Szendi G:
The myth of the hundred-year-old chain smoking, spirits drinking Grandfather

Whoever wants to avoid the facts always has an example to refute even the most obvious statistics.

 

 

The depressing numbers

Mortality statistics are frightening. Every second person dies of cardiovascular disease, and every second person gets cancer. In their lifetime, 1 in 8 women will definitely get breast cancer, and 1 in 7 men will have prostate cancer. Quarter of people die of cancer. One in ten people is already diabetic and diabetes is developing in another three. Diabetes shortens life expectancy by 10 to 15 years. Each year 9,000 people with diabetes have a leg amputated, and many become blind. The number of patients with Alzheimer's disease is growing rapidly, and osteoporosis has reached epidemic numbers.

The age of hopelessness

Of course no one plans their life this way, but this will be the fate of the majority. The shrinking number of people at Class Reunions is frightening, and it's difficult to witness how our once young and healthy schoolmates have become collapsed, obese, or are living on medication by the age of 50. The average Hungarian man has a short life, and he spends the last ten years of this short life with some kind of chronic illness. Healthy people are dying all around us. Illness and death seem, as always, to be coming from out of the sky like lightning strikes. We are full of stories:

"We talked cheerfully in the evening, then he was found dead in bed in the morning." "He wanted to jump on his bike, but he just fell down and was dead." "A routine screening test revealed that he already had non-operable colon cancer." "He was active all his life, paid attention to his diet, he didn't even smoke, then he collapsed at work and it was all over." - How can we ever live fully, if death is constantly sneaking around us?

The French scientist Blaise Pascal described human fate in this way: "Imagine a lot of people chained together, each doomed to death; and every day, some of them are executed in front of the others, and those who remain, seeing their fate in their peers, look at each other in pain, hopelessly, and wait for their death to come."

Destiny seems to be unpredictable, snatching people at random. However many of them have tried to live healthy lives, following the instructions of their Doctors, and diligently went through all the screening tests, and yet they were still struck down. We can't even believe in medicine, even though we thought the Doctors would save us. They'll tell us how to live, and if we follow their instructions, we won't have any problems. Then we can start thinking that eggs are good too, fat is not bad, and healthy cooking oils are extremely dangerous. Wasn't the person who never followed any medical advice right? We see the physicians' powerlessness against diseases, and that the theories of medicine that we believed to be true overthrown. It's estimated that in Hungary 30,000 people die every year from the medical treatment itself, and medications intended to be life-saving are found to have deadly side effects.

Lost in the information

Many, when they look deep into their souls, imagine life just as Pascal did, but in their daily lives they tend to disregard this in a fatalistic way. "Why shouldn't I light the cigarette, because tomorrow it will turn out that it doesn't cause lung cancer after all?" "And wine is healthy, they said." Everyone wants to live for a long time, but most people feel hopeless about the eternal struggle for long life. Many give up the struggle, because it all seems like tilting at windmills. Who can say what the secret to a long, healthy life is? Many prophets preach and sell this secret for good money, but which one is real? In search of the secret to a healthy life, some people believe in vitamins, some in esotericism, some in new German medicine, some in veganism, some in faith, some in fasting, some in I don't know what kind of extracts. But which should we believe? Can we believe anyone? Beyond belief, does anything prove that a particular method will work? And if we choose one, will we not regret later that we did not believe the other?

This total insecurity is the root of modern-day fatalism and nihilism. The philosophy of, "You must die of something," and "We only live once, so enjoy it" resignedly finds that it is not worth the trouble, and that we are not responsible for our own lives. It is not worth fighting against fate. Fate is already written for everyone.

