Natural health guru a walking advertisement for good living

It’s one of those happy coincidences that a man promoting the benefits of natural health should be blessed with the name Plant. And if ever anybody was an advertisement for the lifestyle he promotes it’s 83-year-old Ronnie Plant, who has just driven from Wexford to Galway for this interview, and is looking forward to climbing Croagh Patrick in two weeks’ time, a climb he undertakes annually.

In between practising naturopathy and climbing mountains, Ronnie writes books. His first, Health is Wealth – A to Z Encyclopaedia of Natural Remedies and Good Food, was written seven years’ ago. His latest, Selling Sickness, which is an attack on many of the practices of modern medicine, has just been released.

Selling Sickness is a hard-hitting work, in which he claims that many illnesses that plague modern society such as Type 2 Diabetes, cholesterol and high blood pressure, are not actually illnesses and can be treated naturally, without the need for lifelong dependency on chemical drugs.

“My contention is that we are going down the wrong road, with too many people today thinking we have a pill for all ailments,” says the sprightly, lean Ronnie, whose only ailment is deafness in his left ear, a legacy of years spent in construction of London’s underground and the Channel Tunnel.

Ronnie maintains that the Irish health service has been “developed, cultivated and turned into a ‘sickness industry’, the largest and worst run industry in the country.

“Our Health Service employs over 105,000 personnel, costing the taxpayer up to €14 billion annually. Fourteen years ago, the service cost a little over three billion, a figure considered astronomical at that time.”

Wexford born Ronnie, an athlete in his youth, is quick to admit that for many years, his lifestyle wasn’t healthy. In fact, it was almost 50 years ago, while living and working in Galway, that he mended his ways, after a health scare.

“I worked in Galway in the early 1960s when the company Cold Chon (which makes bitumen emulsion for roads and is based in Oranmore) was just setting up. I was Works Manager and one of the mottos we had was ‘if you are sending out bitumen to County Councils, whatever you do, don’t have them waiting for it’.

So, to ensure that nobody was waiting, he’d be up at 4am or 5am every day, but wouldn’t eat breakfast until 10am, when he’d enjoy the ‘full Irish’. He was also smoking at the time and would regularly call to Paddy Burke’s in Clarinbridge for a few pints every evening before going home for dinner.

“We spend the first halves of our lives destroying ourselves and the second half trying to undo that,” he laughs.

His brother-in-law, a doctor, told him if he didn’t stop he would die and advised him that diet and lifestyle were key to being healthy.

At this stage, Ronnie had been diagnosed with high blood pressure and was diabetic, so he changed his diet and began to exercise.“Three months later the symptoms were gone.”

He has since adopted as his motto the saying “We are as we eat, drink, sleep and exercise”. It makes sense, he says, “because the engine is only as good as what you put in it”.

He left Galway some time later, but although it’s over 40 years since he lived here, he has retained many close friendships in the West. He was very involved with the local community, including the GAA during his years here, and he helped bring Oranmore-Maree to the Galway Senior Hurling Final, which they lost to Castlegar.

After leaving Galway, Ronnie continued his day job in industry, a job that later involved overseeing the final stages of the Channel Tunnel, linking England and France. But he also began to study naturopathy and eventually people started coming to him for advice and natural remedies for ailments.

He did a correspondence course in natural health, although he never sat any exams and says that he is largely self-taught.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.