As a dick-and-fartisan who moonlights occasionally as a doctor* in this space, the topic of food, exercise and obesity in America one near and dear to my opinionated ass. On the one hand, child obesity rates are undeniably skyrocketing, which puts a damper on future national defense and the high school dating scene if I’m ever single again. On the other, fat is a human tradition indicating mastery over all predators.
In the great debate between health officials and Alaskan reality stars, there are a number of arguments to be considered carefully. As mentioned before, I am a kind of doctor* (though not a chiropractor), so I will attempt to use my expertise to chew through them.
In the end, we’ll still be fat, but perhaps we’ll be fat together.
Availability of Healthy Food
Even when consumers are provided nutritional information and healthier foods, the majority of us still opt for what we’ve always eaten.
Even what’s considered healthy is divided into camps bordering on religious schisms. Buying fresh fruits and vegetables doesn’t mean s#@t to people who only eat organic and free-range cabbage. Eggs are low in bad cholesterol, but are also the product of chicken sexual exploitation to your average vegan. Frozen waffles come in gluten and gluten-free varieties and woe be to any grocery store that mixes them on the shelves. (Seriously, though: you could make someone with gluten intolerance poop their pants.)
And then there’s processed meat. Why is it that when Native Americans use every part of the buffalo, it’s considered holy and natural, but hot dogs are an abomination? Is it the penis-shape? Because they used that, too. I won’t link to those Google results for you, because I believe that searching online for “What did Native Americans use penises for” is the quintessential work-terminating experience.
Clearly, we’ve always eaten weapons-grade biotrash. It’s just that, if the past 10,000 years were our species’ teenage years where we could eat and eat and always stay skinny, first world nations have finally hit our mid-twenties and can’t get rid of our college beer bellies.
While it makes perfect sense to maybe put down questionable “foods” like whatever “cheez” is, it’s pretty obvious that diet can’t be the only culprit here.
Diet and Exercise
Probably the most important and overlooked part of this debate is exercise. It’s good for us and hamsters, which is why we force the latter to run on primitive versions of our treadmills.
Unfortunately, exercise has no real ambassadors to the non-exercising world. The biggest proponents in entertainment of going to the gym are
- The guys from Jersey Shore.
- Athletes that supplement their workouts with performance-enhancing drugs to shatter world records by people that looked like us.
- Actors in terrible movies.
Who wants to be in a Transformers movie, right? That and Adam Sandler rom-coms are apparently all a gym membership gets you, even if you’re John Turturro.
We need new fitness heroes: men and women who demonstrate that there are actual rewards (number 3) for people that aren’t douchebags (numbers 1 and 2). Maybe then we won’t feel so dirty about looking like porn stars and get back to keeping our next generations fit.
According to some so-called experts, it could save our country.
Our National Defense
Like anyone who has watched the news since September 12, 2001, I’m terrified of anyone capable of doing the monkey bars and especially of those who can do so without slowing everyone else in line down.
But, consider ancient humans. According to some very exciting Smithsonian displays, we all had Fight Club abs when we were on everything else’s menus. This protected us by A) allowing us to put up a decent fight and B) become so tough and stringy that only animal health nuts would still want to eat us.
Now that we are masters of the food chain, we can sit comfortably on our thumbs watching lesser predators eat the animals we once used as distractions. We’re the Roman emperors of predation.
So none of this stuff will be a concern once we build enough infrastructure in the rest of the world to power developing nations’ Angry Birds platforms.
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*Rick Snee is not, in any way, a licensed medical professional or an actor that plays one on television. He’s just really opinionated, which is good enough for blogging. To submit your own questions to Dr. Snee, Guynecologist, post comments below or email the good doctor.