Okay, we get it. Smoking is bad. Exercise is good. Everyone should watch their diets carefully. We shouldn’t watch so much brain-numbing television. We should get up off the couch once in a while. We understand all that.
So why are you threatening us now with Alzheimer’s Disease? Are you tired of waving diabetes and cancer and heart disease in our faces?
I watched a report yesterday on the national news claiming that diet and exercise can prevent Alzheimer’s Disease. So it’s all granddad’s fault if he’s got this horrible disease. He must’ve been a lazy gluttonous slob.
I’ve got news for you people. You can eat healthy, exercise regularly, never smoke or watch TV on the couch, and be the president of Mensa, but at some point in your life, unless you get run over or murdered, you will get some kind of disease, and you will die.
Selling diet and exercise as a preventative cure for every disease under the sun just weakens your credibility. It reeks of snake oil. It makes people not want to listen to you, even if you’re right about some of it.
Everyone will die eventually. No matter what you do.
I considered putting this rant in the BBQ Pit, but I think it’s a little mild. If the mods disagree, feel free to change it.
The OP is not bizarre. What’s bizarre is when someone gets lung disease and all their friends start quizzing them about whether they used to smoke, lived with a smoker, et. Just because there is sometimes a correlation does not mean it’s a simple cause and effect: smoke and die of lung cancer, no exceptions; and the other side must be, do as we tell you and you will NOT die of anything unpleasant. Blaming the victim runs amok. I’m sorry, if you get Alzheimer’s Disease, it’s NOT YOUR FAULT.
You may remember Jim Fixx, a running athlete who died at 52 from a heart attack. In the days after his death, many people expressed wonder that someone so devoted to running could die so young of a heart attack. It was reported that he continued to eat greasy food.
“Ah-hah!” said the finger pointers, “If he had changed his diet, he wouldn’t have had that heart attack!”
I think there is a qualitative difference between reporting that even moderate exercise decreases the chance of age-related cognitive dysfunction and saying that exercise will prevent Alzheimer’s.
I think those studies should be viewed cautiously. Media catches wind of one study that shows interesting results, ignoring all the others that have null results, and suddenly there’s a headline.
However, we know the environment does affect our health. I don’t know how anyone can deny that. The question is how much do you value health over your lifestyle? Do you want to eat sticks and berries for the rest of your life just so you can live to be a spry 110-year-old? Or do you want to indulge in your vice(s) of choice and then deal with the consequences that may or may not follow?
I seriously don’t know the answer to this question. I mean, I know the answer is somewhere in the middle, but where is the “middle?” And does it matter if you don’t want to live long or care about being sick? (I care about the latter, but not so much the former.)
I know I breath in more noxious car exhaust than average and that it can’t be good for me. But does that mean I’m going to pick up and move to the country? Or stop spending so much time outdoors? There’s certainly a trade-off involved with my lifestyle. I don’t want to spend any more time indoors than I already do, even though I know the risk factors involved with my behaviors. So in a way I AM responsible for what happens to me. Not all the things, of course, but I shouldn’t be so shocked if CERTAIN things happen to me.
I think instead of looking at so-called “lifestyle” diseases as a way of blaming the individual victim, we could say they are the price we all pay for living in our society. Because life is unfair, some of us are going to have to pay a heftier price. We may find out that plastics are what’s causing EVERYTHING that’s wrong with us–from autism to sciatica. Are we gonna give up plastics? Hells no. We’ll just find treatments and adjust that way. It’s sad but reality.
Emphasis on can. Probably want to add the word “help” in after that. And considering that Alzheimer’s Disease is one of the diseases that would make me eat a bullet rather than hold onto life, I’ll take any leads on preventing it that I can get. I suspect my husband, who’s losing his mom to Alzheimer’s right now, agrees with that assessment.
Screw the “you gotta die of something” arguments. Given the choice to die like my paternal grandfather, with most of his facilities remaining and at the age of 102 (and who rode bicycles with us grandkids well into his 80s, and into town for many years after), or like my maternal grandmother who wasted away into a shell of a being who just stared with dead eyes at anyone who came into her room, dwindling away like that for years? Yeah, I know which “something” is better.
You may feel threatened, but I don’t think the national news report did any actual threatening.
Of course I’ll die. Alzheimer’s, heart disease, DIABETES (yes I’m adding that one to the mix, just to be a prick) and cancer are not about dying, but about long-term suffering through long periods of life.
I read a New York Times health column recently (I think Tara Parker-Pope’s Well blog) about a study that found that triathletes, marathoners and other Iron Man exercisers have heart and other circulatory damage that rivals sedentary smokers. So there appears to be a point at which you can have too much of a good thing.
I used to be fat. Now I’m not. I feel better. I look better. I think better. Everyone thinks I’m my teens’ older brother. EVerything’s just goddamn better. I eat less of what I used to want and more of what’s good for me and that I now usually want in spite of myself. My tastes have changed dramatically. I’m not just eating granola to annoy you.
I HOPE to hell I’m warding off the cancer my father suffered with for the last 13 years of his life, or the dementia that took his mother, and the flawed thinking, lethargy and indifference I’m starting to see in my own mother.
But no matter. The immediate rewards have been worth it.
I laughed my lazy, non-exercising butt off when Jim Fixx died. Then I heard he had a family and personal history of heart disease, and engaged in his major exercise program without seeing a cardiologist. Given the genetic cards he was dealt he might have died sooner and non-famously without exercise, but he could have lived a lot longer under a doctor’s care. Even with 1970s medicine.
Regarding the OP, I’ll take any news I can get about lowering my risk for Alzheimer’s. I’ve seen it take two of my grandparents now, and it is one of my worst fears. Moderate exercise is good for you anyway, so hell, why not.
I don’t think anybody disagrees that exercise and watching your diet is a worthwhile thing to do. I’m just sick of the health nags’ smug self-righteousness about this sort of thing.
I remember when Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer, and he never smoked in his life. Not too long afterwards, stories were going around that the reason he died was from working in all those smoky comedy clubs when he was an up and coming comedian. No proof, no nothing, just “Andy Kaufman died of second hand smoke.” If you happened to catch Kaufman’s act at a club and you were smoking, thanks for helping to kill him, you goddamned murderer.
People get sick. People die. It’s not always someone’s fault.
