000 people in the experiment for 5 to 8 years. All participants are smokers. They have found that there are 18% more llung cancers and 50% higher mortality due to heart diseases for the group that has been consuming vitamin A and vitamin E compared to the group that has not eaten any vitamin supplement.

When the experiment data came out, it came out in Newsweek, and it came out everywhere. All of the scientists were really shocked. We have been told by scientists that vitamin E is a good antioxidant, can prevent the
hardening of our artery soit should be good for our heart. But why did such a big experiment give us a result completely opposite of what we were told?

Dr. Herbert of the FDA explained that when the vitamin C is inside the orange, it is an anti-oxidant. However, when it is isolated away from an orange, it may become a pro-oxidant. In other words, it will produce
 billions of free radicals. It will give us side effects. Someone may say, "No problem, the vitamin pills I am taking are extracted from natural food. They are natural vitamins."

Actually, there's no such thing as natural vitamins. It is only a commercial term created by the merchants. Natural vitamins and minerals only exist in natural plants. As long as it is extracted or isolated from the plants, it
becomes pure chemical substance. It becomes drugs and has the effects as most drugs. That is why there are always warning signs on the vitamin bottles saying 'Keep out of reach of children' or 'Take only one a day'. We
don't see such warnings on vegetables and fruits.

Some experiments showed that osteoporosis patients could utilize calcium very well if they take it directly from natural plants, but cannot absorb calcium, which is from supplements. Measured with quantum physics, we can
see clearly that there is high energy level in the calcium that exists in the natural plants and low energy level in calcium tablets. In fact, after the calcium tablet has been taken it only travels along the blood vessels
and get excreted from urine without being utilized by the body to build bones. The calcium tablets will only increase the burden of our liver and kidneys. If the calcium tablets can really help, why are there still so many people with osteoporosis?

A few years ago, the American FDA proposed to Congress of the vitamin's potential for toxicity that we should prohibit the sale of the vitamin supplements in the market place, because they have side effects. In fact, in the United States, there are 30,000 children reported to the poison control center due to the toxicity of vitamins every year.

Mothers think vitamins have no side effects. They give it to their children just like candies and don't think that they might get toxins from it. Besides, many food products on the market are added with synthetic vitamins, such as Vitamin C added in orange juice and Vitamins A and D added in milk. Unknowingly, our children are eating an overdose of vitamins. It causes more leukaemia and all types of cancer in children. The FDA has warned the public
that not only vitamin C causes cancers and heart diseases, vitamin F causes arthritis, vitamin D causes liver damage, and vitamin B6 causes central
nervous system damage.

Only 4 mg of This May Help You Maintain Youthfulness

By Dr. Mercola

Even if you've never heard of astaxanthin, a carotenoid derived from the microalgae Haematoccous pluvialis, you've surely seen it.
This is the compound that makes salmon, crabs, lobsters, shrimp and flamingos, which eat the algae, red or pink.
It also happens to be emerging as one of the world's most powerful antioxidants, with diverse health benefits that run the gamut from protection against oxidative stress to slowing age-related functional decline.
In fact, while astaxanthin is most often revered for its antioxidant potential, an article in Alternative Medicine Review recently highlighted its unique anti-aging potential as well.

What Makes Astaxanthin Such a Potent Antioxidant?

Antioxidants are crucial to your health, as they are believed to help control how fast you age by combating free radicals, which are at the heart of age-related cellular deterioration......CLICK HERE to read the whole article.