I have never been a big-time environmentalist. Now, I believe it’s important to protect the air and water from irresponsible dumping of toxins by industry but I’m also not afraid of chemical and even nuclear materials just because they are hazardous. We have the technology to harness many of these materials without poisoning ourselves. So, I’m not a disciple of people like RFK Jr. and I have nothing but scorn for the climate change alarmists like that demented dwarf Greta Thunberg.
But looking around at the state of human health in the year 2024 AD I’m forced to admit that modern life has become extremely unhealthy. The proportion of the population that is overweight (or even morbidly obese!) is shockingly high. There is something very wrong with how we live. So, to the extent that someone is calling attention to this dangerous situation I have to give credit where credit is due.
Over the course of the last fifty years many American presidential administrations have declared “war” on various health threats; cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, you name it. But the truth is all we ever achieved was to fund government sponsored research facilities that never produced anything approaching actual cures.
But what seems to be clear is the sedentary lifestyle we now lead is killing us. And not only that, but even before we’ve been finished off by the fat, we are unhealthy and unhappy. It’s obvious that this situation is the product of more than just one aspect of modern life. It is caused by the way that we live together (or rather apart), it’s caused by the way we raise our children, how we spend our time and it has to do with how and what we eat. Almost every aspect of our lives has become less healthy than it was a hundred years ago.
Let’s start by looking at how we live. A hundred years ago we lived in towns and cities. But from the smallest village to the largest metropolis people had actual neighborhoods. Their kids had places to play together. The children’s mothers could keep an eye on the youngest children while they played together and at least made sure that the older ones were theoretically safe among friends while they roamed the neighborhood looking for some kind of a ballgame to play. But at least they were outside getting a substantial amount of exercise, instead of just sitting around the house. Compare that to modern suburbia where most kids now grow up. Most homes aren’t adjacent to each other on a sidewalk so the kids are isolated from each other and need a parent to bring them to a friend’s house or a playground. No one walks anywhere. We sit in our cars. But there aren’t any parents around to drive them anyway. Their mothers are now full-time employees of some corporation. The kids instead spend their time inside the house playing video games on their “phone” and eating whatever snack food has been left around the house to sedate them. This leaves them lonely, socially inept and obese.
And what happens to these kids when they grow up. If they’re lucky enough to get jobs it’s probably in a cubicle where they’ll get no exercise other than walking to a cafeteria once or twice a day to eat a highly processed meal made from some combination of high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fat and cardboard. To be perfectly fair I think we’re actually surviving this regimen better than should be expected. Laboratory rats are given a more humane existence than what we have relegated ourselves to.
The solution to our problems is some combination of reclaiming the family and urban planning. We need to get women back to raising children. And we need to build communities that allow neighborhoods to exist for the majority of people. As far as food, a meaningful analysis of the health risks for processed foods should be scientifically run. I think forcing the CEOs of food manufacturing corporations to ingest their own products should be stringently applied and the impact on their health and longevity carefully studied. But in addition to that meaningful guidelines should be published and warning labels should be affixed to the packaging of any of the most dangerous products.
And I think we all need to start walking a lot more. And if we had a neighborhood to walk in, we’d even probably have to talk with our neighbors more than once a year. And if we did that, we might even talk about all the problems around town and what we want done about them instead of just complaining about the politicians we don’t bother to vote for.
What would it take to make these changes? A great majority of Americans would have to want these changes and then they’d have to elect leaders who cared whether we live or die. So, of course, none of these things will ever happen. Instead think of how you can make these things happen for yourself and your children. You would have to marry a woman who wants to raise her children from home. Then you would have to work hard enough to afford this “luxury.” Then you would have to buy a house in a town or city that still had safe neighborhoods. And finally, you would have to do research to make healthy choices with respect to food and lifestyle (exercise).
That’s a tall order. But it’s food for thought.
Updates:
Milo Mindbender commented:
There is a meme regarding the fact the there comes a “last day to play with your friends” and you will not know that it happened until afterwards.
My generation circa 65, mostly stock, some aftermarket parts installed played outside, drank hose water, had fewer than 10 channels of TV, watched bugs Bunny drop anvils, yosemite sam carry guns, and a coyote chase a road runner forever without success. We knew what we couldn’t do in real life, and was cartoon, but we played anyway.
We were taught about a food pyramid that actually looked more like a finishing diet for hogs, ate what we wanted, rode our BMX bikes everywhere, and had no guilt about global affairs.
Children today are gifted with generational guilt by their parents, teachers, and both public and social media. We crushed them before they developed into functional beings, added out phobias, and psychosis to the mix, and to make ourselves as a society feel better plastered over the cracks with SSRI type meds to conceal we were trying to adult the children before they were ready for it.
Similar to a vegan cat, or a teams toddler we were ready to teach the youth that they were recipient of a bounty they didn’t deserve and needed to be guilty as charged, my children were not allowed video games, and they were teenagers before we got Internet or a computer. They grew up gloriously feral, and are now still relatively socially maladjusted, but healthy physically, if not mentally according to society. They got home cooked meals, and played outside weather permitting, with no siren call of cable to keep them indoors, there was less off a fight to get them outside. My grandchildren are sofar following the same direction and I don’t feel that this is a bad thing. Feral children are more interested in the world around them that sedated, and electronically stimulated zombie children can be, because they look at and into what’s around them instead of the screen.
War Pig commented:
The preservation of foods was a great boon which allowed us to eat fruits and veggies year round and curing meat greatly extended its edible life. But overprocessing said food, especially the junk ingredients used to do it are most of the problem. Bread used to be flour, milk or water, yeast, a dab of sugar to get the yeast happy and maybe butter. And we kept the starter for our sourdough around as sourdough bread is good for us. Now I read the ingredients on bread and cannot pronounce most of them. My brother’s wife has the starter grandma used. She divided it and distributed it out among the family before she passed. Supposedly it came from Germany with our ancestors in 1820 or so. How old it really is, is unknown. It may be well over 200 years.
