Buy Better Food (OKAY, and eat it too) Buy More Time in Life
A treatise, again, on life quality.
It’s about four-fifteen local time. I’m in a small African town nestled next to the Pare mountains, really just a long line of tallish scrubby hills two hours outside Moshi, Tanzania. Yesterday my guide Aladdin, a civil engineer turned guide who works for ETrip Africa, drove me here to investigate a little-known animal park to see what was what.
I am often Ben’s guinea pig. Ben Jennings runs Etrip, and it’s a delight to suss out new areas with him.
At one point during the day, Aladdin and I were discussing elephant poop.
Okay okay, what on earth does this have to do with good eating? Stay with me here.
An elephants’s dung is a hefty, soccer-ball-sized mass of highly useful material. African animals from dung beetles to monkeys use it, feed off it, so that the loss of one ellie can be devastating. But that’s hardly all. That dung is used by Africans for all manner of medicinal purposes, not the least of which is when burning, it keeps away mosquitoes. I’d like to have some here in my motel room right now, for that matter and for that use.
Aladdin, the guide, told me that if you move an ellie to the zoo, the poop becomes useless. That’s because an ellie eats the way it should eat in the wild, and those varied, largely undigested materials are precisely what make the poop so valuable. Moving an ellie into capture changes their diet in precisely the same way that processed food or a diet full of sugar changes ours, and not for the better.
Nature knows more than we do, a lesson that being in rural Africa is underscored a thousand times over. Which is just one of the many, many reasons I travel. You are constantly learning, which is a fine thing.
Enter Robert Roy Britt, whose material (not dung, thank you) regularly ends up being linked in my writing on fitness.
A somewhat-dated but still-important Australian study on television-watching proved that watching TV for an hour shortens you life by 22 minutes:
Britt’s story today makes the point that poor eating, such as eating a really nasty piece of work called the hotdog (say it isn’t so) can also cost you nearly an hour of your life:
Combine the two, you get it. Hot dog, hour of stupid, you lose an hour of life. Something that takes almost nothing to stop, and add those precious minutes back.
The cumulative effect of being sedentary and eating processed food (the worst offenders are hot dogs, Ritz crackers and Oreos, go check your cupboard and your fridge) are pretty bad. There are good reasons that we are dying younger and badly, and that our poor bodies are failing us. Food that tastes good isn’t good for us, in too many cases.
The plate of food sitting next to me in this small motel in rural Africa is full of papaya and watermelon. I also have some cheese, which you can buy at the better stores in areas where lots of Whites live. I like dairy, albeit that’s been largely cut out of my intake by my nutritionist. It’s now a treat, kinda like ice cream. More and more I concentrate of veggies and fruit.
The difference that made, some 34 years ago, was that I dropped and have kept off some 85 lbs so far, and my energy level is offensively high. The discovery of oxalate kidney stones last year, which is just one of those various Jokers we get dealt, has meant that some of the world’s healthiest foods had to come off my menu. Foods like spinach, almonds, legumes, lentils, all of which for non-oxalate-formers are keys to excellent nutrition.
We shift and change as the body ages and changes through pregnancy and illness and disaster and disease, and all other Jokers that we are dealt. What we don’t need to do is stack our own decks with the bad cards of lousy life habits, bad food and the sitting disease.
I’m in the one percent who took it off and kept it off. I regularly get asked how I did it. That’s the answer. As Medium peep Penny Nelson wrote me the other day, her trainer said that weight loss happens in the kitchen, not the gym.
However weight loss per se isn’t the issue, as story after story on Medium underscores. Nature doesn’t care if you’re carrying a few extra pounds. She does care about, as with the ellies, what goes through your body, which are either proper nutrients or just crap food, which shortens your lifespan and directly impacts your quality of life. What is left of it, that is.
Yet we are forever writing idiot stories about how to lose weight, on diets that can kill, when better nutrition and regular movement are the absolute gold standard for a better, longer, healthier life. We would rather take body-damaging detox teas, just laxatives. Better fiber nutrition would solve the problem of being constipated, which we seem to be both physically and emotionally. But that’s way too easy a fix. We wanna pay a fortune for a lie to simply avoid having to eat a goddamned carrot or two.
