Extend Your Healthy Longevity – Twelve Things That May Be Accelerating Your Aging – Part Two of a Three-part Series.

Thanks for your feedback on the first article in this three-part series.  A special thanks to loyal reader, Roger Knisely, for suggesting that I “flip the script”.  So I’ve changed the headline and will try to put a more positive spin on the next eight items over the next two weeks.

Here are four more age accelerators for your consideration:

  1. Sticking to the S.A.D – Standard American Diet. I’m a bit of a snit when it comes to how bad our nutrition awareness is in our culture.  I fear that our abundance is killing us, especially in the food area.  I believe we can argue that we are, literally, eating ourselves to early deaths.

Let me have better authorities than me do the talking about this since you may be tired of my tirades.

Food journalist and author, Bee Wilson, published this article in The Guardian that says it better than I can. It’s a long article so just in case it’s more than you want to read, here are a few extracts that get to the core message (bolding is mine).

“For most people across the world, life is getting better but diets are getting worse. This is the bittersweet dilemma of eating in our times. Unhealthy food, eaten in a hurry, seems to be the price we pay for living in liberated modern societies. It makes no sense to presume that there has been a sudden collapse in willpower across all ages and ethnic groups since the 1960s.”

“What has changed most since the 60s is not our collective willpower but the marketing and availability of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods. Some of these changes are happening so rapidly it’s almost impossible to keep track. Sales of fast food grew by 30% worldwide from 2011 to 2016 and sales of packaged food grew by 25%. Somewhere in the world, a new branch of Domino’s Pizza opened every seven hours in 2016.  You can measure this life improvement in many ways, whether by the growth of literacy and smartphone ownership, or the rising number of countries where gay couples have the right to marry. Yet our free and comfortable lifestyles are undermined by the fact that our food is killing us, not through lack of it but through its abundance – a hollow kind of abundance”

One of the most vocal critics of our food system is physician Dr. Michael Greger of Nutritionfacts.org.  In an article just this week he wrote the following:

“Most deaths in the United States are preventable and related to nutrition.  According to the most rigorous analysis of risk factors ever published, the Global Burden of Disease study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, our diet is both the number-one cause of death and the number-one cause of disability in the United States, having bumped smoking tobacco down to number two. Smoking now kills about a half-million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills thousands more.”

As in so many health-inducing solutions, the resolution is simple, but not easy. Renowned food author Michael Pollan’s now-famous seven words illuminate the path:  “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”  You’ll find those pithy words, along with 80+ other life-saving nutrition-focused suggestions in his wonderfully simple and readable book “Food Rules”.

Our taste buds have been taken and held captive for decades by carefully engineered and designed combinations of sugar, salt and fat, designed by our global food industry to promote cravings rather than satiation.  Our bodies are called on every day to fight a battle against this invasion.  Maintaining the Standard American Diet is to lose this battle insidiously before our time should be up.

A largely plant-based diet can be the age decelerator.

2. Limited or no aerobic exercise and no strength training.   “Aerobic exercise will give us life; strength training will make it worth living.”  So says the late Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the life-altering best-seller “Younger Next Year”.

Last week, I suggested that we become better at understanding our biology.  Fundamental in that understanding is that our cells need and crave oxygen. The only way to increase the amount they get naturally is by getting our heart rate up.

Voila!! Exercise.

Dr. Lodge does a masterful job of bringing that complex process down to an understandable level.  It was his explanation that motivated me to move a modest, sporadic exercise schedule to a six-day-a-week aerobic exercise routine of 45 minutes per day. If I miss it, I envision my cells shaking their fists.  That motivates me to get on a boring upright bike or treadmill.  Thank goodness for my Kindle!

Most people north of fifty shun resistance training/weight lifting.  That’s for the younger set, they say – the tattoo and tanktop and lululemon hard-body crowd at 24-Hour Fitness.  Dr. Lodge takes the opposite position.  Strength training in your 30s or 40s is optional.  At 50 and beyond it is imperative.

Why! There’s this condition that we all begin to contract in our late thirties called loss of muscle mass (commonly referred to as sarcopenia) that really accelerates when we reach fifty.  There is no drug to treat it – you can only counter it by doing resistance training.

