So, you think he’ll pull his own funeral train with his teeth?
Odd, that I can’t find any mention of military service in WWII. He was twenty-eight and a body builder then. Perfect candidate for the draft boards.
I think he may have helped train troops. But, can’t find a cite.
In his prime he could have, but at 96 he’s just going to serve as his own pallbearers.
Of course, this begs the question of who would win in a fight between Jack Lalanne and Chuck Norris.
He was inducted to my high school’s hall of fame when I was a young 'un. He gave this absolutely rousing speech that grabbed the attention of 2,000 teenagers who, up to that moment, would rather be anywhere else. I will remember him for his wit and personality.
I remember him when he was a youngster in his late 80s on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect and began supporting himself on his chair with just his arms and rocking his body cross legged while discussing the need for Americans to keep in shape.
True story: one of the guests on that show was Carrot Top and this was before he became a punchline for steroids jokes. I’ve wondered if that appearance had anything to do with his getting so enormously buff.
Yeah, my grandparents are in their 90’s and still living. Guess that proves always having a dish of candy around and snacking on it throughout the day is the path to immortality, right? Of course not.
None of which of course takes anything away from Jack Lalanne being one amazing guy. Sorry to hear he’s gone.
My paternal grandmother and all her descendants except one have lived to 97 or older (or are still alive) and none of them are exercise people except my uncle who is 96 and might live to 97.
I saw a documentary on cable and had already heard the same from a psychologist friend whose specialty is geriatrics that after a certain age genes trump lifestyle. On the other hand if you look at a random group of people who died of natural causes at 75 or before, lifestyle usually played some part in their death. If you look at a random group of, say, healthy 85 year olds, most of them usually ate better/exercised more/never smoked or quit smoking/etc., than their peers.
Then something strange begins to happen. If you look at a group of healthy 95 year olds lifestyle doesn’t seem to matter as much. You’ll still find more who had relatively healthy lifestyles than didn’t, but it’s probably a smaller percentage of healthy lifestyles than you’d find among healthy 80 year olds. What you will find is more people from particularly long lived families and a statistically significant number of the people will have siblings or other immediate family members who also lived to be extremely old.
By the time you move past the century mark, the number of people who had healthy lifestyles seems to have significantly less significance and the percentage with immediate family members who lived to a similar age is less than it was a few years before. At this point mortality rates average about 50% per annum, meaning that of a group of 100 people who see their 100th birthday about 50 people will live to be 101 and about 25 will see 102 and ~12 will live to 103, etc…
What gets interesting is the supercentenarians (people 110 or over). At this point there seems no longer any rhyme nor reason : they are as or more likely to have been in the “I used to smoke, drink, and dance the hoochey koo” category as to have had healthy lifestyles, very rarely had relatives who achieved similar ages, and their mortality rate per year goes down, not up, compared to 100 year olds (i.e. a 110 year old is more likely to see 112 than a 100 year old is to see 102).
Jeanne Calment, the oldest documented human ever (she lived to be 122) smoked until she was well over 110. Next week (Og willing) the U.S.'s only known WW1 veteran, Frank Buckles, will become a supercentenarian (he turns 110 on February 1) and not only did he fight in the first world war while a teenager (stress there) but as a civilian businessman in Manila he was held as a POW by the Japanese for 3 years in WW2 and weighed less than 100 pounds when freed, about as stressful a situation as you can imagine. He was a smoker and a drinker for much of his life.
It’s as if some genetic sequence or fluke of some sort says “ever onward” and overrides the risk factors. There’s been a lot of research into what brings this phenomena about- it’s assumed to be genetic but there again, supercentenarians don’t usually seem to be the children of people who lived to be extraordinarily old nor do they tend to have of super long lived parents or siblings who made it to the supercentennial mark (some do, most don’t).
