Peter Snell Back to Get NZ Moving

FORTY-SIX years after he set the athletics world on its ear, Peter Snell wants to get the modern world off its collective backside.

“I’m nearly 68 and I don’t intend to retire for some time yet,” he said at Massey University’s Palmerston North campus yesterday.

“I have no intention of sitting on my backside. There are so many things I still want to do that will give me genuine satisfaction.” Dr Snell was invited back to New Zealand from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas as the Massey University Foundation Fellow in Health and Exercise Science. As such, he is holding a series of meetings with fellow scientists and researchers at all three Massey campuses to devise productive research projects in three main areas: Maori and Pacific Island health, specifically the interaction between diet and nutrition, as well as genetic factors in the response by Maori and Polynesian diabetic patients to exercise and diet; research into the impact of aging in health factors, and the parts played by diet, exercise and lifestyle changes and fatty acid production and research in meat and dairy science and technology.Dr Snell will be back in New Zealand in May next year to evaluate the results of the early work and identify projects that will be pursued.

However, a key component yet to be resolved is the question of funding, he said.

One area where he has no doubts, is the part played by exercise in enhancing general well-being. This precept is at the core of his recently published book, Use It Or lose It, written in conjunction with 80-year-old writer Garth Gilmour who wrote the Snell biography 40 years ago.

His interests have swung solidly into this field after his earlier post-doctoral work in sports physiology.

“In those days, you couldn’t make a living from sports sciences the way you can now,” he said.

This prompted his move into preventative medicine in general and the effects of diet and exercise on ageing in particular.

Dr Snell is a natural left-hander but in his youth taught himself to use his other hand for writing. This is particularly fortunate at the moment, because a bicycling accident has his left forearm and hand in a plaster cast.

He said he crashed his bicycle into a curb, crushing a finger and cracking ribs. He also rapped his head hard on the ground, causing swelling on the right side of his face and necessitating a CT scan.

However, before going for treatment, he kept an appointment with one of his patients, only finding out later how battered he looked.

However, that’s nothing for Mr Use It Or Lose It once the fastest middle-distance runner in the world who is determined to make his own life part of the proof of his claims that diet and exercise slow the effects of ageing.

(c) 2006 Southland Times, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.