I hope you’ll take this seriously. None of us want to end up that stooped, shuffling old person.  I get it – exercise, especially strength training, is inconvenient, usually painful starting out and you won’t feel like the in-crowd at the local fitness shop or rec center.  But without the strength-training component, we face extended morbidity and early frailty.

Be sure to consult with your physician before starting and I suggest starting with a professional trainer who has worked extensively with mid-life and older clientele.

3.  Being a hermit. A recent article in Medium.com contained an attention-getting sub-title:  “Lonely people are 50% more likely to die prematurely than those with healthy social connections.”

In 2016, the AARP Foundation announced that the health risks of prolonged isolation are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Our wi-fi connections are getting better but our personal connections are going south, especially when we enter into the post-career phase of our lives.  The promotion of full-time, leisure-based retirement steers starry-eyed retirees into “golden years” that often evolve into “lonely years.”  We retire, we move away from our roots, friends move away, we become generally less-socially active. The expectation that our “work playmates” will “stay in touch” doesn’t happen. Health issues may cause us to restrict our ability to travel to maintain our social engagement.

The AARP study revealed:

    • 17 percent of American adults 65 and older are isolated
    • Research shows a 26 percent increased risk of death due to a subjective feeling of loneliness
    • 6 million adults 65 and older have a disability that prevents them from leaving their homes without help
    • 51 percent of people 75 and older live alone

Building and maintaining an active, positive, sustaining, and available network of people requires a pro-active approach.  Here’s a link to a brochure that has a self-assessment checklist to gauge your risk of isolation and its effects.

4.  Be done with learning.  Some time ago, I did some research for a Toastmaster speech on the “state of reading” and was surprised by what I found.

    • Approximately 39% of high school never read another book after graduation.
    • Approximately 42% of college graduates never read another book after graduation.
    • 95% of books read in the U.S. are read by 5% of the population.

I have a college-degreed, septuagenarian friend who proudly boasts of having never read a book since graduating from college.  For him, and the many like him, I offer up this wisdom for consideration:

“In a world that is constantly changing, there is no one subject or set of subjects that will serve you for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of your life. The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn” John Naisbitt

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning today is young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. ” Henry Ford

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner of 40 years, says there’s one quality of Buffett’s that he holds in especially high esteem: his ability to be a lifelong “learning machine”.  At 89, Buffett still spends 5 hours a day reading – often up to 500 pages a day.

Today, we are the benefactors of new knowledge about your brains.  Dr. Roger Landrey, preventive medicine physician, former Airforce flight surgeon and author of  “Live Long, Die Short: A Guide to Authentic Health and Successful Aging points out that

” Atrophy of the brain used to be viewed as a side effect of aging. Now, we know this may simply be a lack of use.”   

If we don’t use it, we lose it.

Dr. Landry goes on to say:

” When we use the skills and knowledge we have, the many connections in the brain remain in the best shape they can be. Don’t use them, and they become more difficult to use through a process known as synaptic pruning, in which the brain atrophies in areas where these functions are rarely used.  Neuroplasticity and effective neurogenesis can only occur when the brain is stimulated by environment or behavior.”

It’s encouraging to see the trend line in adult learning turning up.  Boomers are awakening to the benefit of continued learning.  The evidence of this is showing in the increased enrollments in adult learning classes at universities and community colleges and the many online learning communities such as Senior Planet, Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI), Coursera, Udemy, and others.

The choice to stop learning is a choice that says “I’m done.”  As Strategic Coach founder Dan Sullivan says: “It’s a signal to the universe that you are preparing to send your parts back.”

Four more aging accelerators to come next week.  Thanks for your feedback.  Please let me know your thoughts on these four – or on the series so far – by scrolling down and leaving a comment.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at  www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Extend Your Healthy Longevity – Twelve Things That May Be Accelerating Your Aging – A Three-part Series.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

“Life is a fatal disease. Once contracted, there is no known cure.”

This is a quote from Dr. Walter Bortz, one of my favorite authorities on maintaining good health in our third age.  Dr. Bortz is an 89-year old former Stanford University geriatric physician and author of seven books, my favorites being “Dare to Be 100” and “The Roadmap to 100”.