This isn’t to say that there’s no reason to take care of yourself: it’s very probable that Jack Lalanne had the genes for old age, but it’s an absolutele certainty he wouldn’t have been jogging and swimming and hosting infomercials and doing pushups and pullups in his 90s if he hadn’t kept in shape and that’s a helluva lot better than living to be 96 but spending the last decade in a nursing home gumming Jell-O. However, somewhere out there is a guy who rarely missed a cheeseburger who’s older than Jack and has more than a decade left to go, and there’s no ryhyme nor reason to it.
I remember his show from the 60s, and he had a particularly sharp wit.
I have to ask, though: am I the only one that think he looked like crap?
I mean, he can lift two 5lb dumbbells, but, what else can he do at 96?
Sure, that’s more than most 96 year old people can do, but, is it more than most 70 year olds can do?
Best wishes,
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He did have heart valve surgery in 2009, that would take a toll.
No idea what he was capable of in his 90s but he did still have visible muscles. He’s been in bad health for at least a year or so. I read in some business mag last year that like George Foreman and his grill he made more money from that juicer than anything in the rest of his career combined. (From what I’ve heard it really is a quality juicer; being $100 or whatever I’m sure it didn’t sell a tiny fraction as many units as Foreman’s grill but every million helps.)
Funny. Saturday I almost said to my roomate, ‘Isn’t it amazing Jack Lalanne is still alive?’
Weird, eh? Not the first time that’s happened.
As I told my coworker, ‘Eat right, exercise, and die anyway.’
Not to make light of it, though. I used to watch Jack Lalanne when I was a little kid. Him and his dog (German Shepherd?) Happy (IIRC).
See how useless fitness is? He couldn’t even do 100!
Seriously though, RIP. I had no idea he was still around. I remember his television show back in the 1960s. (Not that I watched it, but his was a household name.)
For perspective he died a year younger than Leon Askin (the obese General Burkhalter from Hogan’s Heroes) and several years under “it’s that old guy” character actor Charles Lane who was a heavy smoker until 90 and lived to be 102.
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Seriously though, RIP. I had no idea he was still around. I remember his television show back in the 1960s. (Not that I watched it, but his was a household name.)
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It’s because you don’t live here. There’s not a night that goes by you don’t see his juicer infomercial in channel surfing; I’ve seen it several times just since learning he died.
See?! Now pardon me while I go get some pizza.
My understanding is that celebrities who have a piece of the product they sell make out like a bandit: Lalanne with his juicer, George Foreman with his grill, Suzanne Somers and thighmaster.
I’m not sure if it was Lalanne but I remember seeing someone like him on the “Virginia Graham” show circa 1970 talking about how he was going to live to 100 because of his diet, exercise. He almost made it.
[QUOTE=Jim’s Son]
I’m not sure if it was Lalanne but I remember seeing someone like him on the “Virginia Graham” show circa 1970 talking about how he was going to live to 100 because of his diet, exercise. He almost made it.
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One of the most famous was Jerome Rodale who claimed several times he was going to make it to 100 and whose health regimen included, among other things, ingesting boiled urine. He’s most famous today for one thing: dying in his chair a moment after discussing health on The Dick Cavett Show. The audience laughed at first because they thought he was pretending to snore and doze off while the next guest talked when in fact he was having a fatal heart attack.
Dick Cavett has said that he’s met and heard from hundreds if not thousands of people over the years who clearly remember seeing that show live. Most of them can describe it in detail (though some remember the guest as Euell Gibbons, another famous fitness/diet guru of the 1970s) and it fascinates him because these people have very clear memories and could pass a polygraph even though the show wasn’t broadcast live and that particular episode was, for obvious reasons, never shown. It’s a mass false memory.
Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai lived to 99 and – before he died, of course – credited his longevity to drinking his own urine each day.
Excerpt fom the link: “He told journalist Khushwant Singh that he was advised to try drinking his own urine when in his 40s to cure piles (hemorrhoids), and he got immediate results. Thereafter he continued the practice and was quite open about it, saying that you should not do anything you would be ashamed of.”
I just knew that he was over exerting himself, and that his overdoing of exercise would kill him…