Jack LaLanne vs. The New York Times

This weekend, New York Times Food Critic Frank Bruni wasted space in an otherwise fine newspaper with this editorial on Jack LaLanne and his (negative) impact on American fitness culture.

It is Jack LaLanne you can thank, or curse, for all the gyms: in exurban strip malls, suburban manses, downtown hotels. The health club he opened in Oakland, Calif., in 1936 was one of their seeds and templates, an endorphin emporium that pointed the way.

That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you could pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These, too, are his doing, at least in part. What he left behind when he died last week, at the toned old age of 96, was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul.

If Bruni seriously thinks America is fitness-obsessed, he needs to walk away from all those fancy, Manhattan bistros he reviews and spend an afternoon hanging out at a Jack in the Box - maybe one next door to the gym at an "exurban strip mall." If he does, he's in for a major shock. Guess what, Frank? With an obesity shooting past 30%, we're not fitness-obsessed. We're a bunch of fat-asses!

Admittedly, we, however, image-obsessed - but I'd be much more willing to pin that on Us Weekly or reality television. True, there is a small, highly visible population in America who fuss too much about their six-pack abs, but for the most part, we're a lot more interested in Ryan Reynolds' six-pack - and only from the comfort of our living room couch, while guzzling down an entirely different kind of six-pack.

Furthermore, while I admire any writer who achieves a resume like Bruni's, he seems to forget that we are a nation of individuals. He may have found self-actualization in his career or his intellectualism, but we can't all do that. For many, fitness is where we find character, where we find ourselves - and there's nothing wrong with that. Bruni doesn't appear to agree. Instead, he tries to paint fitness culture as some sort of cult:

“There seems to be a whole substitute morality, where your obligation is to go to the gym and not ask why,” says Mark Greif, a founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and the author of a widely discussed 2004 essay, “Against Exercise.” “If you don’t, you become a sort of villain of the culture.”

The message that perspiration is a gateway to, and reflection of, higher virtues is captured in health club slogans like ones used by the Equinox chain over recent years: “Results aren’t always measured in pounds and inches.” “My body. My biography.” “It’s not fitness. It’s life.” The same idea is encoded in the language of personal improvement. A “new you” usually means a trimmer, tauter version, not someone who has learned to speak Mandarin or picked up woodworking skills.

But the flaw here - as is the case with the rest of this piece - is that he completely overlooks the fact that exercise is good for you. It's what our bodies were meant to do and most of us don't do it enough. If you don't exercise, you may not be my "enemy," but you're certainly your own enemy. If we lived in ancient Sparta, where the drive for physical excellence reached a point that unhealthy children were routinely killed, I'd concede this point, but, and I repeat, we are a fat nation. We need to exercise more.

In addition to promoting weight loss, exercise has scores of other benefits. It wards off diabetes, osteoporosis, heart disease, arthritis, and on and on. It's also been shown to have scores of physiological benefits and improve productivity. Bruni has sport with the American public for approving of our two most recent presidents' fitness regimes. You bet your ass I approve! Anyone who makes time to clear their head and take care of their body, even when saddled with one of the world's hardest jobs, is going to make better decisions. (That said, I'm not thrilled with all the decisions made by these two leaders, but that has more to do with ideology and less to do with jogging.)

Let me put it this way; I know people who don't like to read. They find it a waste of time, especially when you can work through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2 hours onscreen thanks to the miracle of cinema. Tell me, Frank, what about those people? Do you approve of them? Just as exercise nourishes and body, reading nourishes the brain and I'm fairly certain you're somewhat dismissive of people who eschew the written word. Yet it all serves the same purpose, in a way. Mind-body-soul, buddy. They all work together. You need to tend to them all.

Yes, as is the case with every other industry in America, the fitness industry can be overzealous, but would you attack a food company selling healthy foods and admonishing high fructose corn syrup? Would you attack anti-smoking campaigns, even though they tend to over-dramatize the horrors of tobacco? If you smoked or were a firm believer in the curative powers of Pepsi, you might be willing to take those jabs. And that, I believe, might be the root of Bruni's odd diatribe. In his memoir, "Born Round," the writer details a lifetime battling his weight, including jags with bulimia. I haven't read the book, but I'm willing to bet that the his personal body image issues inform the opinions in this piece somewhat, which is fine, but he really should have offered a little more disclosure.

