Newspaper Page Text
By Lou Cottin
I was 63 years old. She was 36.
Something I said, in all in
nocence, I assure you,
engendered the remark, “Hey,
you’re a senior citizen now.
Why don’t you act like one?”
“And how, my dear, is a
senior citizen supposed to act?”
I asked.
She thought for a while.
“Search me,” she said. “But a
writer and research man like
you ought to be able to find
out.”
For all its flippancy the
suggestion turned out to be a
good one. Learning about my
age group became a hobby. My
writing assignments on com
puters took me to many places
in the United States and in
England. Wherever I visited, I
checked on the aging of the
area. I talked with people in
senior clubs and nursing homes,
geriatric specialists at local
colleges and at Roosevelt
University in Chicago and at
the University of Chicago. In
Washington, D C., I haunted the
office on aging at the Depart
ment of Health, Education and
Welfare.
At the time, the National
Council on Aging had its library
in New York City. At first, I
wandered in just to check on its
bibliography, whiclTserved as a
marvelous resource for
material on my subject. Many
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Flipping
FLIPPING OVER a new photographic flash unit enabling snapshot photographers to follow
, rapid motion, gymnast Mara Merritt of Schenectady, N.Y. illustrates the new product’s ef
ficiency. The new unit contains eight separate bulbs permitting the photographer to capture
four fast shots with flash before the unit flips and the next four are ready.
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4.1
By Lawrence E. Lamb, M.D.
DEAR DR. LAMB - Does
drinking a glass of water after a
meal do any harm to the
digestive system? This water is
in place of coffee, tea, milk or
soft drinks.
My daughter says drinking
water after a meal is the same
as drinking tea or coffee, “after
all, they are only colored
water," until, of course, milk
and sugar are added.
My husband says the water
washes away the digestive
juices.
DEAR READER — A glass
of water after a meal is fine. It
also helps to give a person a
satisfied feeling without gorg
ing on calorie-rich foods that
lead to obesity.
, Aside from the calories pre
sent in any sugar and cream
added to tea or coffee and the
calories in soft drinks, they are
a great deal more than colored
water.
Coffee, tea, and the cola
drinks all contain caffeine and
that is a drug. Coffee is nothing
more than a liquid “go pill.”
These drinks can be both help
ful and harmful, more often the
latter. They have the opposite
effects of tranquilizers, adding
to nervousness and, among
Growing older
Time to break 4 old’ mold
are the hours I spent at that
library reading and making
notes.
The more I studied the more
disturbed I became about the
status of our age group. It was a
bit insulting to be a bug under a
microscope. It was uncomfor
table to be treated as a statistic
blipped out from a hole in a
computer card. It was annoying
to be considered an “age unit”
problem that could “somehow”
be solved by scholars writing
pompous “reports.”
What bothered me most was
the blind acceptance of
research and data as the basis
for practical action. Most of the
people involved professionally
in service to the aging were
young or middle-aged. They
made decisions about us and for
us. Rarely did they ask us what
we thought of the priorities that
they set up for us.
Another irritation was the
lumping of my contemporaries
indiscriminately with other
groups. When they said “aged,”
they always added “the poor
and the handicapped.” That
shows no regard for the majori
ty of us who — though old and
often poor — are functioning.
Such loose classification by the
experts puts all of us in the
category of government cost
factors. Little consideration is
given to the possible con
tributions that many of us can
Dr. Lamb
Water fine after meals
other things, stimulate the
stomach to produce excess
amounts of acid digestive
juices. Caffeine can contribute
to irregularities of the heart.
You may be interested in a
recent study at the National
Naval Medical Center in
Maryland, in which President
Ford’s doctor, William Lukash,
participated. The investigators
reported that just five cups of
coffee a day caused increases in
fat in the blood and raised the
blood sugar, and could lead to
damage of the nervous system.
The investigation team
recommended not drinking
more than one cup of coffee at a
time.
Many individuals with
digestive problems become
symptomfree after stopping
coffee, tea and colas. If you are
nervous or tense you certainly
don’t need to complicate the
problem with these drinks.
On the positive side, coffee in
small amounts increases
alertness and may even im
prove typing skill and accuracy.
We Americans not only use
the most oil in the world, but we
use over half of all the coffee
produced in the world. Our con
make.
The pundits whose books I
read couldn’t even agree on
what to call us. Take the word
“aging.” What does it really
mean? We ail begin aging the
minute we are born. Try
mature. Who knows when
maturity happens? Even the un
pleasant word “old” is non
descriptive. Some people are
old at 30; others are still
youthful at 80.
The trouble with the kind of
categorization I studied is that
we are not thought of as per
sons. My research convinced
me that this official approach
of professors, politicians and
statisticians will not be chang
ed unless each of us asserts his
or her individuality more
defiantly.
After retirement, we remain
in character, in personality, in
interests much as we were in
the preceding decades.
