The Wearisomeness of Advice About "Your Health"

Looking at the bestseller lists is a dreary experience--a reminder of how, in an age in which reading may be so uncommon that anyone who reads any sort of book at all may be thought at least a cut about the rest intellectually, even those who read have an exceedingly limited, narrow, range of interest, and a susceptibility to old scams. This goes for nonfiction as well as fiction, where books purporting to offer advice about improving one's health are always evident.

It is entirely right that people be interested in the subject. But for a long time it has been rare indeed that the books available justified their interest in their specific content.

In spite of the impression we are always given that medical researchers are "making new discoveries every day," the reality seems to be that the vast bulk of the research is garbage, and what discoveries they make are not being translated into actionable advice that people can hypothetically apply in their own lives. Comparative minutiae apart (during which the medical community frustratingly goes back and forth, as they have recently done in regard to red wine, in a manner all but designed to feed the impulse to medical nihilism), the medical professionals who write these books give the same advice over and over again.

Exercise. Get your sleep. Don't smoke. Don't drink, or if you do drink drink very little. Avoid stress, and manage what you can't avoid.

And of course, "Abandon all hope of culinary pleasure ye who enter here." (Because no matter how many times they tell you otherwise a carrot stick is just not as satisfying a snack as a potato chip or a candy bar.)

Much of the advice isn't particularly pleasant. Not exercising and eating what you actually want is a lot more fun than the other way around, and there is no doubt that people are sick of being told to do the opposite.

And anyway, the really hard part is actually implementing it in an active, harried life with many demands and limited means. The plain and simple fact is that few have much control over their lives, and a very limited range of options with regard to any changes in their lives (with the fact that they have tried and failed to do what they ought, perhaps repeatedly, making the prescriptions the more depressing). Indeed, writing in The Road to Wigan Pier it seems to me that the non-doctor George Orwell displayed a better understanding of what we might today think of as the problem of obesity than a hundred of our health book writers put together--precisely because he was not so remote from the realities of the daily lives of the general public as they, fixated as they are on their Platonic images of unwell persons ready to make a new beginning, like sinners who have been born again.