I'm not 100% sure of this theory, because I haven't read his book. It's not fair for me to judge, so I'll make you a deal, Frank. I'll read your book and keep an open mind about how you live your life. In turn, the next time you're in Los Angeles, you come surfing or attend a yoga class with me and we'll discuss why what Uncle Jack did wasn't so bad.

And if that doesn't settle it, I'm sure a couple rounds of Greco-Roman wrestling will decide who's fit, er, I mean right.

Thanks to Fitness Nerd Andrew R. for pointing this editorial out.

Megadosing madness

Here's an interesting article at WebMD about overdoing vitamins and minerals. The basic upshot is that it is possible to overdose on vitamins when eating normal, healthy foods, but it's hard work.

A few rare cases in medical journals have described, for example, an overload of vitamin A in a person who ate polar bear liver, a meat with extremely high amounts of this vitamin. Signs of a surplus of vitamin A may include nausea, blurred vision, and dizziness.

And if you eat handfuls of Brazil nuts every day, you could be way over the Tolerable Upper Intake Limit (the maximum per day that is unlikely to cause harm, as determined by the Institute of Medicine) for selenium. Just one ounce of Brazil nuts contains 544 micrograms of selenium. The Tolerable Upper Intake Limit is 400 micrograms per day -- and less if you're younger than 14.

Since polar bear liver and sacks of Brazil nuts are probably not on your menu, you'll want to think about the supplements you take and fortified foods or drinks.

This is a little disappointing because I now need to scrap my weekend plan of doing a cleanse consuming only the entrails of Arctic mammals. On the other hand, I've always found Brazil nuts to be an intrusively large presence in the nut mix bowl, so good riddance.

Also, well, I told you so! As I've said before, we don't live in the Jetsons world. In moderation, supplements are fine, but they can't be your primary source of nutrition. Years of being a Fitness Nerd has taught me that our knowledge of human physiology is wibbly wobbly at best, so relying entirely on man-made nutrition to fuel it just doesn't make sense. Sure, I take sups. I'm muy pro-supplement in moderation. I take a multivitamin as a safety net for anything I might have missed, as well as an omega-3 sup, but for the most part, I rely on Michael Pollan's example and build the bulk of my diet around foods that don't require nutrition facts or ingredient labels. An apple is an apple is an apple.

Case in point, refined flour. I've researched this a fair bit and have yet to find anyone who can explain the logic - either nutritionally or economically - of stripping out wheat's bran and germ, where you'll find all the nutrients and fiber, then "enriching" said stripped wheat with other vitamins and minerals, making it an inferior, fiberless nutrition source. Isn't a little pompous for us to think we can make nutrition better suited for the human body than that which nature has developed over its thousands-of-years long lab test?

But, well, heaven forbid that we involve common sense in the nutritional debate.

Fung-Lung Chung vs. Cancer

Cruciferous vegetables, including broccoli and cauliflower, have been shown to battle cancer and now scientists have discovered the substances within them that do this. Appearing in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, the study, headed by Georgetown professor Dr. Fung-Lung Chung, focuses on --

Okay, look, I wasn't going to do this because I don't want to be culturally insensitive, but I need to take a moment to comment on the name Fung-Lung Chung. It's a terrible name. I don't think I'm out of line because I would have made the same comment if his name was Tom Rom-Com or Rob Bob-Knob. These aren't good names either and it is the responsibility of the parents to sort that out. It's job #1 of parenting. First thing you do before even buying diapers. "Let's call him Fung-Lung Chung - no, wait, that rhymes. He'll be mocked his entire life. Maybe it isn't a prudent choice." That's what should have happened.

On the other hand, growing up with decades of name-based ridicule could very well have driven Dr. Fung-Lung Chung to excell in life and do something like, say, potentially discover a cure for cancer - but that's quite a gamble for a parent to take. He also could have taken his own life after shooting up a Del Taco. It could have gone either way.

Regardless, it all turned out okay because Dr. Fung-Lung Chung and the gang have isolated substances in cruciferous veggies called isothiocyanates (or ITCs). Humans have a gene called p53 that suppresses cancer, keeping cells healthy. Sometimes, this gene mutates and can't get the job done. ITCs sweep in and get rid of those mutant p53s so the healthy ones can take care of business.

Well done, people. Dr. Fung-Lung Chung, I salute you.

