When I think back to the earliest example I can remember of “They Say,” it was about saccharin. My grandmother used to put a tiny little pill in her coffee. It was a saccharin pill. She didn’t want to use sugar so she used saccharin. In the 70’s and early 80’s “They” told us that saccharin was bad for us and could cause cancer, as it had in rats that were fed massive quantities of saccharin. Then in 2001, “They” reversed their thinking and took saccharin off of the list of chemicals KNOWN to cause cancer. OK, so did that mean it doesn’t cause cancer or that it may and They just don’t want to warn us about it? I don’t think They really know. I do know this, most humans that consume saccharin, do so in very small quantities. It is not found in many foods today and if you use it at all, it is in the form of Sweet and Low packets that you put in your coffee; a far lower dose than the lab rats received. They should be telling us to use it in moderation!
They always strike again. They have told us over the years about the various food items that if eaten are bound to kill us. Let’s see…there is the saturated fat found in butter, meats, eggs, and dairy products-that will clog your arteries, then there is the transfat that is produced by hydrogenating oils, let’s not forget the sugar we are all getting fat from consuming, the white flour/potatoes/pasta that is bad for our blood sugar regulation, the alcohol that is going to increase women’s chances of getting breast cancer. Lately They are targeting high fructose corn syrup, sodium, hormones in meats, pesticides on produce, things that are not “organic.” If you took every one of their recommendations to heart, there would be many, many empty shelves in your pantry and very few items to choose from to eat. Also you would make yourself and everyone else crazy!
Coffee, over the years has been labeled bad, and good. It seems every year or two They reverse their thinking about coffee. It raises heart rate, it increases concentration, it is addictive, it is bad for pregnant women, it is good for decreasing your chances of getting Alzheimer’s but is bad for sufferers of Acid Reflux; it is better to drink filtered coffee. Again, moderation would be a good prescription here.
The Atkins diet is a bit of a conundrum. It espouses low (or no) carb eating along with the high fat, mostly meat, dairy, and nut consumption goes against everything we have ever been taught about healthy eating.. It would stand to reason that anyone eating this way would harm their heart. You are supposed to lose weight rapidly this way. Apparently after Dr. Atkins died from a slip on some ice that caused a brain bleed, his wife admitted he had coronary artery disease. The coronary artery disease may not have caused his death, but all the years of eating low carb, high fat had in fact taken a toll on his heart after all. Maybe a recommendation of lowering your carbohydrate intake and slightly increasing your LEAN protein would be a safer middle ground for Atkins fanatics.
Foods are not the only area of conflicting information from “They.” Exercise is another area in which we are constantly getting mixed information; information on how much, what kind, how intense. This is a field rife with new inventions to give you six pack abs, rock hard guns (arms), and a solid core. The problem is you have to USE the apparatus regularly to achieve any results at all.
Twenty years ago, it was thought that you needed to bring your heart rate up close to it’s maximum to get a good cardiovascular workout. Thus, high impact aerobics came about. Workouts were very strenuous and exhausting. Many people took up running for long distances to achieve the perfect level of fitness. In 1977 author Jim Fix wrote a book that started a running/jogging revolution. Suddenly couch potatoes and armchair athletes were outside running in their parachute pants everywhere you looked. Jim Fixx was an avid runner but oddly, he died of a heart attack at the age of 52! That fact was really controversial and stunning to his exercising throng. It was discovered that he had 3 blocked arteries that caused his heart attack. Here was a thin, vigorous fitness icon who died of a heart attack.
The most recent outbreak of “They” fitness advice came over the airwaves last night. It was a study by the Journal of the American Medical Association that revealed that older women need to exercise an hour a day to maintain their weight! You can extrapolate from that information that if you want to lose weight, you need to exercise for more than an hour a day. Who is really going to do that much exercise regularly for the rest of their life?
In 2005-2006,in an effort to lose weight, I went to the gym a minimum of 5 days a week and worked out for an average of over 60 minutes. Some days I worked out for closer to 90 minutes. I would use machinery first, an elliptical, a stair master, a stationary bike, then I would go up to the track and walk for a half hour or more depending on what friend I saw while I was there and how much catching up we needed to do. Where did all of this hyper exercising for over a year get me? It got me a very painful case of Plantar Fasciitis that lasted for over a year. The pain was so bad that I went through every treatment known to medicine short of surgery. I even wore a walking cast for a month to alleviate symptoms. I doused my foot in ice baths, I stretched, I went to physical therapy, I had cortisone injections. Nothing helped to cure this condition.
The irony of it was that I could not exercise at all during this year of pain. As a result, my weight went up instead of down. What finally helped my situation was that I got a job where I was sitting for long periods at a time and not standing on my injured feet. That ended up resting the tendons and after a few months, the pain subsided and I could have a life again. What is the moral of this part of the story? Moderation would have been the way to go here too! If I had stuck with 30-45 minutes and had stopped when I initially felt the pain in my feet, it may have saved me a year of agony and maybe I would not have gained any weight.
So, to wrap this in a neat little package, They don’t always know what They are talking about. They often change their recommendations after some time goes by. First They tell us something is bad for us, then They back off of that claim a few years later. What is a person to do with all of this conflicting information bombarding us?
This is what I do and what I think makes the most sense. Use the “They” information sparingly. If you like to eat a certain thing that They have deemed as bad for us, eat less of it and eat it less often. If you can, get some exercise every day. Don’t kill yourself doing it. Do something you like; you can get added exercise by taking the stairs instead of the elevator, parking further away from your destination, getting outside and working in your garden. Diet fads come and go, so do exercise fads. Anything that sounds too extreme usually is too extreme. They will keep telling us what to do but we can choose to listen or use our best judgment.
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