The War On Bullshit

Health and fitness has to be right up there with religion on the stupid-bullshit-ometer. Much of the drivel belched forth by health and fitness magazines, tv shows books and websites these days is not only inaccurate, it’s dangerously misleading. Yesterday I saw a so-called “personal trainer” showing an 8-year-old how to do squats, incorrectly, at my gym. I mean, if you’re going to screw up the boy’s bone development by getting him on weight training when he’s too young, why not fuck up his knees while you’re at it, right?

Tangent aside, here are five fitness myths that are doing serious damage in western society.

5. Walking is the Best Exercise

Best in what sense? Lowest impact? No, that’s swimming. Most enjoyable? No, that’s sex. Can do it anywhere? No, you can’t do it in a car, and almost anywhere you can walk you can also run. So what gives?

Sure, walking is great when you’re 80 years old, and you have to start somewhere if you’re so completely out of shape that a light jog will give you heart attack. However, there’s no reason that most people cannot or ought not to be doing something more intense.

4. Skinny = Healthy

Healthy means you have the stamina to run 10 or 15 kilometers, the strength to lift your body weight, and the flexibility to bend over and put your hands flat on the floor with your knees locked. This has nothing to do with whether your ribs protrude from your skin. Unfortunately, in a society where obesity is so prevalent, people have begun confusing the anorexic physique with the olympic physique.

3. Lifting Weights will Add Bulk

The way the magazines tell it, half an hour in the gym twice a week will turn you into Hercules. This is laughable. The average man is incapable of gaining more than about 5 pounds of muscle in a year without steroids, hormone injections, creatine and colon-stretching amounts of protein. The average woman can expect even more limited results. Making it sound like bulking up is the natural effective of lifting some 10 pound dumbbells is a horrific insult to every diehard trainee out there. You don’t accidentally put on muscle. You have to fucking well work for it.

Besides, you’ll be amazed at what swapping 5 pounds of fat for muscle will do for your looks.

2. Weight Loss Diet Plans

It’s not that any particular diet plan is bullshit, it’s that they’re ALL bullshit. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. The laws of physics make it so. Whether you eat carbs or protein or fat, whether you go over or under your weight watcher’s points, whether you eat Jenny Craig certified food or chili dogs, it’s all fucking irrelevant. All that matters is Calories In - Calories Burned = Calorie Deficit. For every 3500 calorie deficit, you’ll lose at least one pound, not counting water.

This is not to say that all combinations of food are equally healthy, just that if you burn more than you eat, you will lose weight no matter what you eat.

1. That’s Not Food You’re Eating

Much of what’s eaten in the modern, industrialized diet is not food, but synthetic, food-like substances. If it comes in a package and has ingredients you don’t recognize, it’s synthetic. White flour and anything containing it is synthetic. Corn syrup is synthetic. White rice is synthetic. White sugar is synthetic. Most cheese is synthetic. Frozen dinners are definitely synthetic. And you can bet that anything you eat at a fast food restaurant will also be synthetic. So are all sodas and much of the sugar-water that masquerades as fruit juice.

Many of these synthetic non-foods are devoid in nutrition and packed with salt, sugar and fat. If you want to be healthier, try eating real foods! You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel, how much more energy you’ll have and how much easier sleep will come.

Real foods include:
Fruits, vegetables and their juices (with no added sugar or preservatives)
free-range, organic meats, fish and eggs
Milk and natural cheese
Organic, all-natural whole-grain breads and pastas
Pepper, chilies, rosemary, thyme, sage, garlic, marjoram, basil, oregano, cloves, coriander, parsley, cumin, turmeric, mustard, bay leaves, tarragon, fennel, etc.

Flavoring real foods with spices and herbs will produce far healthier, tastier dishes that the fat, sugar and salt infused factory-food that oozes from supermarket shelves.

Every time I visit the United States I am reminded of just how massive the obesity problem is. It’s time to start getting creative about addressing this issue. One problem, believe it or not, is that people don’t seem to know which foods are bad for them. Here’s a radical idea: how about we try restricting the definition of food, to, you know, things that are good to eat.

