Comments on: Oh heavens! the people they are so healthy!

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 23:58:37 +0000

I’m no fan of Furedi. In fact I’ve never heard of him or read his stuff. It is ironic how the underlying motive for many of these web personalities and authors remains opaque unless you know their history. I have some interest in the history of Marxism and I have noticed the much of the verbiage you hear from today’s left can be traced almost word for word to old tracts written by Stalin’s propaganda masters. Of course the fact that they talk about equality and justice for all is no indicator of their real plans for you. On the right many of the editors of conservative publications that I respected now stand revealed as crypto- Catholic totalitarians, in the wake of the Shiavo episode. I guess that is why it pays to study history and philosophy, if only there was more time.

By: Curt

Curt — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:24:08 +0000

I would find it difficult to explain that since I don’t find it to be true. But let there be no mistake, that’s not what Furedi is getting at. He’s not just railing against the diet fads and all that. He seems to also think that checking for prostate cancer is overly narcissistic. You’re a doctor, explain why that isn’t an excessive reaction. You are suggesting that the health craze actually lowers our quality of life by messing with our mental and possibly physical health, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you. But Furedi is objecting not on quality-of-life but on moral grounds; he seems to think that even caring about one’s own health and quality of life at all is narcissistic and immoral, which I find just as unreasonable as the health nuts, and I find his bitching about moral imperatives to have a bit of totalitarianism in the same way as when the government gets involved in health issues. As Nietzsche said of Kant: “the categorical imperative smells of cruelty.”

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 01:08:49 +0000

I think Furedi does have a point. Let’s confine the discussion to the government’s puritanical nanny recommendations about eating and drinking. Beware of the dangers of drinking coffee. Not that there is any thing unhealthful about it, but it is a stimulant and people enjoy it so it must be bad. So only drink one cup a day and ditto for beer. And you should not eat anything with much salt in it, because it might increase blood pressure in people who already have high blood pressure, but mainly because it tastes good. Recently I read that salt kills 150,000 people a year, over three times the number killed in automobile accidents. See: www.cspinet.org/salt And, don’t eat eggs or oysters because of the cholesterol, but oops, cholesterol in food doesn’t really matter, because you synthesize cholesterol endogenously. So we won’t talk about that any more except to say that eggs and oysters can transmit salmonella and vibrio bacteria and can kill you. Also, now that everyone has stopped smoking we are all getting fat. Not that people follow the government’s recommendations, but if worry shortens your life they may be counterproductive. At very least the medicalization of diet succeeds in ruining or at least diminishing life’s small pleasures. Also in a more psychiatric vein, don’t forget the medicalization of body habitus. No longer do we have fat people and skinny people but now millions have eating disorders such as morbid obesity, anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Curt, you are a philosopher. Explain to me how all this is better than the old discredited philosophy of “eat drink and be merry.”