The piece was meant to paint a rose picture of today's life, even with all of its current financial and environmental problems, to yester-year. Except what jumped out at me was the noticeably missing tidbit regarding health care costs and obesity.
When you add the fact that more money and consumer goods, and more leisure time with less labor-intensive jobs has taken our overall obesity level from 20% in 1997 to over 34% today (the overweight category stayed about the same at 1/3 of the American population), it doesn't look like modern life is as good for us as the article claimed.
Nothing new to low carbers. We understand there's a strong addiction component inherent within the context of carbohydrate foods, be it added processed chemicals or higher-glycemic index reactions. But there's a lot of those on a low carb diet who are stalled and stagnant, a lot who are still addicted to processed foods, as well as TVs and computers. We don't get off the hook just because we've stopped eating sugar. Genetic factors, environmental, behavior, and socioeconomic factors still apply.
Look at any low carb board, egroup, or community and you'll see dozens of folks saying "I'm Back!" Because we're just as susceptible to food advertisers, emotional whims, and social-engagement feeling-left-out-of-the-loop events. Real Life, as Dr. Atkins used to call it. Only we're ill-equipped to handle the food issues and social Mac trucks that plague our efforts. We don't seem to be able to rid ourselves of the dieting mindset.
It's easy to say "It's a lifestyle, not a diet." But much harder to put that into practice.
Were the hunter-gatherers really so poor? Were they missing out on what current, modern-day society offers? Maybe not. It might have been a harder life, but if the cost we are paying for that extra ease and luxury is risk of diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and death, it might not be worth the price.
3 comments:
Pff. We don't have more leisure time today. If you take the entire human species, and look at how much work the entire species is doing, we're working a LOT harder today than we did in hunter-gatherer days.
Think about it--back then, you didn't have to do make-work to earn money, then go buy the stuff you needed. You just made or caught or gathered the stuff you needed, did your food prep and that was it. Sometimes you built a house, sometimes you made clothes or tools or weapons. But it was all simple stuff so it didn't take that much time.
There have actually been people who've done the math. It's fascinating. Turns out hunter-gatherers did maybe three days' worth of work a week. The rest of the time they socialized and played.
No way can we do that. For all that us wealthy first-worlders can go to the store and buy clothes, someone had to make them. Everything that's "leisure" for us costs extra work for someone else, because we're not making all these wonderful toys ourselves.
And of the leisure time us rich folks do have, how do we spend most of it? Staring at a screen, getting out of touch with our families and friends. So it's not like it even matters.
food for thought...
My family just returned from Uganda where nothing is automated, electricity is available only sparingly, and they had to walk almost everywhere. Everything too a lot more effort than in the states! It took ALL DAY to wash clothes - haul water from the hand pumped well. Find a dead tree and cut it down, then haul the wood back to the house and chop it apart to build a fire to heat hot water. Hand scrub the clothes and heat more water to rinse them, then wring them out by hand, and hang them to dry. Add to that the effort of breaking up the hard ground with a hand plow to plant a garden and haul the water from the well to water the plants, pick the bugs off of the plants every day so that what little grows isn't eaten by pests. Then because there is no electricity anything you grow has to be dried or salted or "Canned" to keep it through the dry season.
It is NOT harder today. We have no real idea of the automation that goes into all our food production, water delivery and everything else. We may have higher stress about other things, but we could have more leisure - except we are addicted to stuff!
Years ago, when my husband was living at his dad's ranch, without electricity and water, it was not an easy life.
Animals had to be fed and cared for daily, water had to be hauled in two or three times a week, and clothes washed by hand. Daily life tasks and working outside be it animals, yard work, or vegetable gardening took up much of the day.
Hunting for food, and going up the mountain to cut down trees for firewood like I have to do today would have added to everything we had to do back then. So I don't have a fanciful and fictionalized view of what hunger-gatherer life was like. I have a fairly accurate picture.
One of my middle sons used to play baseball in college. When he stopped due to the politics involved, and took a job with Household Finance in bill collections, he put on about 50 lbs rather quickly.
Most people in our day and age do not have hard, labor intensive jobs like my husband does. They have sit down jobs. They can afford modern conveniences that cut the energy expenditures of yester-year down quit a bit.
I can see this play out in my own life, especially since I had to quit my standing job as a cook, and now sit at a computer and write all day.
While I've been able to keep my weight stable, even with my new sedentary lifestyle, I've had to cut way back on lunch in order to keep from losing the ground I've gained so far.
Thanx to both of you for your comments.
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