Literature - Essays
The Secret to Good Health
Many of the keys to good health are now well known, and in retrospect so obvious that one wonders why it took so long to discover them. With such simple answers that are rather easy to implement lying before us, why did we insist on finding more complicated ways that require even more effort? Why do we go out of our way to be unhealthy, and keep killing ourselves when living longer and healthier would seem such a simple choice? It is now well known that diets and fast conditioning programs do as much or more harm than good. Even the wonder pills that reduce blood pressure, metabolism, and cholesterol wind up having side effects and unknown problems. One of the first steps to good health is to stop looking for a magic elixir; there is no magic elixir. The magic lies in what the universe gave us from the beginning and what we often refuse to accept.
Today we know that, for the majority, fitness and health are simply our bodies’ response to the lifestyle and environment we choose and what we expose our bodies to, complicated to some degree by genetics, that is, the bodies given to us by our parents. The way to become more fit and healthy is simply to select the right lifestyle. The key, then is to choose how much and what you eat, how much you exercise and sleep, and how much stress you endure.............forever. What could be simpler? Why did it take society so long to discover that? Sure, taking pills might seem easier, but it just doesn't work.
So far there is little that we can do about the genetics, except for being aware of what our parent- provided weaknesses are. Genetics is the luck of the draw. According to double noble prize winning Linus Pauling, each of us is on a slightly different evolution chain, another way of stating the genetics factor. If your chain has not evolved to deal with the huge amount of sugar you are pouring into your body, then you will probably get diabetes if you don't stop the sugar madness. Given that knowledge we can be proactive in preparing for the onslaught. If your parents have diabetes, stop injesting sugar. Simple enough? This is not a new concept. An entire race of otherwise healthy Hawaiians died because their systems had not evolved to handle a very common disease. Half the American Indian population suffered similar deaths because they were on different evolution chains.
The most important key to good health lies in learning as well as unlearning a few simple facts and myths. Many people still believe that health is something that happens to us, without much choice or input on our part. For an extremely small, unfortunate percentage this could be true, if the bodies given us by our parents are inadequate to fight off the invaders in today’s environment. Today, however, we know that good or poor health is simply a choice for most people.
Although a lot of damage has already been done, that is no excuse to continue choosing unhealthy lifestyles. Two most obvious examples are eating too much and exercising too little, two things that are so easy to do in America today. More obvious things like smoking hardly need mentioning.
Unlearning Sugar
Today in the USA a huge emphasis is placed on the problems of alcohol, tobacco, and drug addiction. Addiction to sugar could easily rank with these on both difficult-to-break and destructiveness scales. Refined sugar is a substance that did not exist before a few hundred years ago, and now each of us ingests tens of thousands of milligrams of it each day. A Coca Cola contains a whopping 39,000 milligrams of sucrose! That is six to seven teaspoons of sugar! Tell a doctor that you are taking even a thousand milligrams of anything else each day and he will panic. So why not panic about the amount of sugar we eat? We have known for years it causes severe tooth decay. Now we know it causes diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, and a dozen other medical problems. If sugar were invented today, it would probably be classified as a dangerous, controlled drug.
Our bodies have not had time to evolve and handle so much sucrose, and it will be killing us for thousands of years unless we learn not to ingest so much. When refined sugar first became available it was an extremely elegant substance carried in special jewelry containers by the wealthy and treated in much the same way cocaine is today. When mass production set in, we all began to overdose on it without limit. We must unlearn that sugar is harmless. A friend who is an expert on diabetes told me that a time/area map of the world depicting growth of diabetes overlaps almost exactly a time/area map of the world growth of Coca Cola consumption.
Sugar is one of those chemicals that, like salt, has a very strong taste. We learned from childhood to associate the taste with awards for being good. It actually covers up the taste of whatever it is put in, so we lose much of our appreciation for other tastes when we overuse sugar. Americans have learned to put sugar and salt in just about everything to the excess so a major large part of the culinary experience has become simply eating and drinking sugar and salt. One of my favorite breads from the South is cornbread, which is made with no sugar added. I find the California cornbread uneatable because so much sugar has been added it tastes like cake. If I had learned to eat sugared cornbread first I am sure I would like it.
Obvious Benefits of Exercise-An amazing "secret" revealed; why walking works.