Meditation: Mind over Matters

One of Mother's favorite things to say about me is that I'd lose my head if it weren't fastened on. Indeed, I am the forgetful type. Nary a week doth pass in which I don't lose my car keys. And, a few years ago, I noticed it was getting worse. Around the time I lost my glasses and found them on my head - twice within the span of an hour - I decided it was time to take action. I started drinking coffee regularly (although research indicating that helps has since lost its luster). I also began making a point of doing the Sunday Times crossword every week and reading more often.

Is it all working? Mostly, yes, beside the fact that I haven't seen my car keys in two days, which is problematic because I'm going to need to pick my daughter up from school eventually, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm doing it right. It occurs to me that I've left out an important part of the brain fitness equation.

Rest.

I went to a guided meditation yesterday. (My friend Omar drove. He never loses his keys.) It was fairly revelatory. I'm constantly preaching the gospel of rest and recover for muscles. They won't grow if they're not given the space to rebuild. The brain should be no different. And to back this up, I just stumbled across this study out of Massachusetts General Hospital.

Participating in an 8-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. In a study that will appear in the January 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by MGH researchers report the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain's grey matter.

"Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day," says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's senior author. "This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing."

The study participants did mindfulness exercises for about 27 minutes a day. That's a bit rich for my time-management blood at this point, but I do plan on committing to 5-10 minutes a day and seeing where I go with that. Although I can reach a mindful state while surfing or doing yoga, calming my thoughts while being physically inactive is something I've never been able to do without the aid of The Cartoon Network. I'll probably try a few methods and see what works. One trick is to count your breaths, starting over once you reach 10. The idea is that if you find yourself counting up past ten, you're not focusing on your breath and you've let your mind wander.

Another one I like has to do with focusing on what the Buddhists call the "Root Mind," but I'm a little hesitant to share that one with you, given I recently wrote this article about the Tao Te Ching and was ruthlessly attacked by readers and accused of being a "Recruiting Agent of Taoism" - which is a very real concern, should you choose to embrace Eastern philosophy in your meditation. After all, we're all aware of the bloody, violent swaths of oppression that Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism have ripped across history. Don't mess with the Zen-minded, man, lest they throw down some serious karma on your ass.

Anyway, I digress, and that's exactly why I need to meditate more, so that I can keep that focus throughout the day.

Also, I'd really like to know where my car keys are.

Serious Night Moves

Behold Australian Big Wave Cowboy Mark Visser surfing Jaws, one of the world's most dangerous waves - at night. It's kind of stupid, if you break it down.



But there's just something so thrilling about the fact that he went for it. Two years of planning to do something he just really wanted to do. I think that's a excellent way to live your life. If you have a dream or a goal, no matter how insane it may seem at first blush, you gotta go for it.

Have a great weekend. Mine will be filled with good friends, good food, beautiful women, surfing, and karaoke. I'll be back to being a cynical bastard on Monday.

via Outside

Shocker! Americans Deluded About Their Diets!

Back in November, Consumer Reports polled 1234 random Americans. I'm not sure why they picked that number. Perhaps because it's really satisfying to type 1-2-3-4 on a keyboard. 1234... 1234... 1234...

Anyway, they surveyed these 1234 people and learned that 90% of Americans think that they eat "somewhat" healthfully. In my opinion, this is probably the most astounding display of reality disconnect since the whole Marie Antoinette "Let them eat cake" debacle. 90%, huh? Let's review our National State of the Waistline, shall we?

Based on the heights and weights they gave us, about 35 percent were at an appropriate weight, 36 percent were overweight, and 21 percent officially qualified as obese, with a body mass index of 30 or more.

That's odd! Something tells me that you didn't put on that weight with "somewhat" healthy spinach salads and grilled salmon. The article makes for a great study in contradiction. Here's a little more detail.

Here's a look at the percentage of people who said they observed the following practices all or most days of the week:

• Choosing whole grains rather than refined carbs, like brown rice over white: 60 percent.
• Consuming five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day: 58 percent.
• Limiting sweets and sugar: 53 percent.
• Limiting the consumption of fat: 51 percent.

You're killin' me! Who are these 30% to 39% bozos who consider their diets healthy without the aid of these four, basic rules of nutrition? Seriously, eating right isn't that tough. Case in point, this great article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago by Über-cook Mark Bittman on how simple it is to have a healthy, balanced, environmentally-sustaining diet using three basic recipes: salad, stirfry, and beans-and-lentils.

