Kara & Michael’s Blog

So I would just like to state, for the record, that I am very disappointed with this blog. So far I have written articles only when I am worked up about something, which in combination with my type-B personality has resulted in depressingly infrequent updates. So I hereby promise to write more often, and to actually write all the funny things that I think of instead of producing an endless string of heavy political rants. But first I would like to indulge myself one last time, and complain about the most significant public health menace facing the world today.

I am pissed off about obesity. Not necessarily about its existence, but about the way we’ve chosen to deal with it, and the utter irresponsibility of our pathetic attempts to prevent it. Let’s face it, the civilized world has got plenty to eat and we want to eat it. If we were getting more physical activity that would be fine, but we aren’t. And to top it all off we are subsisting to an ever-increasing degree on pre-packaged processed food and restaurant fare. Our culture is, quite literally, poisoning us.

I’m going to avoid the medical specifics here because there are many excellent websites where you can read all about trans-fatty acids and type-II diabetes in children and other specific problems. (My new favorite is dietwords.com, and I’ve added a link to it to my links panel on the right.) What is bugging me about this is not the specific problems created by the obesity epidemic, but the reasons for it that become apparent when you boil it down. We have no self-control. We invented labor-saving devices and we were OK. We invented synthetic food products like margarine and we were still basically OK. But now we hold down stressful jobs that bombard our bodies with stress hormones, then we come home and sit down in front of the television and eat pre-packaged junk food in an effort to escape this stress. Then we sit awake until 2 in the morning because we are too nervous to sleep, and wake up on edge after four hours of poor sleep, to repeat the cycle. And in what name is this ritual performed? Personal improvement.

Obesity, horrible as it may be medically, is not the problem here. It is the symptom of a society spiraling out of control. I know this is worst in the U.S. right now, but it is rapidly spreading to other countries. None of us is satisfied with what he has. We are working ourselves to death, and I speak not just of work in terms of employment. We have forgotten how to be happy. Now we have Zoloft for depression, Ritalin for excitable children … and the Atkins diet for the truly insane.

I am not attacking psychiatry. The Scientologists are total morons for doing so. Psychological disorders are as real as any other illness. The important difference is that you can give yourself depression, but you can’t give yourself the flu. Depression, I believe, almost always has environmental causes, but I do not deny the value (or, possibly, necessity) of drugs as a treatment once that depression has set in. The enormous increase in prescriptions for SSRIs can be attributed to an unhealthy environment, and not necessarily overprescription. A much smaller number of disorders, like ADD or schizophrenia, are most likely present, or at least coded for, from birth, and it’s extremely unlikely that the number of cases would increase sharply like those of depression have — which indicates, for example, that stimulant medications are probably grossly overprescribed to children. We’re overcorrecting for the problems of society and the members of our society most in need of our protection are paying for it.

Maybe that was a bit of a tangent, but my point is that obesity is the physical manifestation of an absolutely sick psychology existent in our present society. It is apparently too easy to ignore the numerous mental manifestations thereof. There will always be heavy people because there are genes that code for it. But evolution takes thousands of years to effect major changes, and so we know that the vast majority of overweight and obese people in the world today were not intended to be that way by nature. I do not believe that any particular religion or ideology holds the answers to repairing our society. Rather, I know that we have become so obsessively materialistic and nearsighted that we can no longer appreciate anything. The fact that it’s obesity that’s killing us today is simply a matter of opportunity. We will continue to self-destruct in one way or another until we remember how to be human. I cannot speak for the rest of the world, but I am absolutely disgusted with the majority of my fellow citizens of the U.S. We have forgotten how to revel in the simple pleasures of life. And so we have chosen a life of monotony that will eventually kill us, because we are too lazy to make a life of our own, to find a reason to live.

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