I rarely write about Alzheimer's in this space, mainly because I don't know much about it. I don't know much about it because, to my knowledge, there really isn't any history of it in my family or wife's. Meanwhile, the issues I write about all the time -- weight control, exercise, nutrition -- have been important to me from an early age.

But now I realize I've been learning about Alzheimer's all along. I just didn't know that's what I was doing.

Let me explain:

My father was very overweight, smoked for much of his life, drank to excess, and valued the people he ate, smoke, and drank with over his own family by several orders of magnitude.

He fought in two wars, and got married and started having children shortly after the end of the Korean War. (My older brother was born in 1955 in the military hospital at Guantanamo Bay. I remember my mother struggling to explain to me why my brother wasn't actually Cuban despite being born there.) I don't think his family life was ever as real to him as the marines had been.

So hanging out with other former marines was, I think, his way of staying connected with what he felt was the central organizing principle in his life. Without military discipline, he told us many times, he'd never have survived into adulthood.

That was the disconnect that led to my lifelong interest in fitness and health. What dictionary defined "discipline" in a way that described his life? Other than getting up and going to work five mornings a week, I couldn't see any mechanisms of self-control.

He probably wouldn't be considered extraordinarily fat by today's standards, mainly because he didn't have access to today's food supply. For his time, he was an extreme outlier. People stared at him. One of his favorite stories was the time he was walking through the private health club he belonged to in St. Louis and bumped into Tommy Lasorda. Lasorda was so shocked by my father's appearance that he ordered an assistant to take down his address and send him a case of Slim-Fast.

Like I said, my father thought that was a funny story.

As you can imagine, as I developed from kid to teen to adult, I didn't have much to work with in terms of role models. For as long as I can remember, I felt as if I was making it up as I went along. That's how I got into exercise in my early teens. I wanted to play sports, couldn't play any of them worth a damn, and figured that working out gave me my best chance to play without embarrassing myself.

I quickly discovered that it suited me, despite the fact it was considered a very exotic thing to do in rural Missouri in the early 1970s. I can still remember people stopping to ask if I needed a ride when they saw me running. At the time, I assumed they'd never seen anyone running for exercise before. In retrospect, I'm more inclined to think it was a comment on my form -- they probably knew what running was supposed to look like, and thought I was doing something different. (Thank goodness nobody saw me lifting back then. They would've offered me rides to the hospital.)

Exercise, I think, gave me the idea that the good things in life come as the result of systematic improvement. Even if you aren't naturally good at something, you can get better, and sometimes go farther than the people who have more natural talent for the pursuit in question.

That's why I was intrigued by this recent study on Alzheimer's by researchers at Rush University in Chicago:

Now, this report from WebMD says that physical activity was one of the measurements that was excluded as a mitigating factor in the study's results. I assume that physical activity does lower the risk of Alzheimer's, but self-disciplined people had resistance to dementia that was independent of the amount of exercise they got.

My guess -- and of course it's nothing more than that -- is that people who consider themselves disciplined and conscientious probably get more exercise than people who don't. But whether or not that's true, I see in this study a connection between the attitude and world view that would make someone likely to exercise and eat right. If you care about getting your job done right, wouldn't you be more likely to care about your physical health as well?

Tuesday blog meat

• Here's the flip side of self-discipline: Animal studies suggest that anorexia is a type of addiction, with self-starvation producing a high similar to ecstasy. The weirdness of the human brain is unlimited.

• One more Alzheimer's study: People who don't finish high school are at greater risk. That brings me back around to my father, who never finished high school (he got a GED) and frequently expressed skepticism about the value of our educational pursuits. After he died, though, we discovered that he had told his friends he'd put all his kids through college. It was, to put it mildly, news to us.