93-year-old Ohio grandma overcomes loss, illness to inspire social media with world travels. Story by Amanda Lee Myers, USA TODAY
USA TODAY Eye-opening experience’: Grandmother visits every U.S. national park with grandsonUnmute0 – Bing video Joy Ryan has survived the death of her husband and all three of her sons, a severe illness in 2008 and a recent bout with COVID-19. She has outlived so many friends and family that she has lost count. That may be why, at age 93, Ryan is living life more fully
than most people half her age.
Just last month, Ryan – who goes by Grandma Joy – became the oldest known person
to visit every single one of America’s 63 national parks. Along the way, she has ziplined in West Virginia’s New River Gorge, gone whitewater rafting in Alaska, rolled down 100-foot sand dunes in Colorado and survived a moose charging in Montana.
Grandma Joy crawls around at the Great Sand Dunes National Park
in Colorado in August 2017. © Courtesy of @grandmajoysroadtrip
HEALING OLD WOUNDS
Ryan does all her adventuring with her 42-year-old grandson,
Brad Ryan, a veterinarian who has documented their travels on
Instagram on an account called Grandma Joy’s Road Trip.
“I’d be sitting on the front porch crocheting if it wasn’t for him,”
Grandma Joy said as she sat next to Ryan. The pair’s travels together began in 2015 after they’d been estranged for a decade over a family dispute stemming from what Ryan said was his father’s adultery. It was a college classmate’s suicide that inspired Ryan to reach out to his grandmother, who he said is the one who taught him love of nature and adventure.
He had learned that Grandma Joy had never seen a mountain or the ocean and
decided it was time for that to change.
“I called her, and I said, ‘Do you want to go see your first mountain?’
Her answer was: ‘What time are you picking me up?'” Ryan said. “A lot of grandparents, they’d have answered like: ‘Are you kidding me? I’m 85. Go camp with somebody your own age. She said, ‘Absolutely, I will go.'”
The two drove through the night to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,
arriving at 2 a.m. in a rainstorm. They set up a tent but struggled with the air mattress.
As they were blowing up the air mattress, the plug came out. Grandma Joy crawled underneath it to help set things right. “And then I couldn’t get out, and I said, ‘It’s like
one of those Laurel and Hardy movies,’ and then I laughed,” Grandma Joy said.
“We finally got that figured out, and then when I got up on the doggone thing,
I kept falling off. So I said, ‘Enough of this crap, I’m sleeping on the ground.’
So that’s what I did. And it was a fun weekend, it really was.”
Not only did Grandma Joy see her first mountain, but she climbed it, trudging
2½ miles up a steep trail that follows the edge of a ridge in sections.
It was all a bit more exciting than crocheting on the porch.
Grandma Joy is pictured in Badlands National Park in South Dakota in 2017.
© Courtesy of @grandmajoysroadtrip – Search (bing.com)
Health Scare
Since that first trip in 2015, Grandma Joy and Ryan have slowly made their way to every other national park, ending on May 16 with the National Park of American Samoa, nearly 7,000 miles away from home.
She has seen so much that it’s hard to believe she was worried about seeing even the next day amid a health scare in 2008. She had become severely ill and lost weight, and no one thought she had much longer to live.
“I went from one doctor to another doctor to another doctor, and finally I got to the end and I said: ‘This is it, I’m doing no more,'” she said. “My brother came in and I said, ‘Harold, I think I’m going to die, and I don’t care.'”
In a last-ditch effort, Grandma Joy went to Louisiana to stay with her sister-in-law,
a hospice nurse. Though she never was diagnosed, her sister-in-law and some local
doctors began caring for Grandma Joy until, miraculously, she fully recovered.
“I came home and I was still upright and I decided you know, don’t waste anymore days because you don’t have that many more days,” she said. “It just gave me a new lease on life. You live every day, every bit of it, as best you can.”
Grandma Joy began volunteer work, making lunches for and reading to schoolchildren. She also continued to maintain a positive and optimistic outlook on life, and to be generous with her smiles.
“You try to look on the good side of everything,” she said. “And try to give anybody a passing compliment, smile at them. Maybe that’s the only smile they’re going to get all day. You can either be a gloomy Gus or you can smile.”
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Grandma Joy smiles in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park and gives
a Shaka sign, which loosely means, “Hang Loose or Right on.”
© Courtesy of @grandmajoysroadtrip – Search (bing.com)
KENYA AND BEYOND
When Grandma Joy spoke to USA TODAY, she was just getting over a bout with COVID-19 that hospitalized her for two days. “The doctor said, ‘If you hadn’t had the vaccine, you would have died,'” she said. “I ached all over. It was like somebody beat me with a club. And then I had pneumonia, and I got a blood clot in my leg. … So, I got everything all over at once.”
It’s a good thing, because Grandma Joy has places to go.
Now Grandma Joy is setting her sights on her next big adventure: visiting all seven continents and gazing at the tallest mountain peaks on each of them, starting next month with her third continent: Africa.
