Kennedy quits presidential bid

Would you like to live to be a hundred?

If the question came out of the blue to a startled audience of several nationalities, it's my guess that the first people to say yes would be Americans. I'm not saying that they would stay with this instinctive response. If a Frenchman or a sceptical Scotsman said, 'But to live like what? Like an animal, vegetable or mineral?', second thoughts might introduce at least some reservations or conditions, such as having enough money to guarantee some comfort, having, most of all, enough health to be comfortable at all.

But Americans, of all peoples, believe most steadily in progress, especially in the progress of science and assume that, saving some natural catastrophe or the final war, tomorrow will be better than yesterday.

A distinguished American surgeon of my acquaintance, once told me that he found it difficult to convince his students that the essential techniques for operation on a rectal fistula and the ones that must be followed today had been laid down by a surgeon who travelled with the French armies in the thirteenth century on the Seventh Crusade. These soldiers were particularly liable to such afflictions because of the great weight of armour they had to bear in walking through the hot and foetid landscape of what we call the Middle East.

The doctor told me that his students were less fascinated by this information than depressed by it. The general reaction being, 'Have we come no farther than this in seven centuries?'.

Well, several things have happened this week that turn on the American love of what, in medical matters especially, they call 'a breakthrough' – the assumption being that any new technique, new drug, new diet, giant step will be a giant step forward. At the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, an attempt was made to implant into a human being the first permanent mechanical heart. The only surgeon whom the government allows to do this has done it on animals and extended their life by, at best, nine months and though, as I talk, the 20 members of the surgical team are satisfied with the immediate result, they have warned us that the first three or four days will be critical and that the great hazard is pneumonia.

At any rate, there's little doubt among them that the implanting of artificial hearts will improve to the point – nobody knows how long from now – it will become standard procedure. For the rest of us who are not yet sick enough to face the dire prospect, there was not a breakthrough but a setback reported today in the most eminent of American medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine. The word, fellas, is that starch blockers don't work! This will come as grumpy news to millions of Americans who, again, more than any other people alive, are obsessed with diet and dieting.

At the moment, there are on the non-fiction bestseller lists of this country four books prescribing quite different ways proffered as painless and fairly quick ways of losing weight, keeping trim, invigorating the vital organs and feeling fine, with no nasty side effects – none, anyway, that will appear in the time it takes you to buy and read the book.

One of the favourite magical pills of the day is this so-called 'starch blocker'. There are several brand names. 200 actual varieties for what is usually an extract of kidney beans. The manufacturers claim, to put it simply, that these pills stop the body from absorbing the calories of starchy foods. 'Inhibiting the starch calorie absorption in human beings' is the claim rejected by the researchers who've just published their findings in the New England Journal. It has a long editorial that asks some awkward and long-overdue questions about what it calls 'the grey zone' between foods and drugs. These products, it notes, are always marketed as foods or dietary supplements, not as drugs, and were sold heavily in health food stores as well as in pharmacies but, once a claim is made or a product is promoted for use in changing a physiologic function, then the matter ought to go the protecting government agency, the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA has, in fact, acted in this case and ordered these 200-odd products to be taken off the shelves. The New England Journal wonders why it took so long after there'd been increasing reports of bloating, indigestion and omens, at least, of long-range disorders. The editorial writer puts his finger on a national characteristic which I think goes far to explain this long flirtation with new diets. He says, 'The public are remarkably responsive to claims for diet and food supplements, particularly when such claims seem to offer a shortcut to weight control or health without prolonged dietary discipline.' The title of the editorial implies what responsible doctors have reluctantly preached for years and years, there is no way to lose weight sensibly and safely except by taking in less calories. The title is, 'Still No Calorie-Free Lunch'.