Now you may think that “food” comprises anything that some idiot dares to swallow. Considering that this dude who ate a plane, I suggest that defining food as anything anyone eats is pragmatically untenable.

I suppose you may be thinking that this is silly because lightbulbs and screws are indigestible, and therefore clearly not food. Well, cellulose walls make celery and corn kernels indigestible as well, but aren’t they still food? Those packets of silica that are put in boxes to absorb order say “do not eat” won’t actually kill you if you eat them, but that doesn’t make them a food! If a eating too much of a mushroom will poison you, we say it’s not a food, but eating too much nutmeg will fuck you up just as bad, and that’s still called a food.

What if we ditch digestibility as the basis for calling something a food? Is aspartame really a food? Yes, the body can metabolize it, but it is devoid of nutrition. The same goes for white sugar and white flour, both “nutritionless monstrosities” that contribute to diabetes and degenerative diseases.

Suppose, instead, that we defined food as any substance that is a significant source of nutrition (i.e., vitamins and minerals) when digested by a typical human. We can further define a junk food as a food that has an unbalanced proportion of fat or simple carbohydrates, or a large amount of a harmful substance, such as salt, alcohol or nitrates.

The astute reader will quickly recognize how this will shake up the junk food industry. Much of what is currently called junk food is here reclassified as non-food. Most candies, some chocolate bars, kool-aid, oreos, white bread, instant white rice and iceberg lettuce are non-foods. Natural ice cream, steak, ground beef and beer are junk foods. Brown rice, whole wheat bread, kiwis, salmon and spinach are foods.

Finally, let’s take this one step further, and make purveyors of non-foods print “non-food” in big letters on the packages of their offerings. Junk food should be suitably marked. In fact, I would go so far as to relegate non-foods to different aisles than real foods.

What I’m trying to say that putting Tang next to orange juice, hot dogs next to chicken breasts and whole wheat bread next to white bread is confusing, because it suggests that these things are somehow similar. They’re not. Tang is not a fruit juice, hot dogs are not meat, and white bread is not even a food, if we look at its nutritional content. Separating real foods from junk foods and non-foods might drive home the message of what’s OK to eat.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to choose what they eat; I’m saying that society should make it easy for people to make informed choices. Restricting the definition of food is an easy way to help people who don’t have the time (or sometimes the intelligence) to learn about proper nutrition. Of course, the definitions I’ve proposed are quite general, and need to be applied intelligently, but we have to start somewhere.

Although we won’t know for sure until we try it, I suspect that marking many common supermarket items, “NOT A FOOD” will have a strong psychological effect on potential buyers. The junk food lobby will surely rally against this but… well… fuck ‘em. Hershey and Cadbury are not going to pay for your quadruple bypass, are they?

This post continues the series on solving the drug problem, which begins here. The most recent segment differentiated between drug uses that affect surrounding people, such as smoking tobacco, and ones that do not, such as popping morphine pills. We found that drugs that affect surrounding people should be banned in public places and in the residences of parents (to protect their kids), but that businesses should be allowed to cater to such drug uses. Technologies such as ventilators, air locks and air filter masks can be employed to protect the staff and non-user patrons such that only adults who had chosen to accept the risks of the drug use in question would be exposed.

This piece categorizes drugs on a different basis: those that impair judgment vs. those that do not. As mentioned earlier, A drug “is any substance that alters normal bodily function.” This includes caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, opiates, amphetamines, etc. Some drugs, specifically stimulants such as caffeine and speed, improve mental functioning. Others, i.e., depressants like alcohol and hallucinogens like mescaline and PCP, impair judgment.

Judgment-impairing drugs require special treatment in our drug policy.

