Nov. 24th, 2007

lahermite: (Default)
this is a great example why i love this woman so much:


hurricanecarol
So today, the news wires roll out this:
http://promo.realestate.yahoo.com/americas_most_obese_cities.html

The article fingers all the usual suspects...lack of activity and calorie-rich/nutrient poor food being the primary catalysts. Public officials, from mayors to governors to legislators, are tackling this with public health campaigns and the like (most likely because they like to strike manly poses in running shorts than out of any real concern for public health, is my guess.)

But there is a growing body of evidence to support the simple fact that this will not do us a whole lot of good (well maybe a little, but not the kind that will make a difference) until these same politicians start to take the environment a bit more seriously, like this researcher:

http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=646

Basically, the article talks about a trend noticed in the U.K. - cities that had a higher number of the people who had weight problems were also some of the dirtiest and the most polluted. While one might argue that is a function of the fact that these areas usually have higher poverty rates, a contributing factor in a country where a Big Mac is cheaper than a head of organic lettuce, there is also some very sound biological reasons why this phenomenon would occur.

In a nutshell, it goes like this: When your body encounters low levels of environmental toxins, it reacts by slowing your metabolic rate down so you don't process the toxins before you can eliminate them. Additionally, fat cells are produced to envelope the toxins and protect them from entering your system. The "yo-yo" effect that many dieters experience, may be in part due to how the body reacts when a person starts to lose weight. The fat cells containing the toxins start to dissolve and release the toxins into your system. This causes even MORE fat cells to be produced to try to capture the released poison before it can do damage to other types of cells.

This makes sense to me. On an anecdotal level, there is a woman I work with who eats sensibly and gets daily moderate exercise. She's been dieting for the last seven years and still can't lose weight. The doctor tells her thyroid is shutting down. I asked her why that would happen and she said the doctor told her "sometimes it just does." The Bullshit Alarm started to ring. Thyroid disease had been ruled out in her case, so why would the thyroid just quit entirely? Naturally, he upped her thyroid meds and she went away happy.

If this article is correct, my guess is she still won't lose weight in the long run, because if she is exposed to enough environmental toxins, her body will have to slow down again in order to handle the toxic load. I might add that she is one of those people who is on a whole mess of maintenance drugs in addition to the thyroid...primarily allergy shots and hormone replacement therapy, so in addition to dealing with her thyroid problem, her body has to cope with the pharmaceutical side-effects of her other medications.

In the long run it is probably not a single-factor issue, but if the theory proposed by the article above is correct, the nation's so-called "obesity epidemic" would be best remedied if public officials would stop large corporations from pumping chemicals into our land, our water, our air and our food.

Yes it would be great if healthy food was available in the same quantities and at the same prices as the prodigious quantities of crap pumped out by fast food joints, but that debate won't go near far enough...because then you would have to define healthy as something other than a head of empty calorie iceberg lettuce (the predominant ingredient in a McDonald's "premium" salad. Don't even get me started on terms like "premium" and "Market fresh"). Here's a list of the most toxic "health" food:

Apples
Peaches
sweet bell peppers
celery
nectarines
strawberries
cherries
pears
imported grapes
spinach
lettuce
potatoes

So offering a kid an apple instead of a Snicker's bar may be an improvement, but not a big one.

And the culture has to change too. Until "the powers that be" value living creatures over profits, office workers, for example, will still be chained to their desks burning the midnight oil and trying to fit a three mile walk into their daily schedule...oh say...sometime between midnight and 3:00AM. And fighting off sleep deprivation to make sure they get that hour at the gym. Sleep deprivation, by the way, has also been linked to obesity:
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/11/17/Worldandnation/Sleep_deprivation_rai.shtml (as an interesting aside, this article ran in 2004. I just recently read the same damn thing trotted out as bleeding edge news a few weeks back.) But even there, this is a culture which thinks sleep is a habit of the indolent and how many workaholics do you know who boast about staying up all night to turn in that very important project to the boss? Americans wear their sleep deprivation like a badge of honor. Even those who complain about not getting enough sleep do it in a martyred sort of way.

Yup. The government officials can put the onus on us for gaining weight, but they aren't doing their part. Their efforts would be more productive if they focused on cleaning up the environment in order to facilitate our individual efforts to improve our health, rather than trying to inspire us to go for a walk by posing for an occasional running-shorts-and-sweat-band photo op.

Government mandated naps at work wouldn't suck either :-).
lahermite: (Default)
i took a bunch of pics today of the kids for xmas gifts. one of them turned out to be more art than gift material so i gave my old art journal a fresh start by posting it there. for those who aren't aware of my photo journal, here's the link:

http://allperspective.livejournal.com/7740.html

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