America is a country of crazy fat cats obsessed with youth; it’s so cranked over with the newest studies and choices bandied about, scrapped or overtaken by yet one more and one more, that staying on the rat race track can get weary

EVERY ten seconds, one American hits the half-century mark! What then should he do? Drown his sorrows in a fizzy drink; throw a wild party to celebrate; or sprint to his cosmetic guru for a second facelift? (For it is assumed in America, that you would have already gone under the knife once in your late 30s or early 40s).

“Looking old is now becoming abnormal. It’s almost considered a disease. It’s no longer a natural stage of life — lipo and Botox injections, implants, lifts, tucks — the full works are everyday life,” says a beautician who shamefacedly suggests that young people in their 30s should be spending $10,000 annually to look young. Maybe even get eyelid surgery for around $20,000 — the eyes get droopy.”

America is a country of crazy fat cats obsessed with youth; it’s so cranked over with the newest studies and choices bandied about, scrapped or overtaken by yet one more and one more, that staying on the rat race track can get weary.

Beauty and youth hunt is the playground of the rich only.

For the rest, home grown wisdom is around to get out your wrinkles and straighten out that saggy skin. They say a man of 60 can now slice off half his age and morph into a strapping 30! Ah, if it’s not the Botox, those instant wrinkle-erasing smoothies, it’s got to be the surgeon’s scalpel.

Wrong again.

Plebeian and plainly put, it’s Mother Nature.

And to be more specific: it’s what you put in your mouth!

Fruit and veggies, says the latest research, is your fountain of youth! And Mother Nature is your laboratory.

Health nuts promise miracles if you change your diet to include five to nine helpings of garden fresh — pure, unadulterated and toxic free — raw fruits and vegetables a day. And what exactly does a serving comprise? It can be a banana; one medium apple; glass of orange juice; cup of steamed broccoli; 1 cup of spinach; cup onions; 1 cup eggplant; 6 oz glass of tomato juice — the choices before us are endless.

When I came to the US, I simply couldn’t contain my excitement at the juicy, jumbo and gaudy fruits and vegetables glittering like jewels on the shelves with the seductive look ‘pick me up and have me — I’m so desirable’! Unable to resist, I’d load my cart with these beauties to be stashed inside the fridge and then forgotten. Weeks later, when I’d remember, out would come the pearly cauliflower, neither withered with age nor shriveled with discolour; the mauve eggplant, firm and supple; the radish, big and succulent; the scrunchy apples, just as gorgeous as when I first set eyes on them many weeks before.

In Pakistan, fruits and vegetables stale within days, but here, thanks to the preservatives, they stubbornly never die. “Our intake of preservatives is phenomenal — you bet our bodies will never rot once inside the coffins,” ghoulishly jokes my neighbour.

With fruits and vegetables in America inorganically harvested and later over-processed, while in Pakistan often overcooked and stale, the nutrient value, needless to say, is lost in both the scenarios.

What then is the answer?

Some ambitious medical doctors in league with businessmen have come up with the ideal formula, sold as Juice Plus.

The capsules — made from fruits and vegetables extract with their nutritional essence and reduced to powder — are already causing waves here because the testimony they bring with them is prodigious: This fruit and vegetable capsules — are the most extensively researched “whole food” nutritional supplement in history, so claim their inventors. Made from fresh raw fruits and vegetables, the extract has been carefully tested to ensure that they are free of pesticides, nor have any other contaminants affected their natural purity.

So why should one pop these pills as opposed to hundreds of vitamin supplements vying with each other on the shelves today? “Because they are not man made, they are Mother Nature’s vitamins which are heavily concentrated, they have not been tinkered with by human hands like the other vitamins,” says Dr Aziz Hasan.

And here’s another caveat from him: an overdose of man made supplements can kill! “A Harvard study done showed higher cancer rates among those taking beta-carotene and vitamin E pills than those who didn’t!”

If you switch to Juice Plus, flush all other vitamins down the toilet! But continue eating vitamin D and Calcium. That’s all.

Aziz Hasan, three decades back, was an assistant professor of surgery at Dow Medical College in Karachi. “It took me months of research to get converted to Juice Plus,” says the 71-year-old physician, who left Pakistan in 1972 to practice family medicine here and steadily build up his fortune.

Semi-retired and living with his wife, Carol, in a gated community in Florida, the Hasans appear extremely young and agile for their age.

“I began taking these caps exactly a year ago and have felt an enormous difference in my energy level. I play golf everyday without getting fatigued as before,” says the man who buried himself in the growing body of research — the most thorough in the history of the world — before popping the first pill himself.

The latest validation about the wonder pill comes from American College of Cardiology. If you consume a high fat meal, our blood circulation is impaired for 4-6 hours, but “ingestion of vitamin antioxidants or a green salad can reduce the impairment by 60%” to protect a free flow of our blood circulation.

Sounds Greek? Or perhaps French and Latin?

Well, all that these grey men at the American College of Cardiology are saying is that if you eat a meal dripping with oil, your blood circulation gets really taxed by the slick passing through your body, blocking the normal flow for 4-6 hours!

The antidote: eats tons of greens! They drudge the fat off.

The Pakistani-American again gets too technical for me when he says: “A DNA study at the Department of Microbiology at Brigham Young University found that after 80 days on Juice Plus, the DNA damage is lessened by 66 per cent. It is amazing to note that this occurred with smokers and non smokers!”

The terrifying news out there for seniors is that 40 new cases of Alzheimer’s get discovered every hour in the US! This number is expected to double by 2010. Such a devastating discovery alone can get the geriatrics frantically popping these magic pills daily because Vitamin E is meant to reduce the risk of developing dementia by 35-70pc. One pill alone is packed with so much Vitamin E that would normally be found in several one-cup servings of spinach and broccoli.

With killers like cancer, cardiac disease and a host of others on the prowl, a person can age (if lucky to survive the attack); can become a victim to today’s stress and go to his grave early, but American seem to love life and don’t want to let go, their search for the fountain of youth will go on forever.