John Robbins on Diet, Lifestyle, & Longevity

John Robbins, celebrated author, speaker and humanitarian, is the scheduled keynote speaker at Live to 100, a unique new event for those who plan to be healthy, wealthy, and wise for at least 100 years.

John will discuss his studies on four very different cultures that produce some of the world's oldest and healthiest people and how examples of their lifestyles can influence and improve our own. Plus, he'll share his extensive research into the characteristics of healthy aging; that it is not just diet and exercise that help people to live to 100, but also the beneficial power of love and connections. Overall, he'll detail lifestyle changes that will allow participants to pursue long, healthy and joyous lives.

The only son of the founder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire, John Robbins was groomed to follow in his father's footsteps, but chose to walk away from Baskin-Robbins and the immense wealth it represented to "...pursue the deeper American Dream... the dream of a society at peace with its conscience because it respects and lives in harmony with all life forms. A dream of a society that is truly healthy, practicing a wise and compassionate stewardship of a balanced ecosystem."

John lives with his wife Deo, their son Ocean and his wife Michele, and their grandsons River and Bodhi in the hills outside Santa Cruz. The Robbins' offices and home run entirely on solar electricity.

When people nowadays hear that I no longer eat ice cream, they sometimes feel sorry for me. "Please don't," I tell them. "I ate enough ice cream during my childhood for twenty lifetimes." Sometimes I ate ice cream for breakfast.

It was my father's dream that I would someday join him in running the business, and from my earliest childhood he set about grooming me to follow in his footsteps. But when my uncle, Burt Baskin, was only 54 years old he died of a heart attack. A large man, he had always enjoyed the family product. I asked my dad if he thought the amount of ice cream my uncle ate might have contributed to his fatal heart attack. "No," my father said. "His ticker just got tired and stopped working."

I understand why my father would not have wanted to consider the possibility that ice cream might have been involved. By this point he had manufactured and sold more ice cream than any human being who had ever lived on this planet. He didn't want to think that ice cream was harming anyone, much less that it might have contributed to the death of his beloved brother-in-law and partner. Besides, not much was commonly known then, in the late 1960s, about the connection between ice cream and disease.

But I saw the connection, as I did when my dad developed diabetes and high blood pressure, and again years later when Ben Cohen, co-founder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's, needed a quintuple bypass procedure at the age of forty-nine.

A single ice cream cone, of course, isn't going to harm anyone. But even though it tastes delicious, ice cream is very high in sugar and saturated fat. The medical data is overwhelmingly clear that the more sugar and saturated fat you eat, the more likely you are to experience heart disease and diabetes and to become obese.

My father had achieved the American dream, in the material sense. But I was called forth by a different longing. Having enough money so that you can meet your basic needs is necessary and important, but there are other things that also matter a great deal. I wanted to see if I could be part of making the world a healthier place. I wanted my steps to be guided by a reverence for life.

Meanwhile, my father, on account of his diabetes and high blood pressure, was beginning to make major changes in his diet. Gradually he gave up eating ice cream or any other form of sugar, and he greatly decreased his intake of meat. As a result, his health improved dramatically. He liked reminding me that he was "not a card-carrying vegetarian," but he was beginning to have far more respect for the lifestyle choices I had made and the work I was doing.

I expected it to be difficult for my parents to see the very different way we were raising these little ones, and also for them to see how in our home the men as well as the women changed diapers, cleaned house, and made the meals. Perhaps because they were nearing the end of their lives, they seemed more accepting of our differences than I had experienced from them before. I didn't realize, though, how deep the acceptance went. (At one point, my father took me aside.

"When you left Baskin-Robbins," he reminisced, "I thought you were crazy."

"Yes," I replied. "I remember."

"Well," he said, speaking more slowly now and turning to face me, "I see that time has proved you were right to follow your own star." Hearing him speak this way, I felt, perhaps for the first time, his blessing on my life.

From The Introduction To Healthy At 100

For many of us in the industrialized world today, our aging is a source of grief and anxiety. We fear aging. The elderly people we see are for the most part increasingly senile, frail, and unhappy. As a result, rather than looking forward to growing old, we dread each passing birthday. Rather than seeing our later years as a time of harvesting, growth, and maturity, we fear that the deterioration of our health will so greatly impair our lives that to live a long life might be more of a curse than a blessing....

In 2005, the famed American author Hunter S. Thompson took his life. He was only sixty-seven, and had no incurable disease. He was wealthy and famous, and his thirty-two-year-old wife loved him. But according to the literary executor of Thompson's will, "he made a conscious decision that he . . . wasn't going to suffer the indignities of old age."...

In the last hundred years we've added nearly thirty years to the average life expectancy in the industrialized world, but for many older adults the later years are not a time of happiness and well-being. A century ago, the average adult in Western nations spent only 1 percent of his or her life in a morbid or ill state, but today's average modern adult spends more than 10 percent of his or her life sick. People are living longer today, but all too often they are dying longer, too—of chronic diseases that cause debility and cognitive impairment.

By 2025, the annual cost of managing chronic conditions in the United States will exceed a trillion dollars. Already, half of those age sixty-five and over have two or more chronic diseases, and a quarter have problems so severe as to limit their ability to perform one or more activities of daily living. Meanwhile, the average age of the chronically ill is continually getting younger. Throughout the industrialized world, people are living longer, but they are getting sick sooner, so the number of years they spend chronically ill is actually increasing in both directions....

Although modern medicine is eminently equipped to prolong life, it seems to be far less able to promote healthy aging. What good will it do us, asked a comedian in 2004, if at some point in the future, the human life span is extended to two hundred years, but the last hundred and fifty years are spent in unremitting pain and sadness? ...

It has been said that we can destroy ourselves with negativity just as effectively as with bombs. If we see only the worst in ourselves, it erodes our capacity to act. If, on the other hand, we are drawn forward by a positive vision of how we might live, we can shrug off the cynicism that has become fashionable today and build truly healthy lives.

It is extraordinarily important for us today to replace the prevailing image and reality of aging with a new vision—one in which we grasp the possibility of living all our days with exuberance and passion. There are few things of greater consequence today than for us to bring our lives into alignment with our true potential for health and our dreams for a better tomorrow....

There are many people today who want to live in harmony with their bodies and the natural forces of life. You may be one of them. If so, it's helpful to understand that you are not alone, and that you have elders from whom you can learn how to accomplish your goals. There are cultures whose ways have stood the test of time that can stand as teachers on the path of wellness and joy. There are whole populations of highly spirited, vigorous people who are healthy in their seventies, eighties, nineties, even healthy at a hundred. What's more, they have a great deal in common, and their secrets have been corroborated and to a large extent explained by many of the latest findings in medical science. New research is showing that we have all the tools to live longer lives and to remain active, productive, and resourceful until the very end.

This is good and hopeful news. It offers us a much-needed paradigm of aging as a period of wisdom and vitality. Through these healthy cultures, we can and a compelling vision of how to mature with pleasure, dignity, purpose, and love....

No one familiar with my earlier work will be surprised that I am interested in how our diets and exercise can help us to live long and healthy lives. But they may be surprised by some of my findings, including the great emphasis I am now placing on strong social connections. I have learned that the quality of the relationships we have with other people makes a tremendous difference to our physical as well as emotional health. Loneliness, I discovered in my research, can kill you faster than cigarettes. And by the same token, intimate relationships that are authentic and life-affirming can have enormous and even miraculous healing powers.... Reading this book will not only help you add many years to your life, but also help make those added years—and indeed all your remaining years—ones in which you experience the blossoming of your finest and wisest self....

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