Leisure World resident Roger Saville remembers the fear that led him to a major lifestyle change and into a career as a health volunteer and wellness mentor.
“I had moved into Leisure World about seven years ago,” he said. “Then I went for my first Medicare physical and they found a tumor on my lung.”
Saville was retired. He had been a technical production engineer in the aerospace field and then in the computer industry.
“I decided to attack my health problem as I had approached things as an engineer,” he said. “I started reading everything I could find on cancer.”
The in-depth studies and Internet searches led Saville to follow a path that looked closely at the way nutrition affects human health and wellness.
“I was looking for the magic bullet,” he said. “I found various alternatives for approaching the tumor, none of which I liked. The only thing I was left with was changing my lifestyle and diet.
Saville had grown up on the “normal” American diet.
“I was a meat and potatoes guy,” he said.
His study, he said, led him to radically change his diet.
“I started eating a lot more raw foods,” he said. “It’s incredible when you learn how poorly our bodies react to our diet in this country of processed foods and eating things that are overcooked. We also have our diets way out of balance for what our bodies require.”
Saville said it wasn’t easy to make the change from what he was used to eating. He found it difficult to cut far back on his meat intake and to take up a diet of regular raw vegetables. Meanwhile he virtually eliminated his processed food intake.”
The diet seemed to work. His tumor, he said his doctors told him, was continuing to shrink.
“It made it easier to make the change because I was working from what was scaring me,” he said.
With the prospect of lung cancer in his near future, Saville stuck to a strict regimen regarding what he ate.
The tumor kept falling off the doctors’ radar.
“Eventually,” Saville said with a sly grin, “I was fired by my oncologist.”
He said he had basically been pronounced in good health.
Saville said he believes he is, for the most part, “out of the woods” from his lung cancer scare thanks to his change of diet.
Saville said that although the good news might have led him back to a meat and potatoes diet, he discovered his taste and desire had changed.
“I always loved eating a good pot roast,” he said. “When I first got my clean bill of health, the first thing I did was to try and eat some pot roast. Well, I put the first couple of bites in my mouth and I felt all of this grease in my mouth. I did not like it at all. I realized I was done with eating a diet like that. All of that grease in my mouth just felt terrible.
Saville found to his bemusement, that he had become conditioned to eating healthy food.
However, Saville was also a ling time cigarette smoker. While a lung tumor might have led others to stop, Saville said he cut back, to this day he still smokes about a half a pack of cigarettes a day.
“In the United States, smoking, over the last 12 years has been reduced from 43 percent to 20 percent, yet our cancer rates (per capita) continue to rise,” Saville said. “However, in China, the smoking rate is somewhere around 60 percent. And yet, their cancer and cardio vascular disease rate is minimal compared to ours.”
Saville said he believes that statistic is due to the fact that the greater Chinese population, which is poor by the standards of our society, eats a lot of raw food that they purchase daily at local markets throughout that country.
“They can’t even afford to cook a lot of their food, and their meat intake is very minimal,” Saville said. “So while they have less than us, they are more healthy.”
Saville has continued his studies and returned to the university and earned a masters degree in nutrition and wellness from Clayton College.
The accomplishment, he said, has added to his cache as a teacher.
Saville has become a health and wellness evangelist of sorts. He has been presenting seminars in Leisure World and the outer community. He has an eight-week class he offers through California State University at Long Beach’s Senior University.
“It really happened by accident. I told a few people about my story and then others wanted to know about what I had learned. I really don’t like to get paid for what I teach. I am retired now and I don’t want to have to work for a living, but I do like helping others open the door to better health.
“I’m 72 years old now, but I have more energy than when I was in my 50s. It’s all about what you eat and that is what you are.”
