Those we pay to preach to us

I won’t call it “irony”, exactly, for that would be unfair. AHA speaker has heart attack.

Heart disease is real. People die from it. I get it. It’s just that I’m remembering a lifetime of being preached to, agitated, made to fuss over our food, told we shouldn’t eat salt, we shouldn’t eat fat, then told that, never mind, fat and salt are necessary, then we’re told this, told that, do this, don’t do that, or OMG! we’re going drop dead any second! “Be afraid! Be very, very afraid!!!

“Are you having a heart attack right now? Are you sure? Maybe you are having a heart attack! Do you know the signs? We think you’re having a heart attack right now…” I’ve heard the radio ads to that effect, from those rat bastards.

I believe that worry, fear, obsession over your food (or anything else) is more likely to cause health problems than any of the foods (or most any actual dangers) themselves. Trouble is, the fear, agitation and obsession have been the main product, packaged and promoted by the media and the AHA.

So if all you heart experts are so knowledgeable that you could presume to tell the rest of us how to live, would you be having heart attacks yourselves? What is the rate, or incidence, of heart problems among heart specialists, compared to the population at large? Is there any difference? That’s a question. I don’t know.

And if you’re having heart attacks yourselves, maybe go ahead and study the phenomenon but stop with the preaching? When you have proven answers, then come out and calmly declare them. I just don’t want to hear another ad, sponsored by the Ad Counsel, subsidized with my tax dollars, telling me how I should live, assuming that I have the maturity, experience and intellect of a three-year-old.

Just stop with the nanny-nag, nanny state shenanigans. Then I might could take you seriously. Maybe.

I know people who can’t get through half a day without worrying about their food, or their environment, killing them, and that right there is a potentially deadly psychological disease, promoted and spread by the nanny state “experts”.

In any case, if I’m going to die of a heart attack this very day, at least I will have spent some time living without fear, and living without fear is a good thing.

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11 thoughts on “Those we pay to preach to us

  1. As a medical provider, I try too remind people of 3 things:
    1) You can control only a few things.
    2) Only worry about what you can control.
    3) Genetics is the biggest player in the health game, and you can’t control that.

    So do 3 things:
    1) Eat as healthy as you reasonably can.
    2) Exercise several times a week.
    3) Enjoy life, sometimes that means eating food that is possibly not good for you. But possibly is just that, because we now realize that some foods we thought were problems, aren’t so much!!

    Finally, ENJOY LIFE!

    • Good points. I’d add that biology and medicine are branches of science with vast quantities of unknowns. A lot of what we see mentioned in the popular literature as “medical facts” are nothing more than today’s best guesses. It is of course true in any field that today’s theories are subject to being superseded by tomorrow’s experimental data, as happened so memorably in physics in the early 1900s. But compared to physics, a lot of other fields are far less known (partly because of being far larger).
      A point about exercise is that it makes the body feel good, quite apart from the medical benefits.

    • Good response. I am reminded of the book, Eat, Drink & Be Merry by Dr. Dean Edell.

      Also, if one is not regularly exposed to the “toxins” that some people try to avoid like The Plague, then how are our bodies going to become, or remain, capable of dealing with them? Same goes for germs (my business partner went bonkers and left because of the “spores” in the air “making him sick”). If you’re not exposed to them, you don’t build a resistance to them.

      And so there are different kinds of “exercise”. One being muscle resistance, another being aerobic, and some of the other kinds of “exercise” being relating to the immune system. Probably the most important “exercise” is in being mentally and emotionally still when things around you are in a state of cacophony, stress or chaos.

      I believe that the brain can make you sick as well as most anything else (that sounds crazy to some people, but you can prove it right now—think of something that pisses you off tremendously, or something that scares you. Right away your heart rate will increase, you may get some adrenaline, your blood will thicken, and you may not know it right away but your immune system may be compromised at the same time— a host of physical responses are initiated, just by the mind. Or think of your favorite sex act and see if there are no physical responses to that!). Likewise for making you well– My only evidence for that is in my own experience (a sample of one). I used to get sick several times per year, and now it’s less than once in two years, and the durations are shorter. Everyone around me can be sick, but I don’t catch it. Then again, it makes sense that, later in life, one has been exposed to more “bugs” and has therefore developed resistance to more “bugs”. So take it all with a healthy dose of salt (and fat, and some wine) ; )

      • This is VERY true. I work around and see literally dozens of sick people EVERY DAY and I’ve missed fewer than 5 days of work in the last 22 years because of sickness, but I still get a flu shot every year….

        We all have different levels of immunity, but exposure does make our immune system more likely to be able to fight off illness. You can’t beat illness, especially viral illnesses which mutate quickly, without repeated low dose exposures. “Germ-a-phobes” are almost always more frequently sick and sicker than non.

        Overdoing exercise can actually be less healthy than no exercise. Radical vegan diets can be less healthy than balanced diets with meat.

        Following the advice of Kipling is a good place to start because keeping your head calm IS the best medicine!!

        If you can keep your head when all about you
        Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
        If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
        But make allowance for their doubting too;
        If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
        Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
        Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
        And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

        If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
        If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
        If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
        And treat those two impostors just the same;
        If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
        Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
        Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
        And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

        If you can make one heap of all your winnings
        And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
        And lose, and start again at your beginnings
        And never breathe a word about your loss;
        If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
        To serve your turn long after they are gone,
        And so hold on when there is nothing in you
        Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

        If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
        Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
        If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
        If all men count with you, but none too much;
        If you can fill the unforgiving minute
        With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
        Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
        And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

        • Interesting data point on being around sick people all the time and seldom being sick. I have another…

          A woman I know (no one anyone on this blog would be likely to know, she is extremely anti-gun) told me she estimates she has had sex with about 400 different men. She is in her mid-fifty’s so that means she averages over 10 new partners every year. I asked about condom use. She told me she hates them and prefers not to use them but will if her partner wants to. “Have you ever had problem with STIs?”, I asked. “I once got a call from someone who’s wife had bacterial vaginosis. But that isn’t transmitted sexually and I sometimes get that even when I’m not playing around.”

          I know others who are also very sexually active with similar stories of minimal use of condoms and few, if any, issues with STIs. I’ve been wondering for some time if there is some sort of immunization occurring or their immune systems have adapted to their lifestyle.

    • Jim Fixx lived more than 8 years longer than the next longest lived direct line male in his family….He died at 52, his father had a heart attack at 35 and died at 43. Fixx took up running at 36…and was a heavy smoker and obese prior. He is not a good case study….

  2. My wife’s family is larding cooking, biscuits and gravy eating little round or large round dairy farmers. They live to be 90 without breaking a sweat.

    The new gym teacher in town decided that he needed to start an adult health program to slim the folks down to meet his weight standards. He lasted less than one month in town.

    They didn’t fire him. The round folks knew better than to go jogging at night on road with logging trucks headed to the saw mill.

    He did leave an athletic looking corpse.

  3. Who better to be a spokesman for the Heart Association than someone concerned about their own poor heart health?

  4. So true we don’t need preaching! My cardiologist husband tells people certain things like smoking and shooting heroin are really bad for them, and he’ll be happy to help them to stop, but he has a kid in college and their choices often pay her tuition. Bam.

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