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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

> The three fold path to health as we preach it:  whole food, vigorous
> exercise, and proper attitude,   hugely and overwhelmingly outweighs any 
> effects there would be in moving somewhere else.  What I find most often 
> in the cases of 'move to a better climate' is that people are doing that 
> in stead of taking an active and pro-active role in the improvement of 
> their health.

My family and I have the same attitude toward health: eat the best food, 
get lots of exercise and embrace a positive reality that sickness is a 
problem of other people. I expect to just gradually wear out with age, and 
an old age at that. Dad died at 93, which too-young I attribute to the 
sedentary life he succumbed to in latter years; at 91 my mother is 
amazingly active and gardens every day: at merely 69 I do whatever I 
choose. Have climbed a couple mountains in the last two weeks, the first 
with my brother and the last with our son and grandsons.

While I was in the Army in Japan in the mid-50s, my parents sold the 
Wisconsin farm and headed for Arizona because doctors agreed that my 
brother's severe hay fever, asthma, sinus problems and generally bad 
respiration would be improved with the dry air here. As an aside, the 
neighborhood where I now live is accessed through an area that was a 
"tubercular camp," decades ago, a place where people afflicted with 
tuberculosis were sent by their back-East doctors. I am told by those who 
grew up here that there was an extensive area of tents and shacks where the 
"tuberculars" lived. Back to my brother, his breathing improved greatly, he 
grew up healthy, and he has remained in the West, although for the last two 
years he has lived just north of Portland, where it is not dry. At age 64, 
he is vigorously active and healthy, is a white water rafter and kayaker 
who has run rivers and camped in Alaska twice, the Grand Canyon thrice, and 
all over the West for the last thirty or so years, always on the wildest 
water he and his younger rafting buddies can find. In his early teens his 
health was greatly in question and there is no doubt that the dry Western 
air allowed his body to mature with health.