Once again, there is a twittering of news articles on FATNESS. The Irish Times reports that ninety percent of Irish men and 84 percent of Irish women will be obese by 2030. The UK Independent reports that by the same decade 65% of British men will be overweight. The UK Guardian reports that early onset diabetes is set to become pandemic among U.S. children.
What is different about this spate of articles is that — albeit between the lines — they actually take on the bete noire in the room: agri-capitalism.
Of course, the articles contain the usual, pseudo-mystification in search of a “culprit” for obesity — is it fat? or it sugar? or is it maybe “fast food”? Could it be sugarless soft drinks?
Just as of course, the articles contain the usual obligatos to “proper diet and exercise” — a piece of advice which supposedly instantly clarifies all the previous listed mysteries.
But beneath the dross, the articles quote two sources that have their heads screwed on right.
The first of these is a Dr Laura Webber, of the UK Health Forum, who is reported as saying that countries which possess unregulated liberal market economies (like the United States), where the multinational food companies maximize profit by encouraging over-consumption, have higher rates of obesity than countries (like Holland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Austria) which adhere to regulated market economies.
Dr Webber says that the government must do more to restrict unhealthy food marketing and make healthy food more affordable.
The second source is a Dr. Robert Lustig who was the consultant for a new documentary on obesity entitled “Fed Up.”
Lustig lays the blame squarely at the door of for-profit corporations: “The food industry makes a disease and the pharmaceutical industry treats it. They make out like bandits while the rest of us are being taken to the cleaners."
Lustig says: "If the food industry continues to obfuscate, we will never solve this and by 2026 we will not have healthcare because we will be broke. Food producers are going to have to be forced. There's only one group that can force them, and that's the government. There's one group that can force the government, and that's the people."
-oOo-
It ought to be obvious. Walk down any supermarket aisle and what do you see? Row upon row of brightly colored boxes and cans. Is there a real food on the shelf? An apple? An asparagus? A plucked chicken hanging by its claws? Not a one.
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It is not all that much better in the “produce” section where most of the potatoes, pears, tomatoes and lettuce are either infused with poisons, coated with wax or genetically modified. However they have been manipulated, it is a fact that most produce today has only about half the nutritional value of produce in 1940 as a result of the artificial replenishment of depleted soil.
If fruits and vegetables are bad, meat, fish and dairy products are worse. The tale is too grim for repetition. Suffice to say that what we call “meat and milk production” is a revolting and despicable congerie of brutality, torture, crippling-surgery, chemical poisoning and frankenfreaking such as would make Dr. Mengele seem like an avuncular country doctor.
What’s more, none of this factory food has any taste. What passes for taste is a bland, bleached washed out semblance of a vague something that has to “livened” up with dollops of salt, sugar and spices in order to make any sensory impression.
So accustomed are we to tasteless food that when we taste a real chicken we think it is rotten and when we taste a real strawberry we think it too sweet.
What passes for food in the societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails is garbage. Soylent colorful.
For all that, it has to be said, in all candor, that only Leftists could come up with a diagnosis which prescribes the overthrow of capitalism as the cure for obesity. Even Lenin did not go that far.
Even if Nutritional Revolutionaries are right, that doesn’t leave the rest of us with much of a viable alternative. Obese waddlers manning barricades along Pennsylvania Avenue is neither a pretty nor a pragmatic solution. But people can take matters into their own hands by regulating what they take into their stomachs.
The Barfo Diet
Now some hot-shot is bound to wonder about bottles and to observe that carrots come in a bag. But such quibbles are not the point. The point is rather to seriously distrust processed food as a default approach to eating. Thus,
Barfo’s First Corollary: Cook your own food.
This corollary ensues from the fact that non-bagged or boxed food eliminates all pre-cooked, processed foods and this in turn leads to having to prepare things yourself from “scratch-ingredients” — that is, foods which tend to have what God put into them rather than what was conjured up by a Mengelian Maven working for some corporation. This in turn leads to,
Barfo’s Second Corollary: Don’t eat anything which has more than a line of ingredients.
The more ingredients a “food” has the less the stuff is a food at all. Long lists of ingredients indicate that everything that made the food a food has been leached out and replaced with half-assed substitutes plus various poisons to colorize and preserve.
Barfo’s Third Corollary: Severely restrict intakes of refined wheat, corn, rice, or sugar — in other words high-glycemic foods with values higher than 70% glycemic index.
