This post is not a magical fairy tale but rather a different perspective to the modern world we live in. Many times before I spoke about the pharmaceutical industry and about the food industry and how they affect our way of life and more importantly, our health. I now add another industry to this mix and call them the three magicians. They are the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry and the sports industry.
Have you ever been to a magic show? What do magicians do? They make you concentrate on one hand while ‘doing magic’ in the other. Isn’t that how magic really works? 🙂
Such is the case with the three magicians, although having nothing to do with your health and well-being, they use magic to make you believe they do. They fabricate evidence in self-owned laboratories to not only prove to you that their magic is good for you, but also to tell you it is healthy.
Eventually, it takes very little effort on your part to see that they harm you and your health in every possible way but as magicians do, they manage to hide the truth from you even if it is hiding right in front of you.For more than 50 years those three have been selling us “health and longevity”, yet for over 50 years we have only become sicker and sicker.
The Pharmaceutical Industry
In a post of mine about cancer, I argued that if the pharmaceutical industry would really had our health in mind, they would have made a simple distinction and could have moved on to curing people, but that is not their intention at all. This simple distinction (which scientific evidence exists for) is that cancer is not an illness or a disease, it is merely a symptom of another underlying cause. Nevertheless, they are busy looking for a “cure” for over a 100 years with no real success, and all the treatments they do have, leave people more sick than healthy eventually.
Recently, a friend and I had a conversation about the pharmaceutical industry which has taken over our whole health system to make money from selling more of their ‘magic pills’. He was really mad at them, observing his elderly father struggling with his health, going to the doctors who only manage symptoms, prescribing a pill for a symptom that begets another symptom only to then prescribe another pill to deal with that symptom. His father started off with one pill and now he takes about 10 pills a day and his health keeps deteriorating with no end in sight. A complete process keeping him very sick and dependent on the pharmaceutical industry and their ‘magic pills’.
The Food Industry
I have written a lot about the food industry, the science behind it and how difficult it is for people to accept the fact that industrial food is just not right for us and is mostly making us sick.
You are more than welcome to go over my posts Free to Choose and What is Food to learn my thoughts about this industry and the way it affects our health.
There are also many resources out there like maybe Tom Naughton’s famous lecture “The Wisdom of the Crowd” on YouTube.
As for blame, shame and evil – I will address my thoughts about these words at the end of this post. It is hard pointing a blaming finger at the people who thought they were helping others access nutritious food more easily, fulfilling needs for hard working people to have their food brought out to them fast and cheap. Maybe it is easier just to say that cheap and highly available comes at a great cost.
The Sports Industry
When I was a little child, I was very sick and could not be very active, but at the age of 17 I found out that I actually like moving and I am a very active person in my preference. Since then, I’ve lived a life of activity but I never think of it as ‘doing sports’. When I feel like it, I go out for a walk in the woods, run, climb trees, lift weights, climb walls, climb mountains, swim. I do it because I enjoy it at a certain moment in life. I follow no rules or laws and do not follow any discipline.
I’m just enjoying who I am, which is what makes me think differently about what people call sport today.
With the advice of dieticians, doctors and nutritionists, people started ‘engaging in sports’ like madmen and a whole new industry was born out of it, the sports industry.
Building on the fact that sports is kind of a drug and makes most people feel better about themselves, they went ahead and created a billion dollar industry around it, supported by doctors and by research they now have money to initiate and support. 60 years ago it was hard to find a gym if you were looking for one, today it seems there is one on every street corner. Wait, but 60 years ago there were less sick people than today, how did we get to decide that sport has something important to do with our health?
My grandpa who lived to be 95 and my grandma who lived to be 101 never spent a day in the gym and lived a relatively healthy life.
Is it possible we’re using ‘Dr. Feelgood’ and an excuse to ‘take a break from our lives’, selling ourselves this sport thing as healthy, to do so much sport with no visible fun or health benefits?!?!?
My answer from all I see around me is ABSOLUTELY!
Don’t get me wrong, if there is some kind of sport you really love doing, enjoy it. If you enjoy an active life because it is who you are, I’m all for it. But what about all the other people who you now see on the street and in the gym torturing themselves thinking some good will come out of it?
The answer is simple and obvious, it is right there before you, the people who live today are much less healthy than my grandpa and my grandma. There’s plenty of empirical scientific evidence to support both my claims (that people today are sicker than past generations and that this is in spite of everyone being sports fanatics in the name of health).
Still don’t believe me?
Try searching Google for the life story of prof. Tim Noakes or Dr. Peter Attia. Both have a similar life story that changed their life forever. They both were ultra athletes who found themselves getting sicker and fatter while doing 4 hours a day runs or swims and went on to discover that sports is not what makes people healthier.
Blame, Shame and Evil
I have no tendency for blaming people or calling them evil. My experience has taught me that my health is in my hands. I have the power to make sense in all this, the information is out there for everyone to consume, some more self experimenting and hard work and you got it all figured out for the most part.
Big Pharma started out with visionary people who wanted to help others get better but became so big and with so many shareholders, employees and others depend on their ability to make money, that you cannot blame them for finding the perfect ‘get rich’ formula and following it to maintain the status quo. The modern world is so demanding, it is easy to get lost in it all. You start by thinking you’re helping people and end up hurting them to make more money.
The Food Industry also serves people’s needs mostly. A mother of three young children who is today expected to hold a job and bring money in to support the household, all the while having to feed her three young ones, cannot be expected to come home after a 10 hours workday and stand in the kitchen to cook. She is hardly to blame for the call she is about to make to one of the local pizza places. In 10 minutes she will have a delicious pizza to feed herself and her three children. The food industry provided for her needs.
The same goes for the Sports Industry, it is fulfilling the needs of our modern society, an evening at the gym, the new way to feel good about yourself.
It is not up to them to make sense in all this, it is your life, take control, do some research, learn what’s what. Stop playing the ‘blame, shame and evil’ game and start acting.
IT IS UP TO YOU ! ! !
