I listen to a lot of podcasts, some
climbing podcasts (go to The Dirtbag Diaries for an upscale climbing
podcast, or The Enormocast - way more fun - for a grassroots climbing
podcast), but mostly health and fitness podcasts, and, mostly (if not
all) with an ancestral slant. After a while, you do hear the same
thing over and over, but, sometimes there are some interesting
nuggets. Listening to one such podcast recently I was struck by how
humans are almost inevitably drawn to finding technical solutions to
every problem that has ever arisen, despite the fact that some
problems require non-technical solutions. Take the ever increasing
levels of fatness in the Western world (and increasingly the
developing world as more and more people take on a Western type diet)
the solutions for which always seem to focus on various technologies.
The first thing I noticed when we
stepped off the air-plane in Mascot was how fat the average
Australian is. Now I know that in these politically correct times we
are not supposed to think of people as fat, overweight, or obese.
Instead they are, I guess, "differently bodied", but, the
truth is almost 70% or Australians are fat, and 25% of Australian
children are fat. This is on par with Americans, frequently thought
of as the fattest folk in the world, and only slightly ahead of
Canadians (60%). Now you can argue that these overall figures are
based on BMI which does not account well for muscularity, but, you've
only got to walk down any suburban (or city) street, go to any
shopping area, or, in fact, simply put your head out the door of your
cave to see that the 66% of Australians who are overweight, are, in
fact fat, not jacked. The classic Australian has a big protruding
insulin resistant belly and a red face from chronic inflammation.
Among women of child-bearing age it is, in fact, difficult to
determine which are pregnant and which just insulin resistant ("just"
is perhaps poorly applied when talking of insulin resistance).
Many experts think being fat is a
complex issue, not simply the calories in/calories out equation
presented by conventional science. There is likely a complex
interplay of hormones (insulin, ghrelin, leptin, cortisone, and
others), the gut biome is implicated, reward centres in the brain are
involved as are neurotransmitters such as dopamine, there are social
pressures and individual psychology. Other experts (see Tim Noakes)
think that being fat is relatively simple - eat more carbohydrates
than your individual tolerance allows and you get a run-away appetite
that leads you to eat too much (carbohydrate generally) and you get
fat (note that people on Tim Noakes eating plan "Banting"
are easily dropping substantial amounts of body fat).
Standard
nutritional and exercise advice generally makes people fatter rather
than leaner, but, in the end, there must be some personal
responsibility and there must be some personal impetus to be all that
you can and not settle for being fat and ill. Traveling around
Australia, I have been shocked by how much poor health Australians
will tolerate. The average Australian is in such poor physical
condition that simply walking is difficult (or impossible) and their
ruby red faces glowing beacons of systemic inflammation could light
up an entire city.
As Mulder famously said on the X Files,
"the truth is out there!" Information is now readily and
freely available on how to get lean and stay lean. Information
availability alone, however, has never been a good motivator for
behavioural change. Disseminating information is relatively easy,
getting people to change their behaviours is notoriously hard.
Perhaps that's why humans are always looking for a technological
solution, like the "chemical gastric bypass" that is
currently under research.
I don't think any of these
technological solutions will offer the answer. Somehow you have to
get people to care more about their health, longevity and functional
capacity and less about how good something tastes for the few seconds
it is in their mouths. Because, from my observations, people don't
really give a damn. Entire lives are ruled by instant gratification.
In the end, getting and staying lean and healthy is all about
delaying immediate short-term pleasure to gain longer term
satisfaction. The day modern medicine can develop a pill for that,
the fat problem will be solved.
No comments:
Post a Comment