Well, the American element in all this is what the Journal calls 'the shortcut' and what today tends to be known as 'the quick fix'. I notice, by the way, that when Mr Reagan was campaigning for the presidency, he offered to 'turn the country round', his favourite phrase, and revitalise a sleepy economy certainly by the spring of 1982. Once he got into the White House and was amazed to discover the complexity of money and jobs and their distribution, he began to say that, after all, you couldn't expect to reverse overnight a 50-year habit of spending and spending and taxing and taxing. 'There is', he said, and as the economy goes on slumbering without a sign of coming awake, he goes on saying it, 'there is no quick fix.'

The most memorable offer of a quick fix that comes to mind is a newspaper ad I saw a couple of years ago. It was published in February. It said, 'You can learn to speak French by April with no effort on your part.' But if the absolutely reliable artificial heart is a long way off and quick-fix diets have now been debunked, how come that in the small, mountainous Soviet Republic of Abkhazia, population half a million, there are 548 residents who are a hundred years old or over. That certainly is a blockbuster of a news bulletin. Why haven't we heard of this before? What is their secret? We must assume they have a secret, a quick fix rather than a way of life which is the long, dull prescription.

Well, first of all, let's calm down and look with all available suspicion at this figure, this claim. You may have noticed, from time to time, that whenever we hear of some old gaffer who's crowding 110, he or she always lives in some mountainous and remote Russian village or in that enormous stretch of country in Brazil, the Amazon Basin, which has yet to be explored, except by almanac editors looking for natives older than a hundred.

An old friend of mine who was brought into New York as a child from Russia always chuckled at these revelations. 'Ask me', he used to say, 'how old was my mother or my father at any time in their lives and I couldn't tell you. Simple, my dear boy,' he used to say, 'there was no compulsory registration of births until after I was born which, my parents told me, was either in 1900 or 1901 or 1902.' Whenever the report of these hardy Russian or Brazilian centenarians came in, this friend used to recall an old woman alive and much venerated in his village when he was a boy there. She was undoubtedly old, he said, but since she'd outlived everybody around, they had to take her word about life in the old days. Every year, the kids who used to hear her tales would add another five years to her suspected age. By the time they were 20, they figured she was a hundred. When they were 25, she was 116.

The point about the registration of births is the key to these legends but now, a team of Russian and American ethnographers have been over to the Caucuses and worked the mountains over and they came back this week and held at Columbia University a symposium on longevity research in the Caucuses. They focused on Abkhazia. They checked this and that and they paired the number of centenarians down from 548 to 241 but that's till 500 per cent heartier and hailer than the oldsters of the United States or Britain.

They came to swear over the stubborn doubts of two of the Americans that church records of births and marriages went to confirm the figure of 241. And what was their secret?

Well, they drink little alcohol and they've never heard of diets. Their blood is no different from ours, no genetic peculiarities. The best the team could do by way of description with no explanation was that they live in the mountains and have almost no cancer. Oh there's... there's one another thing which might be the key! They live in a society which begins by respecting the elders and, as they get older, reverences them. Their advice is sought by young and old. They are thought to be wise. They feel secure, wanted, never at risk. So the best prescription I can pass on to you is, 'Get your children to respect you and your grandchildren to reverence you.' That's it.

A question of age tiptoed on to the political front his week when Senator Edward Kennedy announced that, what with the emotional pressures that followed on two assassinations and the emotional strain of an impending divorce, he has to decided to devote himself to his family and will not run for the presidency in 1984. The newspaper columns and the TV screens are now open for at least half a dozen other Democrats, their aides and wives and publicity men, to guess and hedge and ponder whether Kennedy's withdrawal will help or hinder their own ambitions.

As for the senator, note that he said 'not in 1984'. He discovered in his recent campaign for the Senate that Chappaquiddick, though a 13-year memory, is not forgotten. Maybe by 1988 or '92 it will be. His children will be grown and on their own way. Suppose he waits till the year 2000? He will still be a little younger than Ronald Reagan when he walked into the White House.

We've certainly not heard the last of Ted Kennedy. He's 50. In 2004 or 2008 or 2012, he could still make it. After, that is, a successful heart implant.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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