The Bell Curve -- Joseph N. Bell

My wife has discovered a new source of health information to drop on

my desk: reports of studies being done at the UC Irvine College of

Medicine. Although their intent is clearly a longer and healthier life,

they are a mixed bag to me.

Some, for example, raise doubts about advice that had been cast in

stone a few months or years earlier. Some raise the question of whether

or not a shorter life might be a reasonable trade off for the regimen

suggested to lengthen it. And some demand discipline clearly beyond the

reach of my flabbiness of character and lifelong facility for finding the

easy way.

The best example of the latter group -- No. 1 on every health hint

list -- is the value of exercise in general and walking in particular.

Because I feel that the only rational reason for walking is to get

somewhere, I have always resisted it for any other purpose. I got away

with this mostly because I played a lot of tennis and was able to sell

the dubious rationale that tennis not only replaced but was better than

walking.

But two years ago, I had to stop playing tennis because an errant hip

wouldn’t allow me to run properly. So that threw me into the walking

crowd. I’m still looking for a comfort zone there. Although walking is

decidedly not my thing, I’ve become convinced that it is probably a more

palatable means of getting exercise than gardening or riding a stationary

bicycle. So I’m trying. And it isn’t easy.

It especially isn’t easy when my wife drops a report on my desk like

the one that appeared last week from the UCI College of Medicine under

the headline: ‘Jogging every day may keep Alzheimer’s away.” How would

you like to start your day with a choice like that?

It seems that the UCI researchers at the Institute for Brain Aging and

Dementia made a passel of rats run on a laboratory wheel for three weeks

(it wasn’t clear how often they were allowed to rest). After exhausting

the rats, the researchers took a look at their brains and discovered

“that exercise is a powerful regulator of brain activity,” which then

translated into further research to “determine how much and what types of

exercise may help reduce the risk of cognitive impairment and perhaps

Alzheimer’s disease.”

This raised a whole litany of red flags, chief among them the vision

of a human running wheel with a group of people in white coats using

electric prods on patients who dared to slow down. It seemed to me the

most likely finding to be gleaned from such research was whether one dies

first of exhaustion or “cognitive impairment,” a question I tend to mull

over when I’m walking.

Although I don’t walk fast enough or far enough to satisfy my wife’s

exercise needs, she walks with me for a spell each day before she takes

off on her own. And she inevitably brings along this device she was given

last Christmas that tells her how far and fast she has walked. She even

took it to an Angel game the other night to record how far we walked

around the ballpark.

At first, this gadget appealed to my competitive instincts. It was a

lousy substitute for tennis, but at least I could clock myself and keep

trying to improve my time around the block. But when it started telling

me I was backsliding, I grew to dislike it rather intensely. Now I try to

concentrate on more aesthetic matters.

Since I always walk around the same block, I am learning to moderate

the boredom by studying the minutiae of the places I pass daily. The

improbable newly built upscale home that dwarfs its modest neighbors and

echoes its emptiness. The Christmas lights still strung on some front

porches. The dogs whose high spot in the day appears to be celebrating my

passing by. The remodels which I see to be a welcome thumb in the eye of

threatened John Wayne Airport expansion. And a daily inventory of who is

flying the American flag and who isn’t.

While I was making these difficult adjustments to the cult of walking,

my wife dropped a new College of Medicine report on my desk. This one is

headlined: “Ninety-somethings tend to live active, independent lives.” I

checked it out to see if they had discovered aimless walking around the

block to be counterproductive and were pushing such activities as deeper

involvement in televised sports or off-track betting. No such luck. But

even though the report found that the most common need of people this age

was help in walking, it was otherwise pretty cheerful.

I especially liked the independence part and that 40% of the

90-year-olds studied reported having an alcoholic drink daily and 57%

were still driving a car. Maybe best of all, there was no mention of

either Alzheimer’s or jogging.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.