Ray Malone's Commentary

I hear all the talk about the benefits of so called healthy eating.. but my Dad's words keep coming back to my mind.

My Great Uncle Ed Malone was born in 1870, he died in 1973. I remember him eating perhaps as many as six fried eggs for breakfast.. Eggs were fried in butter of course ... add to that a skillet full of fried potatoes. They were always fried in bacon grease left from frying several slices of bacon that were included in his breakfast. Several biscuits soaked in sausage gravy, and perhaps some in-season fruit as well as strong coffee would complete his morning meal. It was likely at least a 2,500 to 3,000 calorie breakfast.

Uncle Ed also liked to eat butter from a spoon as did my Dad. He also would eat huge amounts of meat. The noon meal always had at least one type of meat with lots of fat for flavor. And lots of potatoes fried with bacon grease or baked and soaked in streams of butter. Supper, as the evening meal was called, always had at least 2 and usually three types of fatty meat fried in either butter, lard, or bacon grease. Uncle Ed also ate vegetables, of course, as well as fruit. He often drank whole milk in large quantities

Uncle Ed ate very much like his Grand Daddy. His Grand Dad, known as Uncle Ben ,was born in 1805 and died in 1918. Uncle Ben lived to be 113. I remember my Dad asking me how old did I think Uncles Ben and Ed would have lived if they had only eaten like my professors said we should all be eating. Dad ate very much like the rest of the Malone clan.

I remember my nephew Steve asking me, when I was facing terminal lung cancer, to visit every cemetery in Ross County Ohio and write down the age at death of every Malone I could find. If one discounted the ages of those that died in childbirth, the average age at death turned out to be 93 dot something. So I decided not to be an exception. I was not going to die of cancer at age 60, I chose to believe that I was going to beat the inoperable lung cancer and live. I did. I have beaten both terminal lung and brain cancer in my life time.

I am convinced that the will to live trumps nearly all other factors in determining length of life. I am still alive and kicking as I near my 70th birthday.

The odds of beating inoperable lung cancer that has masticated into a brain tumor are at best very slim. Yet I will be alive one year after the brain tumor was removed. I only have about 2.5 months to go.

Less than a fraction of 1 percent of those so afflicted live this long. In nearly all cases the brain cancer continues to grow at a rapid rate after the initial operation. I am still cancer free... from my head to my toes.

As noted in my study of head stone dates, the Malone family is living shorter life times .. not longer. Strangely enough it is the ones that try to eat the healthy diets and live the modern lives that die young. However all members of my family are living shorter lives. My Granddad's Father lived to be 101, My Grand Dad lived to be 94 and my Dad lived to be 90.

I will fight to live with my last breath. I know the the will to live is more important that what I eat. It seems likely to me that stress and lack of exercise has shortened our lives.. not the foods we consume.

From descriptions of my ancestors, It appears that few if any were much overweight.. yet their caloric intake must have been much larger than mine or even my fathers. Granddad farmed over 1,000 acres until he was 89 years old. In his 89th year he was farming 1,000 acres with 2 hired hands in addition to himself. From the 1890s until the 1930s he had farmed with horses and primitive farm implements. It had to be back breaking work.

My grandfather told me on his 93rd birthday that he was going to visit his daughter (my aunt) in Arizona in a few months and when he returned he was going to die.

The second day home after returning from Arizona, Grandpa passed away in his sleep. His death occurred exactly as he had told me it would a year earlier. Grandpa was tired of living without my Grandmother. He willed himself to die and he did.

Uncle Ed, was still running his construction company at age 103. Uncle Ed had promised his son, Ed Jr. that the firm would be his when Ed Sr. retired.
Ed Jr. was 83 years old when he finally inherited the company. Imagine walking in to a company and asking an 82 year old man when some work could be scheduled? Image your reaction when the 82 year old replies that he will have to ask his Dad when it could be done?

Uncle Ben Malone was 105 when he took my 8 year old father out to the woods to teach him to hunt for food with both guns and a bow and arrow. He taught Dad and how to find edible plants. Then uncle Ben took Dad to the Creek and taught him how to fish with just a stick, a line, a hook and a worm. One has to stay in good shape to do that at 105.

My family has always had a great distrust of Doctors and medicine in general. We tend to make our own medical decisions based on our own logic. My family knew intuitively that when 18th and early 19th century doctors would bleed people in an effort to make them better, they were actually doing a lot of harm.

I keep thinking... Were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson inferior to Bill Clinton and George Bush? Since they clearly are not, then what makes us think that today's doctors are far superior to the doctors who practiced during the time Washington And Jefferson were president. You can argue that today's doctors have a lot more information to guide decisions than did the doctors of the early 1800s. But so do today's presidents, and that does not seem to help them much.

My case in point is the surgeon who removed my brain tumor last fall prescribed several weeks of brain radiation for me. That would have fried my brain. It would have made me mentally retarded. I refused. I decided I would rather die than have my mental capacity reduced. Even when another doctor told me that failing to accept the radiation would likely result in the return of a raging brain tumor in as little as 3 or 4 months, I continued to refuse the radiation. My own brain told me it could do more to kill cancer cells than the disastrous radiation the doctors prescribed, and it has done so.

It is now nearly 10 months since the brain cancer operation and I am still cancer free and my brain is working fine. The medical advice of two top notch 21st century doctors was decidedly wrong. Others that took the radiation treatment after brain surgery are dead.. while I live on in cancer free health.

The brain surgeon also prescribed that I take anti seizure pills for a year following the brain operation. The anti-seizure pills greatly reduced my ability to think. They slow one's brain. That in my view is a very bad thing.

The Human brain contributes greatly to eliminating all sorts of bad things from the body. Slowing the brain, in my view, is as stupid as bleeding people to make them better. It seems axiomatic that the human brain directs the bodies organs to remove things that can harm the body. Slowing it down is just plain DUMB!!!!

I stopped taking the pills after a short taper with no ill effects. I told the doctor that he could prescribe all he wanted .. but I was not going to take pills designed to prevent my brain from being alert enough to know to issue orders for my organs to kill the cancer cells it found.

In my lifetime I have seen the medical profession reverse itself on many dietary and medical issues. I know for a fact that they are often wrong.
The fact that I am alive, cancer free, mentally and physically alert proves how disastrous and totally wrong the current medical profession can be.

I have just one rule as far as food.... if man made it, I don't eat it.

I believe one other thing... that any area where both Christianity and evolution agree is pretty apt to be the best way to live. Both Christianity and evolution report that mankind has always been carnivorous. I believe that one can only deviate from history's lesson at one's own risk.

Was Methuselah a vegetarian or was he on the Lamb?