Obese and Obtuse

As living organisms of the animal variety, we eat to live. All living organisms require nutritional intake to be converted into energy to enable life to continue.

The downfall of human beings is that despite our capability to think, to plan, to react and to theorize, we take our most basic physical need for survival rather more for granted than we should. So that we turn that maxim around, and too many of us live to eat. The irony in that situation taken to extremes is that we then eat ourselves to death.

It seems reasonable that intelligent, independent, adult human beings might devote a little bit of their time, energy and reason to thinking about what we're fuelling ourselves with. It seems simple enough; we are, in effect, what we eat. When we eat junk we're fuelling our bodies in a way that will result in ill health. Similarly, when we eat too much of anything, we're overtaxing our bodies to metabolize more than we need for survival.

Our overtaxed organs groan under the demands placed upon them and begin to falter, then fail. Too much fertilizer of the wrong produces little of any practical value to the living organism; an exercise in practical futility. The growing, phenomenon of statistics that tell us that a huge percentage of the Canadian population is overweight, and a truly alarming number of people in Canada fall into the obese and morbidly obese category tells the story.

Now how intelligent is that? Mindlessly consuming packaged, pre-prepared and convenience foods on a regular basis, heavily laden with what food manufacturers well know will make their pseudo-food taste good does us ill. The manufacturers can claim that they're only providing us with what consumer tests tell them that the public wants and demands, and will purchase. High fat, high salt, high sugar-laden products.

Heavily laced with artificial chemicals, some of which are clearly injurious to long-term health. We're shortening our lives and placing a heavy burden on a public health-care system that is already overburdened. And if adults don't give much thought to how they're impacting deleteriously on their own health, one might logically think they'd give a second thought to how they're patterning their children for early disease-onset and its companion, early-death.

Mass edible consumer goods' production ensures that convenience trumps concerns for health, and advertising easy lifestyles and lip-smacking-good tastes in a pretty nasty convergence of food industry and advertising industry bottom-line enhancement does the trick. Alarmed health care providers and government agencies make attempts to counteract this pernicious alliance through public efforts to inform people.

Is anyone interested? Seems not. For a while, there was a back-to-basics movement seen in an interest in whole foods and bulk food stores made some inroads in the fast-food environment, but that appears to have fallen by the wayside. The trend now is for supermarkets to super-size themselves and as a result fewer normal-sized supermarkets appear in many urban areas; their slack happily taken up by the surging appearance of fast-food outlets.

When people live within easy distance of fast-food outlets, out of handy reach of grocery stores, guess who wins? Not the consumer. Responsible governments cannot legislate good health. Informing people about their self-interest in making responsible judgements in how and what they eat isn't making that much of an impact on public consciousness. Can we fine people for slowly killing themselves by consuming unhealthy quasi-food products?

Not likely; they're already willingly-enough fining themselves big time by ensuring through their bad choices that they'll be welcoming heart disease, diabetes, hip-and-joint replacement requirements and certain cancers into their private lives, all leading to diminished quality of life and finally to a truncated life expectancy. Everything seems to think they're immune to paying the price of indiscretion.

Preparing whole foods is slightly more time-consuming than the alternate fast-food dig-ins. Decent meal preparations take more thought. But as long as the general public feels there are more important things for them to be concerned about than their future state of health and that of their children, and make those continued 'informed' choices to eat what their distorted palate tells them tastes good, it remains a non-issue.

This makes for a real bind in principles of human rights; do those deliberately sabotaging their health deserve for the rest of the public through their tax dollars to pay for catastrophic health issues? Can health-care administrators and government agencies invoke Big Brother to tally who among us has been excessively careless with their health and invoke a penalty clause in the nature of self-pay health care?

Seems the only alternative we have is to continue raising those red flags, warning, wheedling, enticing people away from bad nutrition choices, attempt to teach them that more and big and whopping big are not necessarily attractive in the long run that results in morbid obesity.