You Might Be a Zombie . . . (20 page)

1. THE INTERNET

Tel ing people about all the things that will make them sick is one of the Web’s primary functions. But only since a recent report in
Biologist
, a UK science journal, has it been thought that the Internet could actually suppress your immune system, encourage disease, and speed the growth of tumors. The report cites studies showing that entering the twenty-first century, time spent using electronic media increased, while time spent in actual face-to-face social interaction dropped significantly. This lack of daily human interaction causes your body to slack off and fail to produce as many white blood cel s and cytokines (those are good).

While keeping your distance from a bunch of filthy human bacteria might seem like a good thing, your immune system actually needs the activity. After months spent sitting alone, surfing porn, your body’s natural defense system begins to atrophy.

So really, it’s not the Internet that’s making you sick; it’s the crushing, crushing loneliness. If you want to stay healthy, don’t waste your time reading books or browsing the supremely addictive Cracked.com website. Go out and get some exercise. But before you do that, you might want to turn to the next section to learn about all the ways exercise can kil you too.

EVERYONE
knows that fad diets aren’t to be trusted. But there are a few simple rules that seem never to go out of style. Exercise like a madman, hit the four food groups, get eight hours of sleep at night, and avoid stuff that’s high in fat. Do all those things and you’l be wel on your way to . . . a premature death. Yep, the ABCs of healthy living lead directly to an early grave. And we’ve known it for years.

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 general y 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 kil ing 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 Jel -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 I. 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 WWI because they weren’t all owed 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 drastical y.” 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 sel ing 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 need some revisions if they wanted to keep their jobs.

Doing what politicians do best, the SSCON caved. The clear and direct “reduce consumption of meat” became, “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.” To ensure that no other senators got any funny ideas about making Americans skinny, the meat and dairy industries spent mil ions to ensure McGovern’s ass got kicked to the curb in the very next election. American waistlines continued expanding, life spans continued shrinking, and nobody even dreamed of pissing off cattle ranchers ever again.

2. GETTING EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP EVERY NIGHT

If there’s one lie that’s ingrained into America’s youth even earlier than “drinking milk turns you into a muscle-bound shit wrecker,” it’s the idea that you need eight hours of sleep each night. The bedtimes of children and the schedules of adults are structured around this one easy-to-remember bodily mandate. For years, it’s been dividing weekdays into three convenient eight-hour chunks of work, relaxation, and sleep.

Dr. Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego, conducted a sleep study that tracked adults from the time they were old enough to set their own bedtime to the time they took a permanent nap in the dirt. The study found that seven hours of sleep seems to be the “golden time” for maximum health. Those who got less than seven hours saw slight decreases in life span. The ones who got the magic number of eight hours? They were, on average,
even worse off
. Despite what your parents told you, Kripke found that eight hours is the duration at which sleep turns from “healthy and relaxing” to “slowest form of suicide imaginable.”

Before you start petitioning your local representative to draft laws banning comfortable beds, smooth jazz, and the writing of Immanuel Kant (for the children!), the studies didn’t show that seven hours is the perfect length of sleep for everyone. Like anything involving the human brain, sleep is way too complicated for blanket rules. The problem, according to Kripke, is that people who natural y sleep less than eight hours a night think they’re not getting enough sleep. That’s why sleeping pil s do such a robust business despite health risks that he puts on level with smoking cigarettes. People who need less than eight hours think they have to force their bodies across an arbitrary finish line their parents invented.

So the next time you’re lying awake in bed, worried that you’re now seven hours and forty-eight minutes away from the alarm, just remember, eight hours is just something your parents made up because they wanted some alone time to have filthy sex on the couch where you grew up watching TV.

Or maybe just count sheep.

1. THE GODDAMN FOOD PYRAMID

In 1992, the government decided to take another run at America’s rampant ass jigglery, this time designing an official info graphic that showed how many servings of different food groups you should get in a day. Just as the four food groups had improved on 1943’s Basic Seven, which actually included
butter
as its own group, the food pyramid took a few steps in the right direction. For instance, it separated fruits and vegetables into their own categories and suggested that both were more essential than the cheese and burger groups. The USDA even created a vil ain, the tiny tip of the pyramid, fats and oils, which Americans were advised to use sparingly. Having outlined its complex nutritional morality play, the USDA dusted off its hands, sat back, and watched childhood obesity rise every year since.

Again, the government had suffered from a crisis of testicular fortitude. Rather than suggesting that anyone eat less of anything, which could hurt the $500 billion food industry, the pyramid suggested that you eat bad foods less frequently
relative to
how many good foods you eat. It also followed the SSCON’s tradition of blaming the word
fats
rather than anything you might recognize from your grocery list. Food manufacturers responded by flooding the market with chips and cookies chemical y engineered to be “low in fat,” giving Americans the green light to eat their way skinny.

Of course, it wasn’t
all
on “the man.” The chart gave our fat asses too much wiggle room. Choosing from the items listed in each section, you could eat three cheeseburgers, down two glasses of OJ, three servings of fries (cooked in McDonald’s new low-fat lard!), a box of Lucky Charms, and go to bed tell ing your body it could thank you on your hundredth birthday.

As for those new chemical y engineered low-fat miracle foods, studies show no evidence that they have any effect on heart or overal body health.

Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard’s Joslin Diabetes Center says, “For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent, low-fat diets are counterproductive. They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.”

Nutritionists hold out hope that we might turn a corner in the next fifteen years though, when the costs of airlifting children to school passes the $500 billion mark.