The Bruce Report

If you want to stay thin, as the old joke goes, nothing beats a strip of duct tape applied against the old pie hole.

            Still, a new national report by the Heart and Stroke Foundation is no laughing matter. Canadians are getting fatter, more sedentary and, consequently, sicker. Incidents of heart disease are up, especially among younger people as chronic obesity in pre-adolescents becomes more common. And, perhaps worse, the nation’s health care system is ill-equipped to ameliorate the problem.

            According to an article in this paper yesterday, “national prevalence of high blood pressure between 1994 and 2005 increased by 127 per cent in the 35 to 49 age bracket. Diagnoses of diabetes increased by 64 per cent and obesity levels rose by 20 per cent within the same time period and demographic.”

            The story in New Brunswick is especially bleak. Here, we hold the dubious distinction of scoring tenth (out of 13 provinces and territories) in overall wellness based on certain metrics, such as: weight, physical activity, and diet.

            Seventy-seven per cent of New Brunswickers don’t smoke (that’s the good news), compared with 78 per cent in Canada as a whole. Forty-three per cent claim to be physically active, compared with 49 per cent nationally. Thirty-seven per cent are maintaining a healthy weight; the Canadian average is 44 per cent. Finally, the percentage of people eating an adequate amount of fruits and vegetables is only 39 per cent, compared with 44 per cent across the country.

            It’s also clear (though not from this study) that a growing number of physicians in Canada are getting fed up with their patients. Some reports last year suggested that a handful of family practitioners in Ontario actually refused to provide non-emergency medical care to people who routinely failed to follow their doctors’ advice.

            All of this is not merely inconvenient or troubling; it’s downright catastrophic to the already underfunded and overtaxed national health system. As Thomas Axworthy of Queens University pointed out, rather pithily, not long ago, “Ten million baby boomers are now between 40 and 60.

“Described as a basketball that moves along the python of life, boomers have overwhelmed every set of institutions that mark their passage: first the diaper industry, then schooling, then musical tastes, next housing, and then the job market have all had to cope with a huge scale-up in a short time period. We are now on the cusp of health care in general, and long-term care and palliative care in particular are coming under the same type of pressure.”

Clearly, laziness and imbalanced diets are sources of our current woes. But something more insidious is also at work: Much of what we eat isn’t really food at all. They are what American journalist-activist Michael Pollan dubs “edible food-like substances.” Laced with sugar, salt, and chemical preservatives to “improve” taste and extend shelf-lives, they are ticking bombs in our guts. “Many of them come in packages with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy,” Pollan once said. “In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients and common sense by confusion. The paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we become.”

It’s an argument made in conspiracy-theory heaven. The packaged-food industry is deliberately poisoning us to provide a ready marketplace of sick consumers for its buddies in the pharmaceutical industry who, in turn, generate new food additives to keep the cycle productively engaged.

But Pollan is right. In a world where billions go hungry every day, we in the fat West have forgotten how to prepare a healthy meal, sit down at the supper table, eat modest portions, and repeat the practice day after day.

We’d better rediscover our secret chefs, and soon.

There’s not enough duct tape on the planet to solve this ballooning problem.

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