In my opinion, BREAD and CHIPS are perhaps the prime culprits in the obesity crisis, ahead of DIET DRINKS and BIGMACRAP.
But here a question arises: if bread is so bad, how come the French (who eat lots of baguettes) have one of the lower rates of obesity? And if corn is so bad, how come the AmerIndians or Mexicans of 25 years ago -- prior to NAFTA -- were not generally obese? The difference in result cannot just be chalked up to “exercise.”
The reason appears to be that American factory bread is made from factory wheat which is basically just sugar in wheaten form. Ditto agri-factory corn. American (and Canadian) flower is basically white cotton candy. It has no nutritional value although, like popcorn, it contains a lot of calories.
Totally apart from the somewhat controversial and faddish “gluten factor,” almost any bread — even “artisanal” breads — are just garbage in loafs and slices. When you get to things like “English Muffins” the result is fatal.
This is not to say that bread made from good grains is ipso facto good without limitation. Grains (wheat, oats, rice and so on) provide “fast carbohydrates.” These are good because they give our bodies energy. But if you don’t expend the energy a carbohydrate gives you, it gets saved as FAT.
Our bodies must and do process anything that is put into them. When it comes to food, the human body will find something to use from meat, fat, carbs and sugars. They are all, in natural principle, necessary and good. But what the body uses first and foremost most for “get-around” fuel is sugars and carbs, in that order. These are the “gasoline” that powers our bodies.
Somewhat more accurately, our bodies run on “glycogen” a metabolized form of sugar. Being efficient, our bodies will first look for the most easily metabolizable form of sugar it has available: the teaspoon of sugar or honey you just swallowed. It will then look for the next fastest form of sugar it can extract: “fast acting carbs” (grains and sweet fruits). Last, it will turn to “slow acting carbs” (nuts, green legumes). These may be analogized to high, medium and low octane gasoline.
So... if you need a sudden burst of energy to scale El Capitan in Yosemite, by all means eat the sugar/carb-packed “energy bar” — but be sure to scale the mountain or else the mountain will end up “scale-ing” you. All of which bring us to
Barfo’s Exercise Routine
Just as people have been bombarded with a perplexing barrage of diets, so too they have been barraged with a host of exercise regimens. What has to be remembered is that capitalism commodifies everything.
I began running because it was the simplest least gear-intense fitness-sport I could think of. But within two years after “jogging” became popular along came: jogging trainers, running shoes, cross-country runners, running magazines, books on running, manuals and training regimes, chronometers, pulse-o-meters, head bands, running walkman’s, running drinks, skimpy running shorts, skimpy running tanks, running rain suits... running became the simple motion around which a vast pile of junk was spun.
When exercise teams up with diet for the sake of beauty, longevity and health the result is a tsunami of commercialized advice which ultimately serves only to confuse and demoralize the victim.
Just as researchers advised dieters to avoid alcohol altogether until further researchers determined that, actually, red (but not white) wine was healthful provided (according to further research) it was kept to 568 ml x 4 / 1000 = 2.3 units of alcohol per day, so too exercise researchers have promoted every conceivable contradictory advice and regimen.
In short, the profit incentive infects the “holistic” diet and health crowd as much as it drives Big Food and Big Pharma. It’s the same paradigm albeit on a less directly harmful level. Bearing all this in mind,
Barfo’s Prime Exercise directive is: walk.
No... walk; not power-walk, not yoga-walk, not interval walk and certainly not walk with: headphones, iPhones, iPods or Google Glass. JUST WALK for at least twenty minutes a day at a pace of about 120 paces a minute (90 at the slowest if you are having difficulty or are in a schleppy or somber mood).
Since the essence of this directive is simplicity-in-action, it would be contradictory to fall into the trap of providing a user manual on “how to walk.” But Barfo does have a couple of tips on how not to muck up your walk with well intended bad ideas.
Aside from a good pair of non-crimping walking shoes wear whatever is comfortable and appropriate for the weather. Do not “enhance” the walk with preconceived (usually idiotic) notions of what “good walking” requires or might “benefit” from, such as arching your back, sucking in your gut, waving your arms, carrying weights and other such nonsense.
The only rule you have to remember (other than not to step into doo or trip over stones) is to hold your chin up. Just by raising your head, all the rest of your natural posture will follow.
The benefits of walking are physical and psychological.