While his quote has a bit of a fatalistic tone, his written and spoken advice takes a much more optimistic tone about delaying the “fatal disease” part of life.

Dr. Bortz convinced me, when I read “Dare to Be 100” the first of three times in 2013, that I needed to ratchet up my own longevity expectations.  Prior to reading his reasoned and experienced position on successful aging, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought and was pretty fatalistic in my longevity expectations.

Kind of the “what will be, will be” – with a sprinkling of naivete about the non-role of genetics in my longevity.

So with a fresh understanding from Dr. Bortz that there is no biological reason that the human body shouldn’t last well past 100 years, I began confessing to the goal of living to 100.  I’ve since revised that to 112 ½ years because, at 75, I decided I need another third of my life to catch up for what didn’t get done in the first two-thirds.

Yes, my friends and family still think I’m nuts but no longer roll their eyes – probably out of boredom, deference, and pity.  Candidly, I am probably nuts to think it will happen.   With mild hypertension, hypothyroidism, atrial flutter, and statin-controlled cholesterol, I’m probably not the best horse to bet on in this race.

But one thing is certain.  Like anything else,  if I don’t set the goal, I for sure won’t get there.  So what if I miss it by 5 or 10 years?  It beats buying into only living to the average U.S.male lifespan of 78.69 years.   Especially when you are 77.5, which I am.

No, I’m not going to be a part of the statistic.  Too much to do in my quest to instill sageism and fight ageism.

Yeah, we aren’t going to get out of this thing alive.  But we don’t need to hasten the demise. Culturally, we’re really good at building age accelerators into our lifestyles, often innocently and due to lack of knowledge, more often just out of laziness, lack of discipline, capitulation to convenience and a refusal to acknowledge the insidious nature of habits.

How might you be accelerating your aging?  Here are the first four of a dozen accelerators I’ll toss out over the next three weeks for you to consider and check yourself against :

  1. Attitude with no gratitude or altitude. Bortz turns the word DARE into an acronym for longer living: Diet – Attitude – Renewal – Exercise.  Of the four, he considers attitude the most important, by far.  He reminds us that “attitude facilitates the biological steps, the planning, the decision making that take us to true old age.  It’s possible to get there by chance, but not likely.” The research studies of centenarians have revealed that they think health and don’t dwell on sickness and death.  They expect to foil the doc and live.

William James wrote: “Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help make it so.”  Tony Robbins reminds us that it’s impossible to be grateful and depressed at the same time. Think lofty thoughts and be grateful for each day.

  1. A past bigger than your future. I learned the other day that the highest increase in suicide in the U.S. is in males 50+ and that suicide rates for males are highest among those aged 75+.  Certainly, illness is a big factor in this.  But also contributing can be a lost sense of purpose, a loss of personal identity brought on by retirement, or a living in the past without a vision for what could be a bigger future in the third age.

Culturally, we’ve been taught to wind down as we age, to come in for a landing after several decades of flying high.  A mindset that suggests another take-off and moving into a future that could be bigger than a high-achieving past is foreign to us when, in fact, we are in an ideal position to make our future bigger.  Maybe not in title; maybe not in money; maybe not in culturally-perceived prestige.  But we can bring and pay forward our talents and acquired skills and experiences to serve others in transformational ways that exceeded what we did in our past.

  1. Seeking comfort and security. Nothing significant develops in a comfort zone.  When we seek comfort, we unconsciously seek complacency. Any progress made in our first half or two-thirds only happened when we stepped out of the comfort zone that was holding us back. Yet we strive for comfort within the illusion that there is a thing called security. The pursuit of comfort and security is not how we grow and is not the real world we live in. We’ve bought some bad intellectual goods.

Brianna West, author and blogger at Thought Catalog offers up some insight in both areas:

 “There’s no such thing as real comfort, there’s only the idea of what’s safe. This one is a big one to swallow, but there’s really no such thing as “comfort,” which is why comfortable things don’t last, and why the best-adjusted people are most “comfortable” in “discomfort.” Comfortable is just an idea. You choose what you want to base yours on.”

