Of Sound Mind
Developed countries have a real problem with the health of their populations. We've become too sedentary, too greedily omnivorous. With the availability of so much food, and food moreover that has been processed so it no longer resembles the basic nutritious foodstuffs of an earlier time, loaded down with fats, sugars and salt, we're eating ourselves into ill health.
Certainly eating ourselves into well-larded bodies, singularly unattractive, not given to healthful outcomes.
There are solutions to rising rates of obesity. Abstaining from over-eating, exercising a body become unaccustomed to muscular challenges would help enormously. Disciplining one's appetite. Urging a change of lifestyle and habit on oneself. Because we owe it to ourselves. Because we have been given only one body to live out what we hope will be a normal lifespan. Because we would like to be able to enjoy that lifespan in reasonably good health.
We have certain options we can choose because we are imbued with free will. But exercising that free will often takes a mighty exercise of will to commit to. And in a busy world when we're so attuned to making so many decisions about so many things this one isn't seen as a priority nor is it particularly pleasant to deny ourselves the comfort and pleasure of eating what we wish to, when we want to.
And how about those pasty, rotund individuals who waddle about with ticking-time-bomb bodies, who cannot seem to put a halt to stuffing themselves incessantly? The people who require that sturdier chairs and beds be installed in hospitals because those designed and produced for people of normal weight simply cannot be accommodated with what's normal.
People who become spatially confined because of their enormous size.
They began life as normal human beings. Through familial habit or individual choice things went awry. That's the people in youth and mid-life who challenge the weight scales at 350, 400 pounds and more. Whose internal organs are suffocated in visceral fat, and thick layers of subcutaneous fat as well. Who labour mightily to lumber along a few steps.
And who suffer from a degraded health conditions; asthma, high blood pressure, heart condition, diabetes, sleep apnea.
There are solutions that can be attempted through surgery. Through procedures called gastric banding. But because there are so many people presenting as truly mortally obese, scheduling surgery with a limited number of specialist surgeons and limited hospital bed availability presents as an additional problem.
It's a costly enterprise, as well, that the tax-funded universal health care system will have to pick up.
And it's an old story of personal failure and the resulting dilemma. Overeating, and not just food, but ingredients passing themselves off as food; the ubiquitous fast-food outlets with their 'enhanced' taste of mouth-pleasing fats, for example. Encouraging people to eat even more. Once that weight goes on, it accumulates and continues to do so.
Until the urgency of the situation is so evident that people stare and rudely comment, and the morbidly obese will no longer consult a medical practitioner who may regard them as responsible for their condition and contemptible for their lack of discipline. There's nothing winning about this situation; nor the decision to embark on the 'cure' of surgery.
Nor the admission that they take 'full responsibility' for what they have become, when they declined to take responsible action when it was needed. We're not to stand in judgement, however. We don't, so much, when the adventurous require surgery to repair the results of accidents in their self-imposed rituals of challenging nature, for example.
Or when surgeons work frantically to save the life of a drunk driver. Or a drug addict is placed on a life-saving regimen and health practitioners devote themselves to saving that life. And there's the unfortunate fact that fully 15% of Canadians are considered to be obese. In Nova Scotia that rises to 25%.
Are we of sound mind when we do these things to ourselves?
Certainly eating ourselves into well-larded bodies, singularly unattractive, not given to healthful outcomes.
There are solutions to rising rates of obesity. Abstaining from over-eating, exercising a body become unaccustomed to muscular challenges would help enormously. Disciplining one's appetite. Urging a change of lifestyle and habit on oneself. Because we owe it to ourselves. Because we have been given only one body to live out what we hope will be a normal lifespan. Because we would like to be able to enjoy that lifespan in reasonably good health.
We have certain options we can choose because we are imbued with free will. But exercising that free will often takes a mighty exercise of will to commit to. And in a busy world when we're so attuned to making so many decisions about so many things this one isn't seen as a priority nor is it particularly pleasant to deny ourselves the comfort and pleasure of eating what we wish to, when we want to.
And how about those pasty, rotund individuals who waddle about with ticking-time-bomb bodies, who cannot seem to put a halt to stuffing themselves incessantly? The people who require that sturdier chairs and beds be installed in hospitals because those designed and produced for people of normal weight simply cannot be accommodated with what's normal.
People who become spatially confined because of their enormous size.
They began life as normal human beings. Through familial habit or individual choice things went awry. That's the people in youth and mid-life who challenge the weight scales at 350, 400 pounds and more. Whose internal organs are suffocated in visceral fat, and thick layers of subcutaneous fat as well. Who labour mightily to lumber along a few steps.
And who suffer from a degraded health conditions; asthma, high blood pressure, heart condition, diabetes, sleep apnea.
There are solutions that can be attempted through surgery. Through procedures called gastric banding. But because there are so many people presenting as truly mortally obese, scheduling surgery with a limited number of specialist surgeons and limited hospital bed availability presents as an additional problem.
It's a costly enterprise, as well, that the tax-funded universal health care system will have to pick up.
And it's an old story of personal failure and the resulting dilemma. Overeating, and not just food, but ingredients passing themselves off as food; the ubiquitous fast-food outlets with their 'enhanced' taste of mouth-pleasing fats, for example. Encouraging people to eat even more. Once that weight goes on, it accumulates and continues to do so.
Until the urgency of the situation is so evident that people stare and rudely comment, and the morbidly obese will no longer consult a medical practitioner who may regard them as responsible for their condition and contemptible for their lack of discipline. There's nothing winning about this situation; nor the decision to embark on the 'cure' of surgery.
Nor the admission that they take 'full responsibility' for what they have become, when they declined to take responsible action when it was needed. We're not to stand in judgement, however. We don't, so much, when the adventurous require surgery to repair the results of accidents in their self-imposed rituals of challenging nature, for example.
Or when surgeons work frantically to save the life of a drunk driver. Or a drug addict is placed on a life-saving regimen and health practitioners devote themselves to saving that life. And there's the unfortunate fact that fully 15% of Canadians are considered to be obese. In Nova Scotia that rises to 25%.
Are we of sound mind when we do these things to ourselves?
Labels: Canada, Health, Social-Cultural Deviations
posted by Pieface @ 7:25 PM
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