It’s any morning in Anytown, USA. Out come the pill boxes and the plastic bottles with labels printed with words that no one can pronounce, let alone learn how to spell. All across the country, a singular question is asked at the breakfast table to a spouse or significant other who is over the age of 60.

“Did you take your pills?”

The United States is number one in the world for the amount of medicine that helps keep us alive prescribed by doctors. Our senior citizens take an average of four prescriptions a day, with some taking as many as nine or more pills daily. A pharmacist at a drugstore chain fills as many as 300 prescriptions per day.

In 2019, Johnson & Johnson reported an annual revenue of $42 billion. Pfizer’s gross intake was $51.75 billion in the same year. On a side note, Pfizer is expected to make $15 billion just from the sales of its COVID-19 vaccines. All that big pharma profit is made in order to keep us alive.

Prescribed pills are not always ingested for their intended purpose. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports the “misuse of prescription opioids, depressants, and stimulants is a serious public health problem in the United States. …” In 2019, 50,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses.

On a personal note, my oldest sister died at age 66 from heart failure caused by her addiction to pain meds. After she had passed, it was discovered that she had $9,000 in prescription bills from three different pharmacies.

According to Rita Giordano of The Philadelphia Inquirer, in 2018, Pennsylvania was the first state to approve medical marijuana as a treatment for opioid disorders to combat the pain med epidemic that kills thousands of Americans every year.

The good news is that medicines and prescriptions help people function in their daily lives. Yet we are far behind other countries with keeping our people healthy. According to recent research, the healthiest country in the world for retirees is Switzerland, with Japan coming in second.

Reasons given were universal health care and social pensions. Canada was the only North American country to make the top 10 on the list. Spain was reported by CBS news to be the healthiest country overall with Italy second. The United States was ranked 64th overall in the world.

A major cause of poor health in the U.S. is poor diet. I for one, am guilty as charged for committing the crime of eating too many wrong foods. Americans eat too much sugar and, well, we just eat too much of everything.

In France, the quality of a restaurant steak is measured by its taste, not by its portion, but in the U.S., our personal restaurant reviews often emphasize size and amount over the palate. When asked to comment about a good eatery, we say, “There was so much food, we could barely move when we were done eating!” If we’re disappointed in the serving, we say, “For 38 bucks, the steak wasn’t much bigger than a hockey puck.”

Another reason we’re unhealthy is lack of exercise and stress brought on by job demands, family issues and the incessant chase of the dollar bill.

Evangelist Joseph Prince said, “Don’t use all your health to chase after wealth, only to spend all your wealth to get back your health.”

All this brings up one significant question. Is the goal of life to live the longest or to live the happiest?

According to Loma Linda University in California, vegetarians outlive meat eaters by seven years. Tell a carnivore who is about to devour a 16-ounce rib-eye that he might be giving up seven years of his life span, I’d bet he’d still dive his fork into the meat.

Comedian George Burns lived to be 100 eating small, balanced meals, but admitted to drinking five martinis a day. Bob Hope, another centenarian, walked 2 miles a day.

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, lived to 101, but here’s what she had to say, “Wouldn’t it be terrible if you’d spent all your life doing everything you were supposed to do, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t eat things, took lots of exercise, all the things you didn’t want to do, and suddenly one day you were run over by a big red bus, and as the wheels were crunching into you you’d say ‘Oh my God, I could have got so drunk last night!’ That’s the way you should live your life, as if tomorrow you’ll be run over by a big red bus.”

On that note, I’m going to have not one, but two chocolate doughnuts for breakfast today. Somewhere out there might be a big red bus just waiting to run me over.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.