“There’s no such thing as true security. We seek comfort believing that it makes us safe, but we live in a world in which there is no such thing as true security. Our bodies were made to evolve, our physical items are temporary and can be lost and broken, etc. To combat this, we seek comfort, rather than accepting the transitory nature of life.”

  1. Ignoring our biology. I certainly was naïve about my biology in my first half: smoking for 18 years, extended periods of limited physical exertion, poor nutrition – just a few of a plethora of bad habits.  Had I been more informed of how my body is designed to function, perhaps I would have overcome the peer pressure and cultural influences that put me in those habit patterns. Will I pay a longevity price for that?  Most likely. But I grew up and matured in an era when we knew relatively little about our biology.  For instance, in my teen years, doctors, dentists, and actors encouraged smoking!  Our knowledge today of how the body parts all work together and what it takes to keep them healthy is unparalleled.  We know all we need to know to virtually eliminate the five major killers in our culture (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and dementia).  Yet none of the five is receding!

Lori Bitter of The Business of Aging.com  and author of “The Grandparent Economy” found, in extensive research she recently conducted, that “baby boomers know what they should be doing – they just don’t do it.  It generally takes a crisis to provide the stimulus to make the changes they know they should be making.”  We choose to ignore what we know that can slow age acceleration.

Let’s keep it simple.  We are 35 trillion cells, give or take a few trillion.  Give those cells the oxygen they crave (exercise), the right type of glucose (nutrition) and less cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine (stress reduction), and they’ll do their job to slow the age acceleration.

 

In addition to either of the two books by Dr. Bortz mentioned at the top, I suggest a trip through a great transformational book on this topic entitled “Younger Next Year”, a must-read for anyone wanting to push that endpoint further out.

These four age accelerators get us started.  Eight more to follow over the next two articles.  Tune in next week.  Please leave your comments below about this quartet of accelerators.

Health alert: Get to Know Your PCP!

How well do you know your primary care physician (PCP)?  Have you been with him/her for a long or a short time?  How old do you think s/he is?  How long in his/her practice?

These aren’t questions we’re inclined to spend time thinking about.

Maybe we, as third agers, should be more attentive to this relationship.  Because there is an intensifying shift in the physician space that has been going on for a number of years that can affect our ability to get the care we may need as we get older.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I’m not a big fan of the healthcare system here in the U.S. (Note: my apologies to my non-U.S. followers.  I’m going to be talking about what I understand to be largely a U.S.-centric issue).

If you are like most, your first point-of-contact when a health issue comes up is your primary care doc (PCP) who is most likely a primary care or family practice physician.   They are generalists who treat adults (and children, in a family practice) specializing in the prevention, diagnosis, and management of disease and chronic conditions.

Like many things in life, we take them for granted, assuming they’ll be there when needed.

But that may be changing – and within our lifetime.

I’ve had a bit of a front-row seat to the machinations taking place in the healthcare space over the last 17  years as an executive healthcare recruiter.  Over the last seven years, that involved recruiting specifically for small to large medical practices, some of which were internal medicine and family practice organizations.

When I moved my recruiting business to that healthcare segment, a major shift in the makeup of physician practices was well underway.  Many independent medical practices, especially internal medicine and family practices, were struggling to survive because of the tremendous burden of regulations, insurance, and billing issues.

In particular, one of the major culprits in this shift was the advent of the electronic medical record system foisted on practices by the government.  It has turned out to be one of the great disasters within our healthcare system history and is driving many physicians out of their practices.

Many internal medicine and family practices consolidated to try to achieve economies of scale. Or they scurried under the wings of hospitals to relieve the burden of running the office side of the business which stole from their ability to “be a doctor” and practice medicine.

Follow the money

For years, physicians-to-be have been selecting the more “prestigious” and higher-income specialties such as orthopedic, anesthesiology, dermatology and others and avoiding the family practice/internal medicine path.  Much of this is being driven by the fact that primary care specialties are amongst the lowest-paying specialties.

It’s now becoming a national problem   – one that could affect us in the coming years.

According to a 2019 study conducted by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) the United States will see a shortage of up to nearly 122,000 physicians over the next decade, including up to 55,000 primary care physicians.

