Let's Talk About Health
Diet, Exercise, and Vaccination
It is January 2022 and we are two years into “15 days to flatten the curve”. For those of you that believe the vaccine is a population control mechanism to insert tracking data into you and make you magnetic, this is not the article for you and I recommend you toss your actual tracking device (your phone) into the river and go live in the rain forest. This is also not the article for people that believe we should be subjecting children to never-ending masking ( we should not) and vaccination for a disease which overwhelmingly does not effect the majority of children. This is the article for common sense people to talk about common sense things, largely ignored during the Government’s unscientific, simple, and often erroneous approach to mitigating the spread of the virus whilst decimating small businesses and people’s livelihood. So let’s talk about it.
On Wednesday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced almost all remaining coronavirus restrictions would be lifted. The politicians around him cheered. England is now recognizing the endemicity of the disease that we have vaccines and therapeutics for. This will likely be the case here once Omicron has peaked, as we are a bit behind England in the infection curve. So what shall people do without the government locking them down? People want to be controlled. It is easier than acknowledging discipline and control of self. It allowed morbidly obese people, people that have never exercised, smokers, and the like, to proclaim moral superiority. Suddenly, it wasn’t about personal responsibility. The morbidly obese and unhealthy could now vaccine shame or mask shame anybody that didn’t go along with the regime’s commands. But why hasn’t there been messaging around other ways to improve health? Why is it an all or nothing bet on vaccines and masks? The powers that be are eager to demand that you mask up as an extra layer of protection, but never to make sure you’ve implemented a healthy diet and getting sufficient nutrition and vitamins as an additional layer of protection. They are never standing at a press conference telling people to exercise and spend some time in the sun. There is a long history to the benefits of diet and exercise. Diet and exercise obviously won’t prevent infection, but the vaccines are not doing a great job at preventing either. Exercise and good nutrition can improve our outcomes when we inevitably face the virus, vaccinated or not. This isn’t anything new. What is new is the unprecedented control and subjugation of the population and it’s most vulnerable.
You would never know during this pandemic that a mixture of a healthy diet and exercise is one of the very things that exist in the “controllable” column. We cannot control the spread of a virus for long that has an animal reservoir and a non-sterilizing vaccine. We CAN control what we put in our bodies and how we treat our bodies. As the narrative in England has shifted, I expect the narrative to slowly shift here in the States as well.
A recently published piece, albeit of the extreme clickbait headline variety, declares that sugar is the worst food ingredient for your immune system. To whom is this news? This falls into the column of controllable variables for the common person. We can avoid sugary and processed foods. Why did this take 2 years to publish? There are merits to simple vaccination messaging like two shots and you are done, but that messaging has not sustained as fourth boosters are now being discussed, although deemed ineffective against Omicron in Israel. Might there be more merit in straightaway perfect honesty? Instead, they closed gyms, locked you inside, and told you that the best vaccine you can get is the one in your arm, which didn’t turn out to totally be the case as J&J recipients panicked and awaited news of booster eligibility. As it turns out, and as we have known for a while, COVID can cause a cytokine storm that basically puts your immune system in overdrive to attack your bodily organs. It also turns out that SUGAR IS INFLAMMATORY, and can cause “a vicious cycle of insulin resistance and obesity that drives up inflammatory cytokines, damaged blood vessels, and activates the immune system to repair those areas.” Sounds like a pretty good recipe for failing to mitigate the risks of an inflammatory disease.
Healthy eating is not anything new. You remember the food pyramid right? Oh wait, that was total bullshit peddled by lobbyists and special interest groups. Nothing like that could happen now! It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to identify evidence that healthy eating and diet is crucial to longer lasting life. You don’t have to look any further than the NIH website for guidance on healthy eating.