We had certain money
problems when we were
younger. We have them now.
We had physical problems when
we were younger. We have
them now. We had life
management problems then
and we have our special
problems now. We cannot, we
will not, handle these problems
as a group. We will solve them
as individuals.
We have not lost our pride.
We do not consider Social
sumption has increased with
the increase of heart attacks.
The evidence of direct correla
tion of coffee to heart attacks is
rather meager, but the indirect
effects that may lead to heart
difficulties are soundly based.
There is general agreement
that patients with irregularities
of the heart and digestive dis
orders should avoid caffeine
containing drinks.
For more information on
coffee, tea, cola and cocoa, you
might wish to write to me in
care of this newspaper, P.O.
Box 1551, Radio City Station,
New York, N.Y., and ask for
The Health Letter on coffee
(number 1-1). Send 50 cents and
a long, self-addressed, stamped
envelope.
I NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE ASSN. I
BRAZIL CRUZEIROS
RIO DE JANEIRO (UPI) -
Brazil has been using for more
than a year a system of
periodic small devaluations of
the cruzeiro against the U.S.
dollar. Check a reliable bank on
the subject before planning
expenses.
Security in the light of a dole.
We worked for that money. We
do not consider the government
appropriations statistically
allotted to “aging services” as
“doing something for the old
people.” We refuse to be put
upon the shelf by younger peo
ple, cornered away with a pat
on the head, told how to play,
what to do with our time, what
associations and activities are
"suitable” for us.
We lay our self-respect on the
line proudly and belligerently.
We say to the young: “We in
tend to use our experiences and
our wisdom to improve our own
lives. We welcome your
suggestions. But we will not
obey your orders. We have had
a lot of practice making
decisions for ourselves.”
Oh yes, I met the aforemen
tioned 36-year-old woman again
a few weeks ago. Now 43, she
still asks, “Why don’t you act
like a senior citizen?” My
answer?
“That’s exactly what I’m do
ing, honey.”
(NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE ASSN.)
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Span
Memory while you sleep
PRINCETON (UPI) - Sever
al college students, in a study
to determine the extent of
shortrterm memory span, fall
into bed at night attached to
electrodes and listening to a
voice repeating numbers.
The students are part of an
ongoing experiment at the
Educational Testing Service
here designed to determine the
extent of a person’s memory
while he sleeps.
“We are not teaching people
Russian. We are doing basic
research that’s of academic
interest, studying the basic
processes of memory,” says
Philip Oltman, a research
psychologist.
The experiment takes place
several nights a week at a
monitored sleep laboratory
equipped with a bed, a
microphone and electronic
equipment to measure brain
waves at the ETS laboratories.
The subject, who participates
in the experiment for three
Page 15
weeks, comes to the lab and
falls asleep to the sound of
numbers.
During the night, a laborato
ry technician wakes him up
several times to find out if he
heard the numbers in his sleep
and measures the length of
time the subject remembers the
numbers.
“It’s like falling asleep to the
sound of a radio,” says Oltman.
“When the subject is in a
particular stage of sleep, the
technician wakes him up and
asks him what he heard.”
When the experiment first
started, a subject was jarred
awake by the sound of an
alarm clock.
Researchers found, however,
that the noise stimulated a
subject’s auditory system and
he forgot the number.
Now, a subject is woken by
the gentle shaking of his bed
which the researcher controls
through a pulley system extend
ed from the sleep room to the
Griffin Daily News Wednesday, April 30,1975
control room.
“During the night, a person
falls into deeper and deeper
sleep,” says Oltman. “We are
concerned with the second
stage of sleep and how a
subject’s memory functions
then.”
Stage two of a person’s sleep
is characterized by a moderate
amount of brain wave activity,
measured by electrodes at
tached to a subject’s head.
“Think of the numbers as an
echo a person hears in his
sleep,” explains Oltman. “If we
wait five seconds, generally, a
person’s recall span is better
than if we wait 10 seconds and
wake up him to find out if he
remembers what he heard.”
“We are trying to understand
the memory process,” says
Oltman. “If you hear your
name when you are sleeping,
you’ll wake up. But if a train
goes by, chances are you’ll
continue sleeping.”
One college student, who
showed up at the sleep
laboratory after pulling an all
night study session, was an
ineffective subject.
“His body was so intent on
making up his sleep, that he
quickly passed through the
lighter sleep stages into the
deeper stages,” says Oltman.
Some studies, Oltman says,
have found that their subjects
learn and remember during
sleeping hours only when the
subject woke up during the
night.
“After we conclude this
aspect of our studies, we’ll
consider long-term learning or
just how a person can transfer
knowledge from his shortrterm
memory to his long-term
learning,” says Oltman.
Then, he says, the possibili
ties are limitless. And some
day, a person might be easliy
able to learn the most difficult
subjects while he snoozes.