Kaiser Health News recently reported that in 2019 the number of internal medicine positions offered was the highest on record – over 8,000.  Only 41% were filled by graduating seniors pursuing their medical degrees from U.S. medical schools.

So why am I sounding an alarm here?

Given this backdrop, we need to recognize that it’s going to be increasingly difficult to find a primary care physician that will accept us as a patient.   Fewer are coming into the system and older docs are retiring out at an earlier age.

Burnout is a growing issue

Forty percent of males physicians and fifty percent of female physicians are burned out because of high patient loads, the hassles of running a practice, electronic medical record requirements, and government regulations – all while reimbursement rates under Medicare are declining.

This condition isn’t likely to get better, certainly not in our lifetimes.

So what is one to do?  Here are three proactive things you may want to consider:

  1. Start by elevating your healthcare literacy. How much do you know about what all the parts and pieces of your body do, how they work, how they interact/interface/intertwine?  Do you know the key biomarkers of your health and where yours are?  How conscious are you of the insidious nature, positive and negative, of your current habits and the role they play in your long-term health?   We exist inside of a 24×7 immune system of  35 trillion cells that are working hard to keep us healthy despite how we ignore and mistreat them.  The knowledge to know how to provide them what they need to do their jobs has existed for a long time, but we give it up to complacency and convenience.  That is, until a calamity hits.
  2. Take greater control of your own health. As an extension of number one, take full charge and responsibility for your health. I don’t believe that we should rely on our doctor to be the arbiter of our health.  Rather, they should be our partners, with us at the helm.  Our ability to do that does require an elevated healthcare literacy and a commitment to compliance.  Too often in our culture, we play into the hands of a reactive healthcare system and turn to our docs only when something skids off the tracks.  It’s like we’ve turned our healthcare into a reactive, $35 co-pay experience.  Start now to let your PCP know that you are going to become, with his/her help, more knowledgeable about what it takes to be healthier and that you wish to partner with her/him on a plan of self-efficacy – taking charge of your health.

P.S. You might get pushback from your doc.  Here’s why: what you are asking of them doesn’t fit the corporate model that they have stepped into if they are part of a large health system or large consolidated practice.  Expectations on the part of the system or practice are to see as many patients a day as possible.  Follow the money.  The more visits, the more insurance payouts.  Someone like you with your questions and requests take time that your doc may want to take with you but be forced to avoid because of insurance restrictions and health system expectations.  Plus a lot of what you will want to know and discuss doesn’t translate into the boxes in the electronic medical record that your doc has his nose in throughout your entire meeting.  You are creating more “paperwork” for an already overburdened doc.  It’s your health – don’t let all that get in the way.

  1. Know your PCP. How old is your primary care physician? How long is he/she planning to continue to practice?  Have you asked her/him?  You might want to just so you know in case you need to plan ahead for a replacement.  We are seeing many PCPs retiring or selling their practice and going inactive at much earlier ages than in the past.  Much of this is due to the declining incomes at the primary care level combined with, and often the result of, the challenges of managing a primary care practice and being a doctor at the same time.  Don’t get caught having to scramble to find a PCP who will take you as a new patient.  Obviously, because of reasons cited earlier, it will be tougher and you may be faced with settling for less than what you want in a doctor.

One possible solution to consider:  a relationship with a concierge practice where, for an annual fee, you are guaranteed unlimited access to a doctor who really does want to practice medicine.  The model is built on reducing patient enrollment from several thousand down to 5-600 and offering more personalized service.

One of the primary care docs I was with for a short while admitted to having 4,800 patient charts.   The average appears to be around 2,500 for primary care physicians.   Concierge-style practices can be relatively expensive, and there can be some insurance coverage issues, but I’m told it’s an environment where you can truly partner with your physician.

So, to recap. 

We need that PCP but we needn’t relinquish our health to them.  Be sure you are positioned with one that is going to be around for a while and engage him/her at a deeper level letting them know you are becoming more knowledgeable ( with her/his help), that you are taking charge, and really want his/her help on this journey.

I believe you will get a very positive response from the doctor. One, because they get that from very few; two, because you are asking them to do what they really want to do – be a doctor.

You will quickly discover, from the response, if this is someone you want to continue with –or whether it’s time to initiate a search for someone else.