These recipes offer other benefits: They’re nutritionally sound and environmentally friendly. They’ve sustained scores of generations of societies worldwide, using traditional farming methods and producing little negative impact on the earth. (Almost without exception, your ancestors relied on something like one or more of these dishes.) All of them can be made with meat, poultry or fish, but they can be satisfying and delicious when made vegetarian or even vegan. In fact, if you cooked only variations on these three dishes you’d be well on your way to becoming an intuitive, fluid cook (the fanciest pilaf is essentially a rice-and-bean variation), eating more healthfully and with a lighter carbon footprint.

Hit the link and check out the recipes in more detail. Let's make that 90% a reality. After all, eating right is as easy as 1234... 1234... 1234...

The FDA: Lapdogs for the Lap-band

I've been doing a lot of soul searching in the new year, trying to bring more tranquility to my tumultuous psyche. It seemed to be working for a while. Thanks for surfing and meditation, I had some serious Zen going and I was sleeping better - but it was taking its toll on the The Real Fitness Nerd blog. You can't write angry when your aura has gone all blue. It just feels false.

Fortunately, this article in the Los Angeles Times about pharmaceutical company Allergan has put an abrupt halt to those good vibrations. After learning about their efforts to lower the minimum weight required for their freakish, digestive system-choking Lap-Bands, I vomited rage-filled bile all over my Sunday paper. Hooray! I'm back!

In you're not familiar with Allergan, they also make Botox, Natrelle breast implants, and Latisse eyelash lengtheners. In other words, if Larry Flynt had gone into pharmaceuticals, he would have founded this company. Despite a projected $4.8 billion revenue last year, the company is seeking to open up their Lap-Band customer base. And everyone's favorite corporate lapdog, the FDA, seems more than happy to oblige.

Allergan received some encouraging news in December when an FDA advisory panel voted 8 to 2 to recommend that the weight requirement be lowered. Under the current guidelines, a person who is 5 feet 10 inches without a serious health issue would need to weigh 278 pounds or more to qualify. That requirement would drop to 243 pounds under the relaxed rules that Allergan is seeking. For people with conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure, the new threshold would be 209 pounds, down from 243 pounds.

5'10" and 209 pounds? Are you shitting me? That's not obese; that's lazy! I'm opposed to weight loss surgery, but I'm willing to concede that if you're hundreds of pounds overweight and you've completely lost control, this highly risky surgery might seem like a solution. But at 5'10" and 209? Instead of reworking your entire digestive system, you just need to get off the couch, you lethargic bastard. And while you're at it, stop eating Twinkies.

The point of lap-bands is to make you eat less by shrinking your stomach. But if your BMI floats around 30 and you have diabetes and/or high blood pressure, odds are that your excessive eating isn't the primary problem; it's that you're making really bad choices. If you didn't have the know-how or willpower to eat right before, how is a rubber band around your gut going to fix things? Eating smaller amounts of junk food isn't a great improvement. Lap-bands get you down to a size where you can make positive changes to your lifestyle. Guess what, Bubba? You're already there.

And here's the kicker:

Many Lap-Band patients in Europe had severe complications over time, including band erosion, slippage or leakage, according to a study published in the medical journal Obesity Surgery. The procedure has been performed overseas for 17 years for medical purposes. It received FDA approval in 2001.

"With a nearly 40% five-year failure rate … [banding] should no longer be considered as the procedure of choice for obesity," said the report.

It doesn't even work!

I'm all for freedom of choice, but I draw the line with needless, life-threatening medical procedures. I'm completely stupefied that the FDA, the same agency that recently deemed caffeinated alcoholic drinks too dangerous to be legal, is about to open up the customer pool for an unproven procedure with side-effects including infection, dehydration, vomiting or pain that can present themselves years afterwards.

30 minutes on the treadmill, 5-days a week and 5-6 servings of fruit and veg is all it would take - with zero side-effects. But I suppose that's a lot less fun than asphyxiating your esophagus.

Mo' Bad Beef Blues

This week, my fellow Fitness Nerd Steve Edwards made me happier than a pencil-fingered man in a nose-picking contest that I haven't eaten beef in 14 years with his post about the latest creepy cow illness, Johne's Disease.

