Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  “To stay healthy, humans need some 50 different minerals that we can’t produce ourselves,” reports Marco Visscher in Ode magazine. “Popeye would have to eat 200 cans of spinach today to get the same amount of iron as he got from one can 50 years ago,” he adds. Similarly, we’d need to eat ten slices of white bread today to get the same amount of nutrients that used to be in one slice. Will an apple a day—with less vitamin A—still keep the doctor away? It doesn’t look like it; Americans visited doctors more than a billion times in 2004.8

  Drowning in a Sea of Junk Food

  According to the latest Centers for Disease Control data, about a third of Americans are classified as obese, another third are overweight, and the numbers are rising. The connection between lifestyle choices and extra weight couldn’t be clearer. Many physicians and scientists believe our children will be the first generation in a century or more to have a lower life expectancy than their parents. For example, childhood obesity expert Dr. Brian McCrindle of Toronto warns that diseases related to being overweight, such as heart disease and diabetes, will “totally swamp the public health care system.”9

  What we eat is largely determined by culturally and psychologically based habits, often very difficult to break. In a recent New York Times series, reporters conducted in-depth interviews with populations at highest risk for diabetes—a disease that now afflicts one in every eight people living in New York City. One resident of East Harlem explained that in his culture, when a guy eats a salad, he’s considered a wimp. “They make fun of you: What are you, a rabbit?”10

  Another man, when asked how his blood sugar readings were doing, lowered his eyes and said, “They’ve been a little high. I started eating Frosted Flakes. What can I say? I like them. You can’t always be eating things without sugar. Sometimes, you have to take a chance.”11 The stakes are extremely high, yet the urge to “be good” to oneself often wins out. From the time we’re infants, whenever things are going badly, someone gives us a cookie, and in effect we learn to reward ourselves for feeling bad! The results can be catastrophic, as N. R. Kleinfield writes in one of the New York Times stories:

  Begin on the sixth floor, third room from the end, swathed in fluorescence: a 60-year-old woman was having two toes sawed off. One floor up, corner room: a middle-aged man sprawled, recuperating from a kidney transplant. Next door: nerve damage. Eighth floor, first room to the left: stroke. Two doors down: more toes being removed. Next room: a flawed heart.

  As always, the beds at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx were filled with a universe of afflictions. In truth, these assorted burdens were all the work of a single illness: diabetes. Room after room, floor after floor, diabetes. On any given day, hospital officials say, nearly half the patients are there for some trouble precipitated by the disease.12

  Obviously, diabetes is so much more than an inconvenience. As many war veterans lost lower limbs in 2005 to this disease as American soldiers did to combat injuries in the entire Vietnam War. What’s the primary cause of blindness in American adults? You guessed it.

  “If current trends persist, the work force 50 years from now is going to look fat, one-legged, and blind, a diminution of able-bodied workers at every level,” says Dr. Daniel Lorber, an endocrinologist in Queens, New York. “Nursing homes are going to be crammed to the gills with amputees in rehab. Kidney dialysis centers will multiply like rabbits. We will have a tremendous amount of people not yet blind but with low vision …”13 Yet we Americans continue to hit the snooze alarm, because we don’t know how to wake up from a lifestyle bulging with dysfunction. As former President Clinton told a conference of state governors, “To beat obesity, you’ve got to consume less and burn more. There is no alternative. And to do that, you’ve got to change the culture.”13

  It’s ironic to realize that we humans, who dominate the planet, have lost track of what we should be eating. Culture and tradition teach people about nutrition, but when cultures unravel, focusing more on wealth than health, we end up eating from boxes, cans, and depleted soil. Meanwhile, gorillas know precisely which leaf to eat to get rid of which parasite, which fruit will add more endurance to their diet, or which type of decaying bark helps their digestion.

  The good news is that junk food is beginning to go the way of tobacco (Already, 99.99999 percent of gorillas don’t smoke). Responding to the obesity and diabetes epidemics, New York City has banned artificial trans fatty acids, and Chicago and Los Angeles are following in the Big Apple’s footsteps. In New York, that means that twenty-five thousand restaurants, bakeries, and food-prep businesses will have to steer clear of the partially hydrogenated oils found in shortenings, margarine, and frying oils. McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Dunkin’ Donuts will have to change their lardy recipes. This is by no means a mission impossible—already, Wendy’s has switched to a new cooking oil; Crisco now markets a shortening without trans fats; Frito-Lay has taken trans fats out of its Doritos and Cheetos; and Kraft has reformulated Oreos. The question is, are these foods salvageable to begin with?

  Nutrition activists at groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest advocate these next steps:

  • Require chain restaurants to declare the calorie content of soft drinks and all other items on menus and menu boards.