This shortage is not likely to get the attention it needs from the government or, surprisingly, from the medical community itself.  It’s lost, along with all the other critical issues that are going nowhere in Disneyland on the Potomac.

It’s on us.  Don’t wait until it’s too late.

Let me know of your experience in this area – positive or negative.  We welcome your feedback on this topic – scroll down and leave a comment below.

Celebrating #100!!

Well, dear readers.  This is blog #100. 

My thanks to those of you who have endured my iconoclasm, sarcasm, rants, wanderings, mild plagiarism, and occasional drivel for the last two years and still open the weekly email.

I never imagined getting this far down the blogging road.  According to one source I came across, most people who start blogs quit within 3 months.

My ego would naturally take that and say that I’m 8x better than most, but we all know that’s garbage.  I’m just afraid to quit because once in a while some of you give me a stroke that hints that someday I may grow into being a real writer.

Given that there are over 600 million blogs in the world today and that 77.8 million blogs are published each month on WordPress and that 2 billion blog posts are being published each year worldwide – well,  my sanity is up for question.

But some of you knew that even before I  put my keyboard to a blog.

 

In recognition of #100, and to relieve you having to sort through and decipher another mini-epistle, I’m doing something a bit different this week.

I collect quotes.  Hundreds of them.  It helps me maintain my reputation as someone who can “cliché you to death.”

In our recent move, I uncovered a couple of forgotten boxes crammed with 3×5 cards with notes and quotes from books and articles I’ve read as far back as 20 years.

Hundreds of cards.

I’ve begun an 80% gleaning, narrowing my arsenal of clicheic hammers.

From that gleaning, I decided to share a few humorous and pithy quotes that I felt you might enjoy.  Most of these came from a single Forbes article.

Thanks for being a reader.  I’m looking forward to the next 100!

Thoughts on work 

  • “ I have never liked working. To me, a job is an invasion of privacy.” Danny McGoorty
  • “Hard work never killed anybody, but why take the chance?” Edgar Bergen
  • “I’ve been promoted to middle-management. I never thought I’d sink this low”  Tim Gould
  • “No man ever listened himself out of a job.” Calvin Coolidge
  • “There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish something.”  Thomas Edison
  • “The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.” Richard Bach

Thoughts on ambition 

  • “Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.” Edgar Bergen
  • “Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap vigors of the mind.” Leonardo DaVinci
  • “Life, as it is called, is for the most of us one long postponement.” Henry Miller
  • “A lazy man is never lucky.” Persian proverb
  • “What use is a good head if the legs won’t carry it?” Yiddish Proverb
  • “A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will condemn himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-hand friends.” Cyril Connolly
  • “The lazy are always wanting to do something.” Anonymous
  • “Life is the classroom; death is graduation.” Anonymous
  • “Nothing is ours but time and choices.” Anonymous

Thoughts on health 

  • “Old people shouldn’t eat health foods. They need all the preservatives they can get.” Robert Osborn
  • “Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.” Redd Foxx
  • “I get my exercise acting as a pallbearer to my friends who exercise.” Chauncey DePew
  • “Flies spread disease. Keep yours zipped.”  Anonymous
  • “When I told my doctor I couldn’t afford an operation, he offered to touch up my x-rays.” Henny Youngman
  • “I knew a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the time he killed himself.”  Johnny Carson

Miscellaneous

  • “The only advantage of being a pessimist is that all your surprises are pleasant”
  • “Always do right because that will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”  Mark Twain
  • “Smile – the shortest distance between two people.” Victor Borge

See you next week

Does Your Favorite Presidential Candidate Have a Food Platform?

 

Hold on – I’m not going all political on you.  I’m in the same place you are – dumbfounded by how far off the tracks we’ve gone in government leadership and common sense.

That’s stuff for another article – somebody else’s article because I’m not writing it.

But a New York Times piece entitled “Our Food Is Killing Too Many of Us” recently hit my newsfeed.  It reminds us that we “Americans are sick – much sicker than many realize.”  It refers to the CDC report that more than 100 million U.S. adults are now living with diabetes or prediabetes.  Breaking down the CDC report, it appears that about 10% have diabetes, 90% have prediabetes which, if not treated, can lead to Type 2 diabetes within five years.