Basically, it's the bovine version of Crohn's Disease. And, as this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates, the popular medical notion that eating Johne's-infected meat can't lead to Crohn's is flawed. "Crohn’s disease shows all the hallmarks of a spreading zoonotic (animal-to-human) infection. Its incidence has sky-rocketed, closely paralleling the increase in factory farming and the frequency of Johne’s disease in domestic livestock."

And even if this isn't the case, here's the paragraph that kills me.

This is itself an extraordinary fact, worth repeating and emphasizing: Cattle suffering from a severe bacterial infection related to tuberculosis and leprosy, characterized by pussy, intestinal ulcers and overall body wasting, and which may be literally identical to a pathogen that causes a devastating illness in genetically susceptible people, are – right now, as you read this – routinely being slaughtered, and their infected meat introduced into the food stream.

Yikes! And here's Steve's take on it:

Wait! What?! No wonder he felt the need to write it twice. I don’t think you need to be a PETA activist to show a little animal compassion in this case. And regardless of the poor animals, I'm sure the cast of Jackass would enthusiastically choose a vomit omelet over a Whopper made from Johne’s-riddled livestock.

The issue here isn't the ethics of eating meat. I concede that as omnivores, we're set up for it. I may not eat meat, but I can't fault anyone else for it. I can fault, however, a greedy corporate structure that's perfectly happy to feed the public diseased, possibly disease-inducing foods. If Johne's Disease was infecting vegetables - say, rutabagas - I'd be just as judgmental.

And before you farmers out there read this and get your overalls in a bunch, do you really think the entire farming industry is a bastion of moral perfection? I've been a journalist off-and-on all my adult life. I'm emotionally invested in the profession, but I'm the first to admit it's filled with lies, ineptitude, and bad haircuts. You may be the most straight-shootin' cattle farmer ever, the Mother Theresa of the open range, but your industry is broken. So get over your sacred cows. Let's go all Joel Salatin on the situation and fix it.

Mickey Mouse Club Cocktail

Maybe it's due to my epic New Years trip to The Big Apple, but The Real Fitness Nerd is feeling a lot of love for The New York Times lately, particularly their Well blog.

Today, I'd like to share with y'all a recent post regarding exercise and alcohol - two of the four activities that played large roles in my recent trip, so I can understand why the Gray Lady would be an authority on both. (For the record, activity #3 was gluttonous eating and #4 is none of your damn business.)

Anyway, the post looks at a recent study presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience showing that rats who exercised more also tended to drink more alcohol.

For the experiment, researchers used adult male rats with an inbred taste for alcohol. Half of the rats were given access to running wheels for three weeks. The others were kept in cages without wheels. After three weeks, the running wheels were removed, and half of the animals from each group were allowed unlimited access to alcohol for 21 days. Earlier studies by other researchers found that animals given equal access to exercise and alcohol — they were allowed to sip booze while on a running wheel — chose to drink less than animals not exercising. Based on those results, “we had anticipated that exercise would reduce” the rats’ drive to drink, said J. Leigh Leasure, an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Houston and senior author of the study, which was presented in November at the 2010 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego. Instead, the exercising animals turned to alcohol with significantly more enthusiasm than the sedentary rats, mainly during the first week of the experiment. “It was a bit of surprise,” Dr. Leasure said.

The article then mentions other recent research showing that humans tend to do the same thing. I remember this research when it came out and I'm a little surprised that I didn't blog about it. (Bad Real Fitness Nerd!) Humans are neurotic goofballs, so it would be easy to hypothesize that exercisers feel they're doing their bodies right, so they should be allowed to poison themselves a bit more. Or maybe it's the fact that young people tend to exercise more than us oldies and are also more prone to ply their bodies with toxins, given they're immortal and all. There's also the whole "sensation lifestyle" thing, where some people just like to live life hard and experience things.

But the rats add a whole new twist to it. Rodents aren't neurotic, self destructive, or into extreme sports. Even the cartoon ones tend to be well-balanced. Think about it. Mickey, Jerry, Mighty, Speedy Gonzales, they all have fine outlooks on life, so the alcohol/exercise connection must be something a little more physical.

The New York Times post suggests several options, including the idea that exercise and alcohol hit the same pleasure centers in the brain, so we might tend to use one in the absence of the other. It also cites a study showing that exercise wards off the cell death caused by binge drinking, but I don't think the rats have read this study (yet), so that can't be it either.

