Fitness and Sustainability, Part 3 – Fueling Us Or The System?

This is part 3 of Fitness and Sustainability.

In the last part of this series we looked at how growth affects the way we think about training and what we hope to accomplish in the gym. The concept of input was discussed and the way in which the level of input can quickly become unrealistic when goals go too far. Let’s get into the some specifics about how that can play out to create a multi-layered problem for our own personal bodies, our community, our country, and the greater culture to which we belong.

The role of nutrition could not be a better place to begin considering the greater systemic challenges we face when addressing our declining health. Michael Pollan has been very successful at reporting the way in which industrial agriculture has developed and now operates in the United States. Plants are usually the first link of energy exchange on this planet. Thanks to photosynthesis they are able to directly capture the sun’s energy. When plants become food for other organisms they pass on this captured energy. This is something we would do well to reflect upon. As long as this system is in place we have a virtually limitless supply of energy.

Humans have found a way to modify this arrangement. We use the stored energy found in fossil fuels to suppliment energy transfer. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers, harnessed from oil, allow us to grow plants in greater quantities and under conditions in which they typically would not thrive. This allows us to create the vast cornfields in the american midwest and west that supply the raw materials needed in an industrialized food system. Corn can be broken down and turned into everything from high-fructose corn syrup to animal feed for industrial cattle farms. From there, we can produce thousands of foods.

This has been great for growth in this country. It has allowed us to produce a vast amount of affordable food quickly by removing the finicky and laborious hands-on work of the farm and replacing it with an industrial model. Not only has this helped the expansion of very large and wealthy agriculture companies, but it has also indirectly fed our relentless pursuit of growth by feeding an ever larger population of consumers in the economy at large. There have been more Americans who have been better fed for less money and therefore able to invest less time in obtaining and preparing fresh foods and more time in productive economic activity.

The problem is that this arrangement comes with hidden costs that are beginning to show themselves. Sugary, processed foods are wrecking our health. Far too great a percentage of the 300 million consumers living in the U.S. are obese or on their way towards it and this is driving the strain on our health care system which in turn is helping to undo our economic success. The savings and convenience of supermarkets filled with industrial food are more than made up for in hospital bills. How does the fitness industry address this problem. Do we offer realistic sollutions, or do we actually contribute to the problem? Industrial agricultural is after all what makes a place like GNC or Vitamin Shoppe possible. Suppliments, energy bars, vitamins, and anything else coming out of a plastic package come from this economic model and far too much of it is being pushed by the industry that is supposed to be a line of defense against our health-care woes.

This is not because the industry is bad, but rather because the industry is still operating on the same model. If the fitness industry wishes to grow, which is what our economy and the culture we have built demands it do, then it must find ways to produce larger amounts of health products cheaply and easily. Examples of this are everywhere. The industry does not create advertising campaigns around heading to the farmers market to buy fresh vegetables for steaming. Rather, the industry creates advertising campaigns for things like protein powder and juicing. These items can be produced and then stored in large quantities that are easily distributed, allowing for an expandable model. Planting, harvesting, buying, cooking, and actually chewing food does not fit the same mold. It is not a maximized model in a growth industry and therefore, the industry attempts to cut all of that out for the consumer – even the chewing it would seem.

We cannot effectively deal with obesity, or any other health issue, if we cannot look at the sytemic problem that also affects the very industry that is supposed to offer solutions. I do not see health solutions when I look at the advertisements in fitness magazines or the shelves in nutrition shops. I see another manifestation of the root causes of our poor health. But therein also lies the opportunity. The fitness industry is one place where we can take a good look at ourselves. We may not all want to save the planet, but we do want to be better versions of and for ourselves, which is why we go to the gym in the first place. What we now need to recognize is that we can do both.

In the next part, we will look a bit more deeply at the way in which what we do for ourselves and what we do for the world are not as separate as they sometimes seem.

Final – Expanding the Benefits of Fitness ->

Further Reading:

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. New York, NY: Penguin, 2006

Kirschenmann, Frederick L. Cultivating an Ecological Conscience. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010

Brownlee, Shannon. Overtreated. New York, NY: Bloomsburry, 2007