If you’ve been enduring my articles for a while, you know that I unabashedly boarded this “food is killing us” bandwagon long ago and continue as a lonely voice in a wilderness of fellow sapiens whose taste buds and habits have been taken and held captive as we slowly eat ourselves to death.

Along with the planet!

OK – I’m not going all environmentalist on you either.  But, at some point, we’ve got to get real about all this.

Think about it – have you heard one garlic-laced utterance from any of the several thousand presidential candidates that included the word “food”?

Have any of them expressed concern or interest in the current destruction and burning of the lungs of our planet to graze more four-legged saturated-fat-factories?

How many of them know or care that it takes 600 liters of fresh water to produce one liter of any sugar-sweetened soda delivered in a plastic bottle.  Or that, according to Soil and Water Specialists at the University of California Agricultural Extension, the water required to produce one pound of beef is 5,214 gallons.

Please assure me you won’t be holding your breath waiting for any of the above to cross the lips of any candidate, right or left.

What we can count on is the continuing political dance that steps over the problem to focus on how to ensure that the financial injury for bad health habits isn’t egregious.  Nary a poke at the source of the problem – poor eating habits, lack of exercise, a food industry that thrives on government inaction and a populace ignorant to what they are doing to themselves.

Oh, and we had best throw in a healthcare system that struggles to spell “food” and would go apoplectic if asked  to define “nutrition.”

The Times article acknowledges that government plays a crucial role:

“The significant impacts of the food system on well-being, health care spending, the economy, and the environment — together with mounting public and industry awareness of these issues — have created an opportunity for government leaders to champion real solutions.

Yet with rare exceptions, the current presidential candidates are not being asked about these critical national issues. Every candidate should have a food platform, and every debate should explore these positions. A new emphasis on the problems and promise of nutrition to improve health and lower health care costs is long overdue for the presidential primary debates and should be prominent in the 2020 general election and the next administration.”

 I suppose we could hope it will happen –the political “food platform” thing.  Nothing wrong with being hopeful but I’m inclined to put hope and wish in the inaction category.  Does it make sense to wait for a political “food platform” to emerge from the tangle of trade wars, border conflicts, space defense, buying frozen countries, and free everything for everybody?

It starts with us. And our nutritional and environmental awareness.  We don’t do well with the first and ignore the impact of the latter.

Meat equals money and our appetite for meat is the most direct cause of the Amazon’s peril along with other parts of the world with the U.S. near the top of the list.

Carefully engineered combinations of sugar, salt and fat are a direct cause of our sickness.  We are victims of our own naivete, reprogrammed taste buds, and craving for convenience. Given all that, we individually are still the only solution.

Consider this suggestion from nutrition activist and physician Dr. David Katz ( the bolding is mine):

“Eat less meat this week. If you eat it daily, skip a day. If you only eat it weekly, skip the week.  If you, personally, had to set some majestic, 200-year-old tree on fire as a prelude to your next bacon-cheeseburger, would you do it? Those of you who say yes are beyond redemption. To everyone else: eat less meat, please. This is the price it is exacting- unattenuated simply because someone else strikes the match.

Less ultra-processed food, less meat, and more whole plant foods are the very formula most indelibly linked to less chronic disease, less premature death, less obesity, more years in life, more life in years. But in this context, that is simply fortuitous.

There are no healthy people on a ravaged planet. There are no healthy people on a planet that can no longer sustain them. We are at risk of eating ourselves into extinction.”

Thanks for allowing me back up on my soapbox.  Feel free to knock me off with a comment below if you feel differently.  My-fruit-and-vegetable-and-wholegrain-fed skin is getting thicker.

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P.S. How fortuitous.  Just as I finished this article, a newspaper headline in our daily rag called the Denver Post said the following: “Trump administration limits scientific input” with a tag “USDA Dietary Guidelines”.  We now know that one presidential candidate, and his administration, have a “food platform”.  It indirectly supports the consumption of meat, highly processed and high sodium foods by eliminating questions about those issues from the 80 questions that the committee overseeing nutritional guidelines have been asked to explore.  If you read the article, I hope you come away a bit incensed.