People spend a lot of time trying to determine how much exercise is good for us, what is the minimum, best heart rates, duration, weight training, and so on. You can read just about anything, including disagreement among studies about not only what is best but also even what is good. Running helps the heart and kills the knees. Every person is unique in nature and there cannot be a simple answer, partly because we are all on slightly different evolution chains. Some exercises, like walking, are so easy to measure that one needs to go no farther than ones on body to find the answer. By observing your own body you can write your own specialized book optimized for your own body.
Also, by taking notice of easily observed benefits of exercise we can motivate ourselves to add healthy amounts to our schedule, and we begin enjoying exercise. People may conclude that we become addicted to it, maybe as much as they are addicted to eating.
Everyone who has walked a dog has seen a demonstration of part of the answer right before his eyes. Why do we need to walk a dog? One of the first things I noticed when I kept a friends dog and walked her each day was that after about 10 minutes of walking she had to take a crapp. Even though I had previously noted dogshit all over the parks, signs everywhere to clean it up, which everyone disregarded, and finally dogshit bags to make it easier, I had not realized that the reason one walks a dog is so they will take a crapp. Was this common knowledge?
Last year when I began to walk for 30 minutes every single day, rain or shine, I soon observed not only all the dogs taking crapps during their walks but also that after 25 minutes I needed to start looking for a toilet, myself. Conclusion? Duh? Before this observation it was not that obvious to me that walking augments dogs and people in dumping waste from the body. Not only that, it reduces the amount of waste that sits stagnant in the body. You will lose a pound or so with a strict walking routine just because of the reduced amount of waste inside your body, without counting the calories you burn.
Isn't it obvious that walking is nature’s way of working food through the body? As long as one lays around on ones ass, the laws of physics limits the body’s ability to work the stuff through our tubes. Gravity alone is not enough, especially when one is reclining. It is also pretty obvious that allowing something as nasty as shit to stay inside us longer cannot be a good thing to do. We all know how dangerous shit is outside the body, so why don't we know how dangerous it is lingering around inside. Shit is highly toxic, full of acids, bacteria, and other toxic waste. And the longer it exists in a warm environment, the worse it gets. So isn't it obvious that regular walking can reduce the amount of stuff the body has to deal with and fight off.
Editorial Notes Added in 2012) In 2003 I attended a microgravity conference in Davos Switzerland. By this time I had already firmed up my observations about the action of walking on the bodies digestion and moving material through the body; however, it was, at that point, just conjecture. A few friends completely rejected the validity of the idea. In that meeting I met a physician who had been doing research on affects of microgravity on digestion. In his lecture he showed how the gut is formed in a Z configuration, attached to the body at the apexes, allowing it to swing with walking and it simply becomes a pump. He even modeled the action in a computer simulation to see what excercises astronauts could do to make sure the shit gets pumped through the body in gravity free space. The exercise is ....guess what. Walking. Finally, I had seen scientific proof of why walking is really important in health.
In the winter of 2011, British medical researchers reported on the results of a 10 year study of thousands of subjects to determine what is the most effective treatment for avoiding various diseases and death. They compared a variety of therapies including diet, drugs, sleep, operations, and exercise. Amazingly, the one treatment that was the overwhelming leader turned out to be walking. Even obese people, as well as people who smoked, avoided many diseases and death longer than those who did not by walking an hour or two a week. Walking one or two hours a week reduced the onset of problems like heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, and many other ailments by amounts as high as 50%.
Doctors surely must have known this a long time as evidenced by how soon they order a patient to begin walking after an operation. Why they don't tell their patients is beyond me. In my lifetime of seeing doctors why has one never told me to walk every day to reduce the amount of shit I carry around. Maybe they don't really know this. Maybe I would not have believed such a simple remedy. People will take Exlax, Milk of Magnesia, Ducolax, and so on when they could probably just take a walk every day.
Besides getting shit out of the body before it rots through an intestine wall, or giving it time to grow more ferocious bugs, there are other ways to lessen its destructiveness. It is made up of what we eat, of course, which also determines how easily it moves through us. You can observe this by observing what happens to a piece of greasy meat compared to a carrot if you leave it lying around. A carrot is still good to eat days after it lies on the counter. An apple can sit there for a month before it softens up and even then eating it would not be too severe. Try eating the meat after a few days. You can tell what's good for your intestines by seeing how difficult it is to wash from a plate after a meal or seeing what happens to it when it lies around.
