Charlie should not have died

 Since my Stroke, I have found my dream world recording an immense number of long-forgotten adventures from my life, no doubt in the effort of recovering my lost memory and vocabulary.

This night, I dreamt that my neighbour called in to see me, and, there, found myself expounding at length about  my experiences as a legal officer of the Land Registry of years ago.

Well, as often happens in dreams, the subject shifts without warning, and I heard a journalist of old exclaiming, "Charlie Haughey should not have died." This, to me, was patently an error, and the falsehood shocked me into waking from my dream. The person I was aware of who in my dream world "should not have died" was not Charlie Haughey, but Charles Atlas (1892 to 1972).

I came across Charles Atlas in American comics when I was around ten years old. Atlas was not a character in the comics, but appeared in advertisements promoting his idea of body-building through exercise, without the need of gym equipment. 

Atlas advocated whole milk as a complete food, being all you needed for good health and strength. He reputedly used five litres of grass-fed milk per day in his routine. 

Charles Atlas (from Wikimedia)

With a body like his, you could down-faced any bully. With his system he trained Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, among many other.

At this time, the Irish Dairy Board admonished us to "Drinka Pinta Milka Day."

As, I came into my teens, I found that I had quite enough exercise cycling to and from school twice a day (about 6 miles altogether), and did not attempt to emulate Atlas' huge consumption of milk. A fit and active peer of mine, however, decided to drink more than the "pinta milka day," in the belief that he could thus build up his body. Alas, his plan backfired. He became ill and, was taken to Hospital. There, the doctors declared that he had caused his illness by excessive consumption of milk, and had thereby become diabetic. (Perhaps he was gorging on other stuff besides milk, or perhaps he failed to match the requisite amount of exercise).

So why did my dream world say that Charlie should not have died?

Charles Atlas died at around 80 years of age. I had my stroke at a similar age: actually, 82. Atlas had been having chest pains for a few years before he died of a heart attack. His remedy for the pains, pursuant to his continuing life-style, was to pursue his exercise regime all the more. Obviously this was the wrong decision. Had he received modern cardiac treatment, he would have lived an active life for another ten years.

It is far from clear that his diet of milk had anything to do with the atheroma of his veins. Many experts think that such deterioration is caused more by sugar than by dairy products