Beliefs do not help, but they give hope

But because you can't simply live, getting up every day and going to work, watching TV in the evening, laughing with friends and planning for the future, according to Pascal's vision, myths and miracles are needed. That's why there is at least one 100-year-old Grandfather in everyone's circle who started every day with a glass of spirits, never took a cigarette from his mouth, and didn't care about what he could or couldn't eat. And he never visited a Doctor in his life, then died by falling from a tree while harvesting fruit. We want to believe that blind fate does not hit everyone, and there are exceptions that are not covered by the statistics and risk factors. Maybe we'll be among them. Why not?

Then there are those who try to confront their threatening fate. Diseases are caused by stress, environmental damage, deliberate genocide by governments (by vaccination, contaminated salt, secret drugs), food additives, radiation from the earth, curses on our descendants. Fighting against these issues gives a sense of protection, but of course it barely does provide any protection for your actual health. New Age, esotericism, astrology, "ancient cures", psy-surgery, and so on, are all designed to meet the need to not feel ourselves as powerless, en-chained people who are just waiting execution. And many, with their blind faith in medicine, try to control their anxieties and get angry at every critical voice that is raised. Unfortunately medicine does more harm than good.

A way out of the chaos

What can people today do, drowning in so much contradictory information? Is it really better to give up because we can't be smart anyway, or see clearly enough?

There are principles that, if followed, can rapidly help make us more enlightened:

1. Common sense dictates that we should go back to where the troubles - that is, the diseases of civilization - began.
2. Let's accept that the human body has evolved over millions of years and adapted to its environment.
3. Suppose that the needs of the human body are not determined by ideas, religion, and morality, but by the mechanisms of action that have evolved during evolution.
4. If the health of two people is different, it can be best explained by their different lifestyles.
5. Understand that health determinants are not of equal weight. In the daily news there are serious, but also insignificant, though often unduly magnified issues.
6. Forget authority: knowledge is not tied to education, rank, or position.
7. Don't forget: the world is moved by interest groups, and that's right. But interests often distort science too, so let's evaluate any new results with healthy skepticism.
8. Let's follow the principles of the Epidemiologist, Sir Austin Bradford Hill, who stated that when comparing factors that influence the health of groups of people, it is important to consider the magnitude of the effect, the repeatability of the result, the dose effect, and whether there is a demonstrable mechanism of action.

Applying the above principles sequentially, we can select and rank health information. If we go back to the 18th and 19th centuries and compare it to present times, we see that while many died from infectious diseases, people lived roughly as long as they do today, and yet then the diseases of civilization barely existed. Diabetes was almost unknown, obesity, heart disease and cancer were rare. This is especially true of the natural peoples. In the old days, people ate completely differently, there was no electricity, and less pollution. When we rank health effects by size, nutrition comes first: people today consume too much refined carbohydrate (cereals, potatoes, sugar, etcetera), and processed foods, and generally lack vitamins and minerals.

There are many other damaging effects, but the degree of obesity and the severity of the metabolic syndrome are fundamentally related to the diseases of civilization (8). Similarly, there is a dose effect between vitamin D and cancer risk, or between vitamin K2 and atherosclerosis, and the mechanism of action is known. If we read that taking omega-3 is dangerous, we may have reason to doubt, since the consumption of large amounts of omega-3s played a crucial role in human evolution. If we read that B12 increases the risk of cancer in smokers, do not reject the news because a dose effect has been found and there is a biological mechanism of action (B12 plays an important role in DNA reading). Don't just accept this: wait for the confirmation of examinations. If a respected Professor claims that our high cholesterol should be reduced, think about the fact that this has not caused a problem to people for hundreds of thousands of years, and independent tests and analyses cannot prove the harmfulness of cholesterol. So, if we want to choose a healthy lifestyle, we have to go back to when people were free from the diseases of civilization, and we must reject any lifestyle that is based on moral-religious grounds (for example, vegetarianism) or speculative theory (blood group diet, alkalization, raw diet, etcetera).

Rational-scientific thinking has evolved over centuries: We now own it, and we shall use it for our own benefit! Too much information is only a problem if we have no compass with which to navigate.

 

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