In addition to eating things that are easy to wash from a plate, fiber and lots of water to dilute it are obvious aids to moving the crapp through us and lessening its destructive power.
These common sense practices turn out to be a lot more important than doctors would like to admit. The body is designed by nature and evolution to take almost anything that has been thrown at it for the past million years, but it may not be designed to handle new things we start throwing at it, new chemicals, habits, environments, even things that are new in the past few thousand years.
Another even more subtle observation is to notice how much better one sleeps after a 30-minute walk, especially if one has eaten an evening meal. This observation cannot be done in one night. It must be noted over a longer period of time. Most healthy lifestyles don't show up over night, so people needing immediate gratification have a difficult time accepting these gifts. After walking 30 minutes a night for a year, I noticed that my weight had dropped about a pound a month.
Yet another subtle measure is mental feeling, which is more noticeable with aerobic exercise. Nevertheless, I also notice an improvement in mental pleasure after a walk. I am generally happier, less stressed, and more relaxed. The difficulty is seeing this over all of life’s other variables that affect mental state. One obviously will not feel happy after any amount of walk if there are real reasons to be unhappy. We now know that a pleasant or unpleasant mental feeling can have internal causes. When the body is healthy the internal causes should produce feelings that are pleasant.
The Need to Unlearn
We must unlearn the many years of teaching that eating everything that is served in a restaurant or other wise has any value whatsoever. We must learn quite the contrary. We must unlearn the gain of any benefit of going back for refills. Even at buffets a plate should never be filled. This is NOT getting ones moneys worth; it is punishing oneself.
American restaurants and most American hosts serve too much food per person. That is one reason why over 60 % of Americans are obese and that overeating is now the second greatest cause of preventable death in the USA. We must unlearn that there is a benefit or obligation to eat what is served. Overeating has now surpassed smoking as a health hazard. Choosing to eat too much is like choosing to smoke.
We must unlearn that we can prevent waste by eating all we are served. Not eating food is not the same as wasting food. The worst way to waste food is to eat it. Eating it can be much worse than wasting it; it can kill you. Eating too much is shortening our lives and reducing our capacity to enjoy life.
We must unlearn rating restaurants by the size of portions served. What leads us to conclude that we should eat all we can? The idiot who promotes the "all you can eat" concept is as bad as the cigarette manufacturer. I have suggested that a healthy procedure would be to always eat less than half of what we are given anywhere and throw away the other half. Food isn't so great after a few bites anyway.
One of the most difficult bits of knowledge to unlearn is that offering someone food is doing them a favor, maybe even showing them how much you care about them. Read my lips. OFFERING FOOD TO AN AFGANI IS DOING HIM A FAVOR. OFFERING FOOD TO AN AMERICAN IS NOT DOING HIM A FAVOR; IT IS KILLING HIM. (A few obvious exceptions should be taken for granted, of course.) We need to learn ways to show our love besides offering food. We need to learn that offering food is like offering to take away health. It wasn't always that way, but today it is.
Let us learn that not eating everything given to us is not rude, and we should not be insulted by someone’s not eating all we offer him or her.
In arguments with others I realized that this concept might not be as simple as it seems to me. They insist that one should not go to the restaurant in the first place if one plans to throw most of the food; this would be immoral. We do not have to give up the pleasures of enjoying great cuisine to avoid obesity. However, in order to do this in America requires that we accept throwing away most of what is served us. That is not in and of itself being wasteful or sinful; the restaurant committed that sin. It doesn't cost any more to eat less, and it is much better for everyone that we not eat everything served. Maybe some day if enough of us start doing this, restaurants will stop serving us too much food.
In most American restaurants today's customer would be insulted if he was offered a healthy amount of food. Many high-end restaurants do serve small quantities that would make the typical American feel cheated. Somehow we must unlearn this. The restaurant is doing us a great favor by serving small (healthy) servings. The food costs are but a small cost of serving up a plate and the amount served would have little to do with the restaurant cost per person. Having every person leaving a restaurant carry a doggy bag full of food is utterly ridiculous. We must unlearn this crazy concept.