“It’s never too late,” Grandma Joy told USA TODAY from her hometown, Duncan Falls, Ohio. “If you only get a week, so what? What would you have if you had just stayed at home that week?”
Next month, she and Ryan will fly to Kenya for a packed eight-day itinerary.
They’ll start by going on a safari at Amboseli National Park, where they hope to have a view of Mount Kilimanjaro. Then they’ll go to the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, a refuge for critically endangered species like the black rhinoceros.
They’ll then fly down to Maasai Mara National Reserve to watch the great wildebeest migration from the Serengeti before the trip ends at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s orphanage for elephants whose parents have been killed.
“I think that’ll be a really fun trip,” she said.
INSPIRATION
Grandma Joy’s travels with her grandson have gained nearly 90,000 followers on Instagram and counting. Their followers say she has helped them aspire to live more adventurous lives.
“You inspire me, Grandma Joy,” one fan posted recently. “I am 55 and have been inactive way too long. I want to explore, too! Thank you for sharing your adventures.”
Another said that Grandma Joy looks “suffused with joy.”
“I will forever want to be Grandma Joy as I age and I’ve got 40 years to go to get to her age!”
The last mountain Grandma Joy climbed was also her first, but she still hikes when she can. Ryan said he’s so glad they started their adventures when they did so at least she could bag one peak.
“What she taught me is that if you can climb a mountain, go do it now.”
Grandma Joy and Brad Ryan can’t stop grinning on the way to Channel
Islands National Park off the coast of California in September 2019.
© Courtesy of @grandmajoysroadtrip – Search (bing.com)
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:
93-year-old Ohio grandma overcomes loss,
illness to inspire social media with world travels
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How To Improve Gut Health – Bing video
Green tea shot: How should you take this ancient medicine?
Story by Daryl Austin, USA TODAY • Wednesday
Black tea: Nutrition advice from experts (msn.com)
Though green tea has been associated with medicinal benefits in parts of Asia for thousands of years, America’s wide embrace of the holistic advantages of the beverage, along with the adoption of other Eastern beliefs and practices such as yoga and meditation, is far more recent. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that green tea began making its way into a large number of U.S. restaurants, stores and homes.
Today, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world after water and can be found in about 8 of 10 U.S. households according to New York City’s Tea Association of the USA. On any given day, over 159 million Americans are drinking tea − with green tea being the preferred type for many.
WHAT IS GREEN TEA?
Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning. Green tea is one of more than 1,000 varieties of tea and is a beverage or dietary supplement promoted for improving mental alertness, relieving digestive symptoms and headaches, and promoting weight loss, per the National Institutes of Health Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. It comes from the Camellia sinensis plant − the same plant from which come the other two most popular teas in America, namely black and oolong teas.
To produce green tea, leaves from the plant are steamed, pan-fried and dried.
IS GREEN TEA GOOD FOR YOU?
“Unlike for many botanicals on the market, there are numerous clinical trials demonstrating that regular consumption of green tea has measurable health effects,”
says Carol Johnston, PhD, RD, a professor of nutrition at Arizona State University.
Such benefits include improved brain function, fewer gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, a boosted metabolism, and even reduced bad breath. “Green tea also contains healthy bioactive compounds such as polyphenols,” says Johnston. Polyphenols are natural compounds great for reducing inflammation and chronic disease.”
And green tea is rich in several powerful antioxidants like L-theanine and EGCG,” says Uma Naidoo, MD, director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and the author of “This is Your Brain on Food.” EGCG, or epigallocatechin gallate, has been shown to reduce inflammation and aid weight loss. And research shows that L-theanine is helpful in relieving stress disorders, improving mood, and getting better sleep. Naidoo says the beverage also “helps with anxiety, protects against cancer and helps reduce body fat − especially around the waist.”
IS GREEN TEA OK TO DRINK EVERY DAY?
The National Institutes of Health Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, notes that when green tea is consumed as a beverage, it’s “believed to be safe when used in amounts up to 8 cups per day.” Still, green tea does have caffeine in it, a compound known for stimulating the central nervous system.
Drinking too much caffeine can cause insomnia, headaches, dehydration, dizziness and dependency. Green tea has about 28 milligrams of caffeine in 8 ounces of brewed liquid or 19 milligrams in the same amount of a ready-to-drink bottled form, per the Mayo Clinic. That brewed amount is significantly less than the 96 milligrams of caffeine per 8 ounces of brewed coffee, but more than the 22 milligrams of caffeine found in 8 ounces of Cola.
Beyond being careful with green tea’s caffeinated content, it’s also wise to be mindful of empty calories from adding sugar and too many creamers to the beverage, says Naidoo. What’s more, “not all healthy foods agree with everyone’s body and mind because each of us has a unique gut microbiome,” she adds, “but if you like green tea and it agrees with your body and mind, drink a few cups a day and enjoy it.”
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