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By Root 1205 0

of the country. Of course, if we are going to have any public health care, we have to know who is making themselves expensively ill. But note that some parts of the country are preoccupied with physical beauty and longevity, while other parts of the country see all this concern as neurotic, whiny, and pestering. These matters are not devoid of politics. We should not overdo the geographical or political lines here, but simply note that, to some degree, they exist. There are people in the country who hear advice from researchers in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., and feel bullied. That may sound backward to the fit, information-hungry East Coast or West Coast urbanite, but since science is so often wrong on this stuff, isn’t it possible that the midcountry folk are right? Perhaps the motivation for these pronouncements is more about the cultural taste of a portion of moneyed America than it is about progress in knowledge. Moneyed America (whoever is paying for the studies and the news stories about them) wants control over life’s chaos. But we don’t get real power over the universe by hectoring fat people about how fat they are.

As far as what you should eat or how you should move around: everyone knows what feels healthy for them. You eat a meal with a gross amount of butter in it, you feel laden and greasy; you drink a lot, you feel poisoned; you miss sleep, you feel awful; you never move around much, it hurts to walk to the kitchen. For most people, the only really valid advice is the advice you would have assessed with your own eyes and ears, in any century, things like eat less, walk around more, get more sleep, and take pleasant poisons in moderation.

I am suggesting that these issues are overstuffed with symbolic content, that this dictates what we think about and how we think it, and that we might want to try shaking it off.

14

Exercise

Our recent ancestors made a hypothesis that physical chores were a main source of unhappiness. They developed machines that lift and transport while we sit and adjust the controls. It made us happy. Imagine that someone came into the room where you now read this book and commanded you to get dressed for the weather and do some arduous outdoor chore—fetch water, say—today and every day after. Now wake from this dream and ask yourself if you are happy to be back. At the end of a workday, for the most part, our clothes are still clean, and we seem to like it that way. There are studies that claim to show that those of us who do schedule in some exercise are happier; some even claim that the effect of regular exercise can be as dramatic as the effect of taking antidepressant drugs. But there are also studies that claim to show that exercise strains the body, damages the heart, and increases anxiety. There is a great deal of money to be made in exercise equipment and paraphernalia, and not many ways to make money by telling people that the exercise fad is a marketing ploy and a cultural myth. Media might like the story, but people are so deeply convinced that the average person ought to be doing more exercise that they worry that countering the idea would seem irresponsible. Certainly those in front of the camera are likely to be personally invested in the idea that thin, exercised people live longer and better lives, are happier, and are more virtuous.

Without looking into the issue with some rigor, educated Americans would have to conclude that the average person who exercises regularly is happier and better off than the average person who does not. We are bombarded with this message, but there is nothing like scientific proof for it. A remarkable number of the foundational, famous studies showing the benefits of exercise were conducted on tiny groups of people, ten or fewer in many cases; and in many cases there was nothing random about the sample. The physiologist Steve Blair’s study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1989, included over ten thousand men and three thousand women, and it involved interviewing them, testing them on treadmills,