Healthy Hearts and Pizza as a Vegetable

It's a strange world we live in. Never have scientists better understood the way the human body works, and never has agricultural science been able to better provide a rich diversity of food for people in developed countries. I realize I'm ignoring vast global inequalities and that that first sentence probably should have read "It's a strange continent we live on," but that has so much less impact. Anyway, the state of affairs is strange because, in spite of a high level of understanding and an unlimited supply of basically all types of food, there is a trend towards bad health in the western world in the forms of obesity and heart disease.

Things have gotten so bad that the current generation of children being born might be the first in history to have a shorter life expectancy than those of their parents... So what gives?

What I think is a major contributing factor to the paradox of North American living can be summed up in three pieces of news that I stumbled across today in my perusing of the internet. First, researchers at John Hopkins University released a study this week confirming something that has long been suspected. It turns out that a diet high in unsaturated fats is better for your heart than a diet that is high in protein or carbohydrates. Might not exactly be an Earth-shattering revelation, but its good to know that guacamoli, almonds, and vegetables cooked in olive oil are doing me some good.

Secondly, and seemingly unrelatedly, the city of Vancouver has won its bid to force members of the Occupy movement to dismantle their tent city. I guess even the greenest of cities can't be unconditionally sympathetic to people who are trying to improve the state of the world.

Now you might be asking yourself, "Where is he going with this?" and to you, avid reader I have a reply. See, the founding principle of the Occupy movement is getting money out of politics because it corrupts thought and benefits only the richest 1% of people. That ideal is not limited to the distribution of wealth, it also applies to policy making and how information is presented to the public. Which brings me to article number three.

It seems that Republicans in the US congress are up in arms this week because, believe it or not, they want cheese pizza being served in school cafeterias to be classified as a vegetable. And, even more interestingly, this is a DEFENSIVE move. As it stands right now, cheese pizza is treated as a vegetable by the companies that provide lunches to American schools. Now why, you might ask, are apparently educated people arguing such an obviously ludicrous point? The answer lies in the fact that the Republicans who are causing a fuss are under strong pressure from food industry lobbyists to maintain the absurdity.

Lobbyists are hired by corporations and given huge amounts of money. Politicians have lots of influence and need money to get re-elected and to buy mansions. Consequently, with enough distributable money, lobbyists  become politicians.

So there you have it. Today, in spite of clear, scientifically supported evidence for what kinds of foods are healthy, two of the most developed countries in the world combined to classify pizza as a vegetable and obstruct an organization that is fighting for a more intelligent method of doing business...

My brain hurts.

-Steve