You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [51]
4. EXERCISING
Exercise is good for you. Exercise is hard. Therefore the more you exercise, the better off your body will be, right? There’s no better example of this line of reasoning than the marathon, which is named for the legendary Greek messenger who ran 26.2 miles from a battle in Marathon to Athens, announced to the general assembly, “We won,” and promptly dropped dead.
Ignoring the cautionary-tale shape to that story arc, the modern fitness movement made the recreation of the mythical death sprint their de facto symbol of peak physical condition (the ancient Greco-Roman sports of nude wrestling and lion fighting were presumably dismissed as too gay and too cruel to animals, respectively). And while it’s true that only the fit can possibly handle such a distance, it turns out it’s not necessarily good for the smug bastards.
Running a marathon is, on balance, bad for your muscles, your immune system, and even your heart. It’s so traumatic that your body begins leaking injury-signaling enzymes. In an interview with Men’s Health, Dr. Arthur Siegel said, “Your body doesn’t know whether you’ve run a marathon . . . or been hit by a truck.” Siegel’s the director of internal medicine at Harvard’s McLean hospital, who ran twenty marathons before he was convinced to hang up his ridiculous short shorts by his research and all the heart attacks he kept seeing at the marathons he ran. Yes, heart attacks. It happens about a dozen times a year. Runners’ hearts give out or they go into complete renal failure. After hours of extensive research, we have it on good authority that doing anything to the point that your organs shut down is generally a bad thing.
However, because our culture tends to view exercise as the physiological equivalent of putting money into your 401(k), marathon runners have been known to ignore their body’s “you’re goddamned killing us” message until they’re doing a horrifyingly faithful recreation of the first marathon ever.
The truth is that, like most things, exercise should be practiced in moderation. As Spiegel advises in the article, you’re probably better off training for a marathon and then not running it. Of course, that won’t prove to the world that you’re a bigger badass than that Greek messenger.
3. HALF OF THE FOUR MAJOR FOOD GROUPS
Back in 1977, Senator George McGovern and the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition (SSCON) were asked to figure out why so many Americans were showing up at hospitals with the muscle definition (and often the heart rates) of a Jell-O casserole. Undertaking the most comprehensive study of American dietary habits in history, the SSCON revealed that, despite America’s unwavering commitment to lard-assed heart abuse, rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease briefly dipped during World War II. After rigorous lab experiments determined that you couldn’t Nazi hunt your way to low cholesterol, the committee arrived at a more practical explanation: meat and dairy rations. America got healthier during WWII because they weren’t allowed to eat all the beef and cheese they could fit their mouths around.
Figuring that some self-imposed rationing might do some good, the committee drafted a report that urged Americans to “cut red meat and dairy intake drastically.” As bad as that news was for American taste buds, it was worse for cattle farmers. Since 1955, they’d been making obscene amounts of money selling the half of the USDA’s “four essential food groups” that contained cheeseburgers and milk shakes. Luckily for future manufacturers of scoop-’n’-eat cheesecake and muumuus, by the time the SSCON released their report, they’d made enough money to hire an army of lobbyists. Soon after releasing the report, committee members were told it would