  • Require the Food and Drug Administration to put warnings on the labels of nondiet soft drinks to stating that frequent consumption of those drinks promotes obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, osteoporosis, and other health problems.

  • Require all schools to stop selling soft drinks (as well as candy and other junk foods) in hallways, shops, and cafeterias.

  • Levy a tax on foods that contain excessive fats and sugar, similar to the tax on cigarettes.

  A significant voluntary agreement was recently signed between the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, whose PR icon is Bill Clinton, and five of the country’s largest snack food producers. Students must bid farewell to fatty French fries, ice cream, candy, cupcakes, and potato chips, now banished from school vending machines and lunch lines.14 At the same time, they can say hello to better grades, better friendships, and a greater interest in what life can offer.

  Avoiding a Prescription for Disaster

  As you get out of your car, two bright headlights come hurtling toward you. You’re astonished at what happens next: a monster SUV smacks into the back of your car, instantly converting it into a totaled two tons of trash. And the driver, you soon discover, sleeps right through the collision! He had taken a prescription sleeping pill after his second-shift job, which “kicked in” a little early. About thirty million people in the United States routinely take sleep medications, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine—a 50 percent jump in the last five years. Between 2004 and 2005, advertising expenditures for sleeping pills increased fivefold, from $60 million to $300 million. The advertising paid off for pharmaceutical companies, if not always for the troubled sleeper, who spends five or more dollars extra per night to battle insomnia. (Collectively, Americans shell out $2 billion annually to “purchase” sleep).15

  Increased use of sleeping pills has also increased the frequency of strange reports about people having sex while still asleep, and forgetting events that occurred while they were supposedly awake. For example, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said a colleague who had taken sleeping pills could not recall advising residents on rounds the next morning. Is that guy also forgetting which patient is having which surgery?!16

  A professional woman who lives near Denver resorted to Ambien to try for a good night’s sleep, but within a few hours she was sleep-driving on a street in her neighborhood, dressed only in a thin nightshirt in twenty-degree weather. She bent the fender of a parked car, urinated in the middle of an intersection, got violent with police, and later confided to her lawyer that she didn’t remember any of it. She wasn’t drunk, she was in a trance of overmedication.17

  Hasn’t society reached an epidemic state when, ac
cording to federal data, half of all Americans took at least one prescription drug within the last month, and one out of five took three or more? Isn’t there something we could do with the $270 billion a year spent for prescription drugs that are chock full of side effects, if preventive health measures at all levels (individual, industry, government) became a national mission?

  What sort of risks will we take to sleep, reduce depression, or decrease the odds of getting diabetes? What pills will we swallow under a banner that says, “In technology we trust?” There’s far more to it than the gruesome side effects that TV ads caution us about to reduce their liability. According to a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one hundred thousand deaths occur in America every year from bad reactions to prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Those aren’t side effects, they’re end effects. And there are often preventive alternatives to the pills.

  Walter Willett, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, puts it this way: “Our studies have shown that with healthy diets, no smoking and regular physical activity, we could prevent about 82 percent of heart attacks, about 70 percent of strokes, and over 90 percent of type 2 diabetes. The best drugs reduce heart attacks by about 20 or 30 percent, yet we put almost all of our resources into promoting drugs rather than healthy lifestyles and nutrition.”18

  A big media splash recently unveiled the results of a large clinical study testing the effectiveness of a drug called Avandia to prevent diabetes. After a three-year trial, an impressive 62 percent fewer people on the medication developed diabetes. For about $120 a month, many of the twenty-one million Americans with type 2 diabetes—and the estimated fifty-four million who have a prediabetic condition—can reduce their risk. The GDP will go up, and certain pharmaceutical stocks will be good investments. But the irony is that an equally impressive clinical trial by the National Institutes of Health revealed that with 5 to 7 percent reductions of body weight and thirty minutes of exercise a day, 58 percent fewer people developed diabetes. 19

  Let’s see … one approach costs $1,440 a year, puts a burden on public health-care systems, and carries high odds of side effects, such as heart disease. The other approach is free and has various personal and social benefits in addition to cutting the risk of getting diabetes: A more healthy, proactive lifestyle will also reduce risk of heart disease and cancer, reduce the number of sick days used at work, and increase productivity and general vitality. Which approach would you take if you were at risk?20

  Similarly, when an anonymous blogger who has been off and on antidepressants for about eighteen years went to renew her subscription, she discovered that a one-month supply was $90. “If I thought I was depressed before,” she wrote, “having to pay $90 to feel better will only make me more depressed.” So she started swimming three times a week, and will be bike riding when the weather permits.