On the physical side of things walking increases your heart rate, circulation and breathing while providing muscular exercise for your legs and lower back; in short, it provides a basic level of cardiovascular and muscular endurance training. Per unit of time it expends almost the same amount of calories as jogging or bicycling.
Psychologically, walking “aerates” your brain as much as your lungs. The point here is to relax — to give yourself a rest from “inputs” including the “input” of meditation routines and other concocted requirements and regimens. Walking at a brisk but not forced pace will tend to preclude obsessive thinking and too much “working things out” in the brain; but it will not prevent idle thoughts, subconscious emotions or recollections from “crossing” your mind. Consider it a form of psychological sweat.
Obviously, the kind of walking I am recommending would best be done in a tranquil environment at an unhurried and unpolluted time of day. Alas, not everyone has the luxury of living in sylvan environments or even urban environments that provide walking space. But even if it is necessary to drive a relatively short ways to a high-school track or some waterfront, it is worth it.
Walking by itself is not a complete exercise routine, but it is a daily basic and one that can be done by just about anyone and by those who are not capable or ready for more intense forms of exercise.
For those who do want to add or substitute other type of exercise, remember Barfo’s Four Elements of Exercise: (1) Endurance, (2) Strength, (3) Flexibility and (4) Coordination.
Endurance exercises the ability to repeat a motion (be it a heart beat or a step). Strength exercise the ability to overcome a resistance (be it a weight or your own body weight). Flexibility stretches your ligaments and the range of motion from a pivot point. Coordination exercises speed, reflex and flexibility in motion.
There are all sorts of ways to combine these four elements. Westerners typically resort to (1) swimming/jogging (2) weight training, (3) stretching/yoga and (4) something like tennis or basketball. But Tai Chi also encompass all elements, albeit is “slow” form.
In short, for those who want to get and stay in shape, a balanced exercise program is as important as a balanced diet, the Four Elements of Nutrition being: (1) protein (2) fat (3) carbohydrates and (4) water (not “liquids,” water). Intakes should correspond to and be adjusted according to the type of outputs engaged in; but, supposing you are at your optimal weight, your intake of fast-burning carbs should not exceed what you will sweat out during the day. Violating this rule is why, for most people, November and December are Caloric Disaster Periods.
Rest & Rejoicing
It is the nature of materialistic societies to focus on material solutions to things and this is particularly the case in those societies which are grounded on the peddling of supposedly useful things or advices.
As a result, whereas there are bookshelves of manuals on “diet and exercise” there is very little mention of the two psychological correlatives of health: “rest and rejoicing.”
(Sleep & Rest)
Although it ought to be obvious, it has only recently come to the attention of that busy gaggle of researchers that a body needs “sleep” as much as it needs exercise. My grandmother (who was born around 1890) used to say “an hour of sleep before 10 is worth three after 12.”
The simple fact is that the body needs rest to digest the food it has ingested and sleep to restore the reserves of energy it has expended in exercise and work. The value of “diet and exercise” is diminished in proportion to a person’s lack of sleep. Americans go to bed too late and sleep to little, thereby undercutting their frenzied efforts to “loose weight and be healthy.” It would be comic were it not so pathetic.
However, “rest” is not limited to “sleep” but includes relaxation during the day. A healthy life style is not simply one that “includes” the elements of good nutrition and exercise but one that “modulates” those elements in time. In other words “balance” is not only a question of static elements but of those elements in motion or coordination.
It is here, once again, that we can see the deleterious effects of modern capitalism on health. The relentless pursuit of profit leads to a corresponding relentless pursuit of productivity which in turn demands equally relentless amounts of labour. These demands led to the now-notorious 14 and 16 hour work days of the Industrial Revolution.
But the 8 hour workday, with “30 minutes” for “lunch” followed by a late dinner and even later television night shows, is only a partial improvement which basically changes the mode of frenzy.
One of the key reasons the “Mediterranean Diet” is healthy is that it is eaten at midday, between one and three, in the afternoon. This is good for physical digestion and mental relaxation. Not only do the calories ingested get expended during the remained of the day, but a late light supper puts less stress on the body during sleep.
In contrast, late (and worse, heavy) dinners result in heart burn and acid reflux, which are then “cured” by a host of noxious medicines accompanied by noxious or scary advertisements.
The obvious solution is alter that mode (in this case, “cycle”) of production to suit the human body rather than demands of machines and money.