Whatever the truth is, it brings up the philosophy that Steve Edwards and I tend to espouse about alcohol and caffeine. Bad for you in excess, but a little might be a good thing. This feels a lot like a biological lesson indicating that.

At least, that's what the rats want us to think.

image: Spreadshirt.com

Food Addicts Unite!

You can get addicted to just about anything. From what I understand, that's the basic point of Alcoholics Anonymous, replacing one dependency with another considerably more benign dependency. People close to George W. Bush claim he replaced his alcohol addiction with an exercise addiction.

So this study in the Archives of General Psychiatry showing obese people tend to have more of a history of alcoholism in their family, thus linking food and alcohol addiction, isn't surprising. From The New York Times:

The people surveyed were asked whether a relative had “been an alcoholic or problem drinker at any time in his/her life,” a question repeated for several types of relative — mother, father, brother, sister, half-sibling and children. Participants also reported their own weight and height, so body mass index could be calculated (B.M.I. is a calculation of weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared, and a result of 30 or more is considered obese).

The first survey, from the early 1990s, found no link between a family history of alcoholism and obesity. “There was an almost perfect overlap between the B.M.I. distribution of people without a family history of alcoholism and people with a family history of alcoholism,” said Richard A. Grucza, assistant professor of psychiatry at Washington University and lead author of the new paper.

The fact that this link existed in the 2001-2 phase of the study, but not the 1991-1992 phase, is all the more telling. Clearly, the reason, as pointed out in Dr. David Kessler's amazing treatise "The End of Overeating," is that "hyperpalatable" foods are on the rise. Kessler theorizes that today's foods have been engineered to the perfect point of saltiness, fattiness, and sweetness. It just tastes so good, and it's just so accessible. Where once higher-fat ice creams were premiums and adding crushed candy bars or other extras as toppings was a novelty, these practices have now become the norm. And while all these rich foods damage the waistline, they cause majorly gratifying chemical reactions upstairs. Here's my review of the book.

In other words, it's looking more and more like food addiction is a real thing.

But at the same time, you're probably not addicted to food. There are a lot more people who just drink too much than there are actual alcoholics. On the same note, just because you overeat, it doesn't mean you're addicted. And even if you are, admitting it shouldn't be an excuse to wallow in a tub of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey. You've said it out loud and you've owned it. That's a good thing. Welcome to the world of telling great truths. Now, go get Kessler's book and start fixing the problem.

Antibiotics for beefier meat - and beefier bacteria!

Welcome to 2011! I hope you enjoyed the long weekend. But now it's back to the grind, so let's see what The Real Fitness Nerd can do to help you resume your standard, hair-graying, forehead-wrinkling stress levels.

Let's start by reminding you that the food industry is progressively working to destroy the efficiency of all antibiotics, purely for financial gain.

The Center for a Liveable Future came out with this report recently illuminating us to the fact that 80% of all antibiotics sold in the US are used on farm animals, not so much to cure them of a sinus infection or a slight case of the clap, but to help facilitate rapid growth. From their blog:

Antibiotics, one of the world’s greatest medical discoveries, are slowly losing their effectiveness in fighting bacterial infections and the massive use of the drugs in food animals may be the biggest culprit. The growing threat of antibiotic resistance is largely due to the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in both people and animals, which leads to an increase in “super-bacteria”. However, people use a much smaller portion of antibiotics sold in this country compared to the amount set aside for food animals. In fact, according to new data just released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), of the antibiotics sold in 2009 for both people and food animals almost 80% were reserved for livestock and poultry. A huge portion of those antibiotics were never intended to fight bacterial infections, rather producers most likely administered them in continuous low-dosages through feed or water to increase the speed at which their animals grew. And that has many public health experts and scientists troubled.

Creepy on so many different levels. Not only, as explained above, is this use of antibiotics - most of which are the same ones humans use - breaking down their efficiency, but this also means the steak you're eating has probably been marinating in a potent drug cocktail far longer than that Lea & Perrins you dumped on it last night. And, I repeat, you're eating it, so how many of those antibiotics do you get secondhand? I'm not saying categorically that this slowly builds a tolerance to said antibiotics in your body so that they're less effective when you actually need them. I've yet to read research indicating this is the case. At the same time, well, I'm just sayin', that's all.

via Wired