Don’t spend to be healthy

DO YOU need medical insurance? No, says a Facebook friend of a friend: “Just eat healthily, drive carefully and exercise.”

This touching faith in your own personal agency in terms of health, this idea that if you do the right things you’ll stave off debilitation and age indefinitely, has been beaten into us for the last 30 years and more. (I’m a guilty party, I freely admit; early  in my career I started writing about health, and it took me years to learn the skills to interrogate the claims that crossed my desk. So yes, I told people things that I laugh at now. Ruefully, naturally.)

Let’s just say you actually know what eating healthily is – and that’s quite a stretch. What constitutes a healthy diet is not as easy to define as the Goops of this world would have you believe. Just about all we can agree on is that a healthy diet is one which promotes health and wellbeing.

Should you eat fruit daily? Are supplements essential to health – and which ones? How many hours of exercise do you need a week? Is saturated fat friend or foe? Should we all use sunscreen whenever we go outside?

There’s a lot more disagreement or nuance than you’d think, about basic received wisdom in health that we accept as part of the wallpaper of our lives. The consensus can shift over a matter of a decade or less, between one tranche of research and another.

And bear in mind the possible agendas behind some of the things we believe without question: “Healthy eating is clearly a political issue and the majority of information about food and health is driven by commercial considerations, particularly in terms of advertising and product descriptions…” (Ben Fine, The Political Economy of Diet, Health and Food Policy, 2011)

It’s a powerful and seductive belief, that your choices create your health. And in some really obvious ways there’s truth in it: smoking really does do serious harm, for example, and sugar is associated with dental caries. But seriously, does drinking a kale smoothie daily ward off enough demons to justify it? Micromanaging your health choices in this way lays you open to the all-too-frequent winds of change.

Back when I was a health magazine editor in the late 1990s, I went to a sophisticated kitchen tea in a trendy restaurant (no embarrassing games or dressing up here) and was seated next to a relative of the groom, here from New York for the wedding. After dinner, I ordered a cup of coffee. “Oh my Gaaad!” she exclaimed. “You’re a health editor and you drink cawffeee? Don’t you know how bad it is for you?”

Damn. Lost all credibility, didn’t I? Since then, we’ve been told that coffee is possibly a super-food, so put that in your hookah and smoke it, babe! (Yeah. Take  super-food claims with a pinch of salt. Did you know Brussel sprouts will do twice as much to reduce your cancer risk as kale? See https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23130850-100-miracle-meal-or-rotten-swindle-the-truth-about-superfoods for more.)

The belief in personal responsibility also allows you to assign blame for frightening things to the victims (and heave a sigh of relief as you remind yourself that you go to gym four times a week, so it could never happen to you).

The result is that people who are ailing are often subjected to thoughtless comments, and advice that can range from useless to actively cruel. Like the woman I met who was told her breast cancer was “probably because you ate too much fat” by one so-called friend, and the result of her “repressed negative feelings” by another. If she was positive enough (and presumably never touched a drop of her favourite grapeseed oil again), she’d recover.

Or the friend with chronic severe pain, which she could not have prevented even if she’d exercised three hours a day lifelong, who daren’t say anything about it to most people. “They try to tell me what to do about it, as though I just wasn’t trying hard enough.”

Yes: “Do you do any exercise at all, dear?” “Have you tried losing some weight?” “You know, a lot of pain is in the brain. Maybe you should meditate?”

The healthiest woman I ever knew, a Buddhist yoga teacher who ate an abstemious, judicious and thoughtful plant-heavy diet, succumbed to cancer. Because even if you do everything right in the kitchen plus an hour of exercise a day, and you meditate, and balance and align everything possible, you are still not safe from the rogue cell, the slip of the foot, the maniac driver.

Like my beloved and perfectly fit and healthy uncle, who fell down a mountain and spent 40 years in a wheelchair as a result. It’s a crapshoot, life is. And that, sadly, is why medical insurance of some kind is essential (even if I violently loathe the current model thereof).

Here are my health suggestions (not rules)

Don’t buy products that are advertised as ‘healthy’.

Eat real food.

Aim for diversity. Don’t overload your diet with any one food or ingredient. Even coffee (guilty!).

Take time to enjoy what you’re eating and stop when you’re full.

Enjoy your body and use it to do things that make you feel good, happy, or useful.

Love someone: man, woman, child, dog, cat, horse or hamster.

And help someone every day.

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.