These People Live to Be One-hundred Forty-Seven Years Old 

    We keep getting these magazines, small newspapers, or whatever you want to call them, each touting some cure for something that ails if not us, somebody else. One thing they all have in common is that they are selling something. For this article, let’s call them advertising booklets. 
    Usually they will start out by telling you that what they are selling, be it a book, some concoction made from 47 plants previously unknown to man, is something that the medical community doesn’t have, has never heard of but is still trying to keep secret, besides trying to shut down this advertising newspaper because they, the medical community, are afraid of being put out of business. 
    Most times if you try to follow the advertising booklets logic too closely you might just fall off your chair. 
    Some of these advertising booklets will darkly hint that they are about to be shut down by forces so sinister that they can’t even stand to write about them. And of course, the reason is because the medical industry (oops, they did mention it anyway), would then lose all their revenue. One of their primary targets within the medical community are drug companies. 
    I have no strong feelings for nor against drug companies. They’ve been caught running enough elicit money making schemes not to be a target for someone who is ready to bend the truth a little, and take a molehill and make it into a mountain. But I myself take several drugs, and am told that they are helping me to keep fit and well. At least somewhat well. The ‘fit’ ship sailed some time ago, at least compared to what I remember being in my youth. And I’m glad the drug companies are there. 
    It seems that two of the most common ailments these advertising newspaper people flog cures for are diabetes and arthritis. Good choices for them, because between these two you have multiple millions of sufferers who are desperate for any kind of help with their symptoms, or maybe even a cure. Besides these two ailments are ones that medical science has not gotten a complete handle on yet. 
    Diabetes – The latest advertising newspaper I’ve seen is trying to sell some formula discovered being used by a Tibetan, by the name of Monk, who is 147 years old and can run down mountain sheep at 17,000 feet in the Himalayas. Of course they can’t divulge the ingredients’, because then everybody could mix it up and sell it, unless they had a conscience. 
    Or another was some mystery plant, (possibly the gualagaba berry, but they never really say for sure), from the Brazilian rain forest. It seems that, according to the people giving testimonials in this advertising newspaper, they had to take it for only two weeks before all traces of diabetes were gone from their bodies. Of course they’re trying to sell you a six-months supply which they never explain, hoping you won’t notice. 
    In addition to that, the leg that at least one of these testimonial givers had to have amputated because of said diabetes, grew back in nine months, and they show this lady, who swears this actually happened, jogging round a park in Outer Kapakastan, with two good legs, and a big smile on her face. This second leg looks a little out of focus, like maybe it had been photoshopped by not a kid, but some elderly person. 
    One of the positive side effects, “Space will not allow us to list them all” claims the advertising newspaper, from this mystery plant, (possibly the gualagaba berry), is that when eaten by the Kinky Monkeys of Brazil, makes the males have erections that last for two days. 
    What they don’t tell you about this mystery plant, is that it makes the Kinky Monkeys bodies supply so much blood to these erections that the monkeys have a distinct lack of blood supply to their brains. This results is their falling out of the trees where they get eaten by jaguars. 
    And then there is arthritis - This malady plagues nearly all old people. It is painful, deforming, and has no cure as such, as least that’s what I understand. The symptoms can be moderated to a certain extent. There are a zillion creams, potions, and pills put out by the drug industry to help people cope with this ailment. 
   But wait, along comes an advertising newspaper, and they have a simple cure for every kind of arthritis. It seems that there is one tribe living on the Mongolian Steppes who don’t even have a word for arthritis. Of course they don’t have a word for lots of things, but that problem is beyond the scope of this article. 
    They live on a diet of yak’s milk which is high in fat, yak meat, which is pretty lean, and rancid yak butter made from this fatty yak’s milk. (Poor man’s yogurt.) This tribe laughed when somebody first suggested that they should be eating plants like their yaks, or eating things that grew in the ground. We’d call them tubers. The first time these people heard this, several of them got sick for the first time in the history of the tribe, and had to vomited. 
    The missionaries who came to save these people from such a dastardly diet, (remember they live to be 147 years old), gave up on the idea of converting these people to a raw vegetable, bean curd, and tree bark diet. 
    But then, along came the pseudo scientists, hucksters, and con men, thinking they might be able to use these Steppe people and their long-life spans to peddle some concoction through the medium of the advertising newspaper. After casting around they discovered that these Steppe people, because of living in such close proximity to their yaks, always seemed to have yak manure on their bare feet. So now they have a lotion made up of one part per two million of sanitized yak manure. This was their secret ingredient, responsible, according to them, for the longevity of these people. The rest of the concoction is some low-grade petroleum-based gunk. And guess what? People bought it up so fast that their demand outran the supply. So now the producers of this Longevity Lotion, have a huge herd of cows named Yak 1, Yak 2, etc. So, they can truthfully say that secret ingredient still comes from Yaks. Why they should suddenly feel the need to be honest about something is beyond me. 
    But these advertising booklets are a wellspring of pseudo- medical information, all presented in the breathless anticipation of the readers been cured--once their credit card has cleared.