Drugs and Driving

Driving while under the influence of a drug that impairs cognitive function should be banned because it increases the risk of transportation for everyone else. The same straightforward analysis applies to boats, planes, ATVs, construction equipment, forklifts, etc. Unfortunately, implementing such policies leads to a boondoggle. Suppose scientists determine that the maximum blood-alcohol level that will not impede cognitive function is 80 milligrams in an average person (hypothetically). The straightforward thing to do, then, is ban driving with a blood-alcohol level over 80 milligrams. Two problems with this are evident. First, how are you supposed to know your blood-alcohol level? Second, if 80 milligrams is the maximum non-effective level for the average person, than approximately half the population has a maximum non-effective level of less than 80 milligrams, assuming a normal distribution; in other words, the limit is too strict for some people and not strict enough for others. Thus, most people simply make a decision whether or not to drive based on how they feel. The problem should be obvious: if the drug impairs judgment, the judgements of the intoxicated cannot be trusted.

Therefore, with some exceptions (discussed below), the legal limit of any drug (for driving) should be set just above the trace level that might be achieved from benign activities, such as eating a meal with wine sauce or a poppyseed muffin. I know libertarians will think this is crazy, but as I said in the first post, individual freedom is not the central idea of my framework: the responsibility not to harm others is just as important as the rights of the individual.

Effect of Business

Let’s say we have a business, like a bar, except let’s call it a get-a-fix, where people can go to buy and use drugs (including alcohol and tobacco). Let us further suppose that the staff of this establishment are trained to evaluate a user’s degree of intoxication, in much the same way as police. And further suppose that the staff are not permitted to partake in any intoxicating substances while working. When a patron decides to leave, a staff member can evaluate the individual’s intoxication level. Given that the staff are trained and not intoxicated themselves, they should be able to make an accurate decision. Of course, the get-a-fix will be responsible if someone who is intoxicated is allowed to drive and gets into an accident where intoxication is determined to be a factor.

Someone might claim that s/he is going to walk home, or take the bus, or whatever, and then go get behind the wheel, or do some other stupid thing, or pass out in a ditch somewhere and freeze to death (happens in Canada and Russia to be sure). These consequences are all part of the drug problem. To address them, society can take this model one step further and require these establishments to ensure patrons get home in one piece, by either seeing them into cabs or operating a shuttle service. Taken alone, this may seem unfair to the business, but within the entire framework I am discussing, it is a quid pro quo for otherwise enhanced profit margins.

Punishment

Suppose someone is convicted of driving while intoxicated. What punishment should be inflicted? Jail time is too harsh for cases where no one was hurt. The common punishment is to take the offender’s license. This is fine when you live in a city with adequate public transit, but for people who live in rural areas or cities with bad or non-existent public transit, taking someone’s license interferes with his or her human rights, such as the right to work. The other possibility is to take away the offender’s drug privileges. Let me make this explicit. You do not have a right to get high. You do not have a right to smoke, drink, snort, inject, pop pills or otherwise partake in drugs. These are privileges and if you misuse them, they can be taken away. Thus, if an individual cannot behave within the bounds of the law while heavily intoxicated, it is up to the individual not to become heavily intoxicated. If the individual demonstrates an inability to do this, the state should be compelled to take action to protect everyone else. More specifically, the state should revoke that individual’s drug use privileges.

I suspect this will be controversial, so allow me to elaborate. If you get high as a kite in your shed, don’t bother anyone else and pose no danger to anyone but yourself, that’s fine. But if you get high as a kite, lose control and then start a fight, you can’t argue that it isn’t your fault because you were intoxicated. It is your responsibility not to get so intoxicated that you become dangerous. If you can’t do that, the state must do it for you to protect those around you.

It must here be recognized that the individual has no real way of knowing his or her limits until going beyond them at least once. You don’t know if you’ll be a mean drunk or a happy drunk if you’ve never been drunk. Thus, a first-time offender with a minor infraction might get only a warning, where multiple offenses would result in suspension of drug use privileges for periods commensurate with the severity of the offense.

Again the reader may wonder how this can be enforced. The mechanism for enforcement will become clear after next week’s piece on dealing with addiction and the following piece on preserving freedom of choice.