I heard recently that the NHS in the UK spent £8.6 billion on prescription drugs last year. Four of the top five most prescribed drugs are used to treat ‘lifestyle diseases’ – cardiovascular disease, diabetes etc. More recently I heard a news item about a suggestion that patients needing treatment for those kinds of illnesses should have to pay toward their treatment, on the basis that their condition is self inflicted.
All arguments about the practicalities of implementing such a system aside, why does it seem that many of us are willing to accept that ill health is inevitable, and beyond our control? There are plenty of scholarly books/articles written on the subject of ‘civilisation’ being our downfall as a species. The further we get from our origins as a species, the more prone we become to physical degeneration. The very things that make our lives easier are the things that make us more prone to sickness. As Frank Forencich writes (in ‘Change Your Body, Change The World‘): “by engineering our environment to take care of our every physical need and desire, we have simultaneously disempowered ourselves and bought disease upon our bodies.” (It’s perhaps worth noting part of his solution: “..we need to find creative and interesting ways to make our lives harder, in some cases much harder.”) Have our disconnection from our origins, our comforts, and medical interventions allowed us to believe that ill-health is somehow a natural state?
Since I began writing this, a few weeks ago, I’ve heard a few more snippets of information that have fed my thoughts on this subject. I heard a trailer for a radio programme concerning research conducted on animals, to investigate treatments for Alzheimers, diabetes, and obesity – estimated to cost the UK tax payer £35 billion/year. Separately, listening to episode 160 of The Paleo Solution podcast, I learned why ‘low GI’ foods are a hindrance to losing body fat. (It’s obvious really, and I should have figured it out before – our bodies need our blood sugar level to drop below certain levels in order to trigger the release of fat as an energy source. If you eat food that will specifically elevate your blood sugar level over a prolonged period you will be inhibiting your bodies ability to mobilise fat for energy).
The trailer for the above radio programme described scientists using their experiments on mice to find “treatments” for these diseases. Treatments that perhaps might be more effective than recommending diabetics eat low GI foods, one hopes…. But why ‘treatments’? It feels like an acceptance of the inevitability of these diseases to set about developing drugs (procedures, perhaps?) to treat them. If we don’t accept that our bodies have built in obsolescence, or that it’s ‘natural’ to become sick (please don’t!), then there has to be an alternative. How about honestly facing up to what behaviours lead to these problems, and giving people advice and support to change these behaviours – maybe then we’d find that it’s all the ‘treatment’ that is required.
Maybe everything comes back to money. There are so many vested interests in making us believe that we do not have control over our own bodies, and health – All those industries: the media; pharmaceuticals; food; ‘health food’ & supplements; fitness etc. This all adds up to a potent mix of misinformation, and contradictory information, that may well leave most of us with our heads spinning, or the impetus to bury them in the sand. In terms of diet alone – ‘fat is bad for you’; ‘carbohydrate makes you fat’; ‘saturated fat is very bad for you’; ‘red meat causes cancer’; ‘sugar is bad for you’; ‘reduce calories to lose weight’; ‘everything in moderation’; ‘calories don’t matter’ – not to mention all the miracle healing foods: cranberries, goji berries, acai etc. If you face serious struggles with body composition there is a minefield of advice in the media, of questionable value. And then in the supermarket: ‘fat free’; ‘no added sugar’; ‘low GI’; ‘high in fibre’; ‘heart-healthy’; ‘wholegrain’; ‘one of your 5 a day’ (funny that fruit and vegetables never get labeled with nutrition information… If you’re buying a packaged food item that makes this claim, I’d be deeply suspicious of its nutritional value).
This could become a tedious list very easily, so I’ll try to change tack. In short, the barrage of advice and consumer pressure all seems to add to a collective sense that we are somehow programmed to malfunction, and that the answer is either pharmaceuticals, surgery, or buying the right food product. This isn’t helped by government advice, both in the UK and the US, perhaps the rest of the developed world too, that is patently unsuccessful. How many people are following that advice and becoming fatter, or sicker? The lack of declining obesity rates should answer that.
In pursuit of an overall project of owning responsibility for our own health, along with remaining physically active (as I imagine you all are) – Pilates; lifting weights; walking; running; climbing; jumping, and all of that good stuff, here’s a challenge for you (I’ve just decided it’s called the “Don’t Play With My Food” challenge):
For the next 7 days only eat food that has not been packaged in plastic, tins, polystyrene or cardboard boxes (glass is allowed, as are cardboard trays for fruit, eggs etc.). The beauty of this is that you won’t need to look at ingredients lists, or nutrition information – you’ll be eating real food that doesn’t require labelling. Please let me know how you get on via the comments…
paleolates 