Because I’m inherently lazy and because Britt has already done the work, let me also offer up the paragraph which contains further links from his piece:
The findings add to a smorgasbord of studies warning of the risks of consuming lots of red meat or processed meat, the negative health effects of processed foods more generally, and the increasingly terrible nutritional profile of America’s fast food.
Look. I get the occasional barky-barky snarky-snarky comment from readers who complain that much of what I write about is nothing new or just so old hat. Well, forgive me for pointing out the VERY obvious, said “old hat” advice about eating mostly plants, less red meat, moving more often daily etc. etc. just keeps getting proven over and over. The Western need for the Big New Thang is part of our problem.
What those readers are really saying is that they want to be able to eat anything they want, never have to work at being in good health, and retain their lousy life habits and still be vibrant, slim, energetic, lovely.
Will. You. Please.
The best advice is basic, simple and proven time again.
An elephant lives to about seventy. They get a brand new set of teeth every ten years until those teeth no longer grow back in, and said elle dies of starvation, which is quite natural and the way nature intended. When not in captivity and fed a constant awful and unhealthy diet of, say, sugar cane, as they can be in Myanmar, these animals eat a broad and diverse range of fibrous plants and leaves, drink lots of water, and live well to a healthy old age.
To that please see this:
https://pedramshojai.medium.com/youre-supposed-to-eat-how-many-fruits-and-vegetables-e311778a6e2f
Not much different that what works for us, albeit we don’t have to rip trees out to eat. We might want to rip out our bad habits, though. But back to our ellies.
This is important because the older matriarchs, those in their late thirties on, are the keepers of the cultural wisdom for their herds. Remove her due to poaching or ill health, and the younger ellies are clueless, terrified, and take to raiding villager’s farms for lack of guidance. We blame the ellies for the devastation we cause, but I digress.
You could make a fair few analogies about us in the same way. When we remove ourselves from better eating, which our bodies ask us for and which we ignore for want of goodies like chocolate (mostly with too much sugar) and processed food which pleases the tongue and insults the body, we shorten our lives. That removes whatever wisdom we might have to pass along in the same way.
You might make the argument that you deserve a treat now and then. I won’t argue. However I’ve learned just on this trip when I ran out of Stevia that when I reintroduce cane sugar to my diet after abstaining since July of 2020, my body treats it, with damned good reason, like the poison it really is.
A few years back during a trip to a temple in Myanmar, I hiked to the top of a long set of stairs in a popular place. The stairs were populated with monkeys who are fed a regular diet from tourists of sugared treats, chips and pure crap.
Those monkeys are sick. Their hair falls out in tufts, they are obese, they move oddly. They aggressive, dangerous and in every way, in terrible shape. We humans did that. Addicted to the salt and sugar of the treats tourists give them, this population has learned to beg and it has beggared their health.
Again, you could make many analogies about Big Food, and how they have successfully trained generations of American and other Western monkeys (us, thank you) to choose salty and sugary junk over fundamentals. That’s another story.
If quality longevity doesn’t matter to you, have at it. The problem I see is that so many of us choose bad habits and then are righteously insulted when our bodies fail us, and like the dying person demanding a Covid vaccine as the intubation begins, it’s too damned late by then. We want our cake and to eat it too without the consequences, just another notion, in my opinion, that in America the rules don’t apply to us.
Sadly, they do. Science doesn’t lie. There is no Staples Easy Button to health; it takes a commitment, which becomes a lot easier over time and practice.
By the time my father was in bed in hospice of cancer from decades of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, then chewing bags and bags and BAGS of Jujubees instead of learning to chew on celery or carrots after he quit, drinking too much booze from late adolescence until the day he was moved into hospice, it was too late.
However, in every way, you can turn the tide. At any point, assuming you are still vertical, you can make better choices. While you might not necessarily regain your best body after years of abuse, better choices have a remarkable way of changing that internal conversation. Your later years can be far better as long as you eat better, move more, and keep it up.
The occasional Oreo won’t kill you off. The point is better care, and with better care, the body takes better care of us. As my fellow writers regularly echo, just start.
Now would be a fine time.