Do you recall the daily Coronavirus task force meetings where Trump would mumble on incoherently to appear like he had a clue about what was going on? Look at the signs below that were present at some of these initial meetings. Slowing the spread was important, but what about making signs of the health guidance above? How difficult is it to encourage people to exercise or eat healthy? Difficult when the President’s diet consists of fast food and soda. In the face of even likelier death, I’d imagine people would hop on a treadmill. Instead, policy makers closed gyms, beaches and outdoor parks that likely forced more indoor congregations and treated lockdowns, vaccines, and masks as a panacea. We were inundated by a maelstrom of media sources, press conferences, incentives for unhealthy foods and other idiocy to take the shot and return to normal life. Only, we didn’t return to normal life for very long.
A further search on the CDC website outlines the basics about an Active People, A Healthy Nation. It acknowledges what we know about exercise
It reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke
It reduces the risk of developing diabetes
It reduces the risk for developing commonly occurring cancers
It helps with arthritis and other rheumatic conditions
It lowers the risk of hip fractures
It INCREASES YOUR CHANCE OF LIVING LONGER
These signs should have been front and center from the beginning of this pandemic. Rational people will do all that is in their power to avoid death, it is a natural human action to avoid death for the majority of people on the planet. We can acknowledge vaccines are a layer, that masks are a layer, but we MUST acknowledge that we can take personal ownership of our health and nutrition as another layer or the science has nothing to stand on because they’ll have binged on their own bullshit. There is no excuse, pending other conditions, that prevents someone from doing physical activity, to be two years into this pandemic and not have drastically changed your life to be healthier. Two shots and a Krispy Kreme doughnut with free Shake Shack Fries neither makes you healthy or of higher moral caliber. I’m not making any of this up. This is ACTUAL science. A study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that “patients with COVID-19 who were consistently inactive had a greater risk of hospitalization and death than patients that consistently met physical activity guidelines.” The outcome of the study was that they “recommend efforts to promote physical activity be prioritized by public health agencies and incorporated into routine medical care.”
Instead, obesity INCREASED during the pandemic, as did worldwide poverty and food insecurity. According to a CDC study, among persons aged 2-19 years old, the rate of body mass index (BMI) increase doubled during the pandemic. Who was hurt most according to the study? Those already overweight as well as younger school-aged children. Not only have we treated children as disease vectors, shut them out of schools, stunted their social development, and stunted their learning, we also put them on the path for an unhealthy lifestyle and earlier death. Further data from the CDC showed that there are now 16 states with an obesity rate of 35% or higher, up from 12 the year before. Is obesity a disease? Where is the public health crisis declaration? The calls for the obese to not be treated in hospitals? The calls for smokers to not be treated in hospitals? The calls for people that choose to not receive the HPV vaccine to not be treated in hospitals once they develop cancer? Awfully odd for a party that declares health care a human right.
No pun intended, but here’s the skinny. There is not only a respiratory pandemic occurring in the United States or the pandemic of the unvaccinated as President Biden likes to refer to it. We seemingly have a pandemic of shifting blame and personal responsibility so that we can sit with our laminated vaccine card inside of a Cheesecake Factory, Facebook pulled up on our phone ("I’m vaccinated” profile picture frame of course), and look down upon the 24 year old male athlete running outside past our window seat that chose otherwise rather than risk myocarditis. We have a pandemic of being lazy and uninformed. We have a pandemic of a toxic media that uses clickbait for views and to get us to WWE wrestle our neighbor, who is obviously a terrible person for not believing exactly what we do. We have a pandemic of desire for erotic authoritarianism. Oppress us so we feel safe! Don’t let anyone leave their homes! Oh, except our Doordash, Seamless, UberEats, Amazon, and Instacart delivery people! Oh and systemic racism is also back, but it’s different when we systemically ban minorities from our society based on vaccination status. And if they’re vaccinated, they need to prove it with a photo ID. Oh, they’re just here to vote? Racist!
“If only he was as noble, moral, and healthy as I” mutters the man to himself as he stuffs his third cheesecake in his mouth.
Excuse my French but fucking brilliant!!