But capitalism is relentlessly interested in commodifying everything including “relaxation” which gets turned into “recreation” which becomes the nexus for more sellable junk whether pool toys, movies or games; so that in the end “rest” gets confused into yet another form of exercise.
In days of yore in “Latin” countries, rest on Sundays included afternoon promenades which usually translated into walking around in circles on a plaza talking with and looking at one another. It was the doing of nothing that was healthful not the 236.7 ml of red whine or the 125-175 grammes of seafood tapas that did it.
It is impossible for any individual to alter the current un-restful and unhealthy mode of production/recreation. But to the extent possible people should opt out by doing one or more of the following: (1) eat heartier breakfasts; (2) go for a walk (or jog or swim) during the so-called “lunch” hour, after which you can (3) eat a very light snack and (4) eat dinners as early as possible (no later than 6 p.m and preferably closer to five p.m.) and make them not an interlude, but an occasion for relaxed enjoyment.
Overall, healthful rest requires two things: (1) Ben Franklin’s early to bed and early to rise and (2) making the communal meal the central purpose of the day, if not of Life in general — which brings us to “rejoicing.”
(Expression)
It is with some reluctance that I use the term “rejoicing” because, needless to say, there is no dirth of books and manuals on how to be happy. This is fundamentally a perversion because the word “hap” means “chance” and it is not possible to plan or engineer good luck. It is possible to be content with what is; but this by definition does not require the doing of anything other than being relaxed with fate.
Walking the plaza with others and sharing daily bread with others are the simple and basic forms of rejoicing common to all men and to most animals.
But, while this is indisputably true, this is not the core sense in which I have used the word “rejoice.” I have in mind that,
"It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man." Matthew 15:11Diet is what we put into our mouths; and while there is a lot of advice on what to put in, the immense defect of nutritional advice is that it forgets the correlative, which is how we express ourselves.
Likewise, the correlative to passive rest is not simply “exercise” but that exercise of non-physical faculties which is generally called self-expression.
Just as there are many forms of exercise, there are innumerable forms of self-expression and, in the present context, of those non-remunerative activities we call “hobbies.” But because my present focus is fundamental simplicity, by expression I mean the exterior manifestation of an inner attitude which is affirmative, accepting and social.
Communal walking and eating is, as I have described, a core manifestation of that attitude. When we describe those activities as "social" we mean that they are actual manifestations of kindness and of taking pleasure in being pleasant to others. No less importantly is the doing of at least one bonne action a day or, as they say in France, “Chacun doit faire sa B.A. quotidienne.”
In other words just as we must forgive to be forgiven we must give a daily something to others if we expect to receive bread for ourselves. The nice thing about the “B.A.” concept is that it doesn’t have to be money or some sort of project. It is sufficient that it is conscientiously some cheerful and caring response to another living creature.
This too is a habit as much as diet, exercise and sleep and it is the fourth component of spiritu sana in corpore sano.
All Virtue is Habit
Aristotle and Aquinas are agreed that habit is the essence of all virtue. But as Plato would point out, the purpose of society is to inculcate virtuous habits so that human beings may fulfill their humanity.
Accordingly, Plato began his monumental work on “The Laws” not with a dissertation of nature of power or the branches of government or natural rights and other similar obsessions of the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries but with a long discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of both not drinking and getting drunk.... in other words, diet.
And Plato was far wiser that Hobbes, Montesquieu, Locke and Marx. Of that there can be no doubt.
All of which brings this article back to its beginning. The mode of production a society adopts will determine the mode of being — and hence the health — of the citizens society produces.
On the other hand, in yin-yang truth, each citizen is a building block of society so that the quality of its constituent individuals determines the nature of society.
It cannot be said, categorically, that “capitalism is unhealthy.” Put another way, obesity was not a pandemic in early stages of capitalist economies. But what can be said is that present day capitalism, in its ineluctable and unrestrained commodification for profit (aka “monetizing”) of everything, is just as inevitably unhealthy.
Just as our present economy produces volumes of junk, noise, weapons and waste so to it produces millions of fat, formless, waddling dumb fucks.
To truly promote the health and well being of people, at least radical reform and regulation of the global economy will be required. Whether a critical mass of people are willing to stand up for their own health and happiness is problematic.
Nevertheless, each one of us can do the next best thing: which is to withhold consent by following Barfo’s Principles of Diet, Exercise, Rest and Expression.
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