  Playing Doubles at Age 96

  It seems that somehow, our society has lost the will and skill to thrive! Unless we use our bodies and minds, they begin to atrophy. Ask the centenarians who are still active, curious, and … alive, but who have seen many others falter. There have been some great studies of the world’s oldest people in recent years, and these super-seniors have many insights about what it takes to be healthy

  A woman named Margaret, profiled in a great Time magazine cover story, recently renewed her driver’s license at the age of ninety-six so she could continue to be designated driver for her seventy-something friends—and also to get to the tennis courts two or three times a week, where she plays doubles matches. She lives in a two-story house but prefers to use the bedroom on the second story to get extra exercise going up and down the stairs. She wears a baseball cap with a Harley-Davidson logo on it, and maintains emotional ties with many people—knitting blankets, sweaters and baby booties for family members, friends, and a charity for unwed mothers. No wonder she’s pushing one hundred—she has the right stuff: attitude, activities, curiosity, a sense of challenge, and connection with people.21,22,23

  Here are a few lessons we can learn from people like Margaret:

  Advice from the Centenarians

  • Keep your mind sharp—for example, one super-senior has made entries in a diary for the last twenty years before he goes to sleep. “My head is filled with all the things I want to do tomorrow,” he says. Stay curious about things that are going on in the world—especially hopeful things. One researcher reported that super-seniors are less depressed than most people in their sixties. Another points out that daily exercise keeps blood flowing to the brain.

  • Be a stress-buster by doing yoga, meditating, and joining support groups. Emotional stress plays a role in many illnesses, making arteries constrict and blood clot faster, which may cause a heart attack. A study led at Johns Hopkins University found that men with high levels of anger and stress were three times more likely to develop premature heart disease than were men with low stress levels. Stressful people are more likely to smoke, overeat, drink too much, and work too hard.

  • Avoid refined carbohydrates like white rice and candy bars, instead eating foods that contain complex carbohydrates like whole wheat and brown rice, fruits, vegetables, other grains, and legumes. (One study found that the average Seventh Day Adventist, who is largely a vegetarian and avoids caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol, lives four to ten years longer than does the average American.)

  • Eat foods that contain antioxidants—cinnamon; blueberries; kidney, pinto, and black beans are especially good. In a war against the “terrorists” that promote aging—the free radicals—antioxidants prevent cellular damage in general, and specifically atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.

  • Avoid being around toxic materials, including antiseptic soaps that destroy natural, health-supporting microbes.

  • Maintain a weight level that doesn’t put a strain on your vital organs. Said one researcher, “I haven’t yet met a centenarian who was obese.” The legendary centenarians of Okinawa practice hara hachi bu which literally means eating until they are only 80 percent full. (On average, Okinawans have high life expectancies, but when they move to other cultures, their lifespan plummets.)

  • Have a sense of purpose, what the Japanese call ikigai—“that which makes life worth living.” Many centenarians are gardeners whose garden “needs them,” or are mentors in social networks. Okinawans maintain a strong sense of community, making sure that each member is respected and feels valued.

  • Have a personal belief system or religion that sets you free from fear and stress, have a sense of belonging in the universe, and have faith that life knows what it’s doing.

  • Says one centenarian, “I try to stay off the highways, limiting my exposure to other older people who sometimes step on the accelerator rather than the brakes; nervous people in a great hurry who don’t look in the rearview mirror; and chemically impaired people who drive on roads that appear to them to be sideways.”

  See “The Secrets of Long Life” by Dan Buettner, National Geographic, November 2005; and “15 Ways to Live Longer,” Forbes. com, http://www.forbes.com/2006/04/28/cx_vg_0501featslide2_print.html.

  8

  The Currency of Nature

  Balancing the Biological Budget

  A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

  —Aldo Leopold

  To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

  —Helen Keller

  Nature does nothing uselessly.

  —Aristotle

  Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in the creek, and turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion …

  —Richard Louv

  Nature is not just window-dressing, not just a backdrop for our busy lives; it’s where we live and what we are. It’s what flows in our arteries and endoc
rine systems, and it’s the whole-grain cereal that gives us energy to start the day. Interwoven with everything we do, nature directly meets our needs for air, food, fresh water, materials for shelter and products, beauty, recreation, serenity, nutrient and waste recycling, disease prevention, flood control, climate regulation, and many other quintessential values.

  But sadly, the more sidetracked we get chasing possessions and the money to buy them, the poorer we become in other forms of wealth, such as connections with nature. When natural systems are healthy, they spin off benefits far more valuable than gold, or $100,000 bills. For example, the world’s predator insects, such as ladybugs, naturally control far more pests than expensive, environmentally destructive pesticides do. Why not spray less and let colorful little allies like these proliferate? Why not use knowledge about how nature works, to meet more of our needs?