Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Diet-Related Disease — a Preventable, Global Killer

Amer­i­cans are fat. It’s a fact known around the world. You notice it right away when you travel from Amer­ica to else­where in the world, or travel from else­where in the world to Amer­ica. The rest of the world, as it increas­ingly adopts Amer­i­can cul­ture, increas­ingly incor­po­rates Amer­i­can eat­ing habits & pref­er­ences, and buys ever more Amer­i­can food prod­ucts, is also becom­ing fat.

There is a move­ment around, telling peo­ple that they ought to be proud of their body shapes and body styles, what­ever it may be.  That is not, in itself, entirely wrong.  Nei­ther is it entirely right, inas­much as it con­dones and facil­i­tates the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of con­tin­ued obesity.

Obe­sity isn’t just a mat­ter of style and appear­ance. It’s also a mat­ter of health and qual­ity of life. Ancient Greek writ­ers and oth­ers around the world have always empha­sized the link between the body and the mind — that a healthy mind requires a healthy body. Healthy peo­ple have more energy, they can enjoy life in more ways, and they are more pro­duc­tive. Healthy peo­ple have healthy diets.

Unfor­tu­nately, modern-day cul­ture is not geared towards healthy diets. We are lit­er­ally killing our­selves with the crap that we eat. We are lit­er­ally killing chil­dren with the crap that we feed them, and the fact that we don’t teach them about food and how to cook healthy, eco­nom­i­cal food.

Diet-related dis­ease — that includes heart dis­ease and dia­betes amongst oth­ers — cost our health sys­tems an enor­mous amount of money. They also cost us in terms of loss of life, loss of qual­ity of life, and loss of human poten­tial. Kids today are unhealthy, and unbe­liev­ably, against all the progress we have made in inter­ven­tion­ist med­i­cine, today’s kids have shorter life expectan­cies than the gen­er­a­tions before them.

The rea­son is because the mod­ern, North Amer­i­can diet is unhealthy and unsus­tain­able. As North Amer­i­can cul­ture in all its facets con­tin­ues to spread around the world, every­one else has already begun to adopt the same unhealthy, unsus­tain­able eat­ing patterns.

Jamie Oliver — you might know him from his cook­books or his cook­ing shows — deliv­ered a won­der­ful pre­sen­ta­tion about this at the TED 2010 con­fer­ence. You’ll be shocked when he shows you how lit­tle kids know about fresh fruits & veg­eta­bles, and how much sugar they’re being given from milk in schools.

His key mes­sage is that this is avoid­able, pre­ventable, and can be addressed & reme­died very eas­ily: through education.