Cutting Through the Health Hype: How to Live Longer
One of the most intriguing possibilities of achieving the singularity is the promise of extending our life-span far beyond what we experience today. Talking about life-span and the singularity is also important because many people want to make sure they’re still alive when we hit the singularity.
It’s a fact that our life-span is rising. New medicines allow us to fight diseases that previously could be fatal and technological advances (both medical and non-medical) prevent deaths every day.
Unfortunately, our development in the medical field is still a work in progress. We possess the ability to cure some of the deadliest diseases known to mankind, but medicine has largely been unable to fix one growing epidemic in today’s world. In fact, earlier this year, scientists just discovered the gene responsible for this epidemic: obesity.
Even the cause of the increase in obesity is a fiery debate. Let’s look at some of the potential culprits:
Cause #1: Lifestyle
Today’s world is much different from generations past. Schedules are busier than ever, more couples are both holding jobs while simultaneously raising children, work hours are longer and more demanding than ever. All this adds up to less family time. And that means more eating out, more stress, and less focus on a healthy diet and exercise. When you’re only focused on getting through the day, you’re not paying much attention to the quality of those calories that you’re consuming. Stress has also been linked to obesity as well as heart disease, which may concern many of those in the corporate world today.
Cause #2: Big Business
This cause is partially tied into Cause #1 because oftentimes, the corporate world is what causes undo stress and forces people to eat out. Unfortunately, it also influences the ingredients found in many of our foods. The cutthroat business world forces many food corporations to save costs by purchasing lesser ingredients. This means non-organic products or cheap alternatives (adding fruit flavor instead of real fruit, adding fake sugar instead of real sugar, etc.).
Cause #3: Lack of Knowledge/Information
While you might have nodded and shrugged when contemplating the first two causes, this cause may be more controversial and make you think. What do we really know about how to eat healthy? It’s widely accepted that our food pyramid guide is woefully lacking, although there have been recent attempts to fix this. If the advent of a new fad diet every six months is any indication, medical science is greatly lacking a definitive solution when it comes to eating healthy.
Someone finally decided to address this gaping fault. Gary Taubes, a science journalist, researched this issue and delved into many of the myths and truths about eating healthy that have circulated through society. With so much fluff often tossed around when talk about eating healthy arises, I hope this book presents some findings backed by solid medical results.
I hope to pick it up to learn more about the field, but from an initial glance, it appears his findings are interesting. Some findings people may already know, for example that low fat diets have no scientific basis for improving health and have never been scientifically tied to weight loss. Others confirm more recent whispers, such as the benefits of reducing processed, starchy foods from your diet.
Understanding obesity is important, not only to advance medical science, but also to advance the state of our health. With technological progress increasing at such a rapid rate, it’s sad to think that so many people won’t live to take advantage of that technology, when all they may need to do is make a simple diet change.
Here’s to hoping we all live to experience the singularity.
