Tag Archives: advertising

A Most Revealing Pyramid

Posted on by
Reply

Another great post from JR prompts a follow-up piece by me.

This one is about food subsidies by the Federal government, the Farm Bill. It comes from The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Hopefully, I’m not violating anything in reproducing this chart they created:

These Pyramids Weren't Built By Aliens!!!!

As PCRM’s post points out, the Farm Bill not only provides food subsidies, but also decides much of what will constitute school lunches.

With a Food Pyramid like that, who needs enemies?!

The most recent post on the Neuroanthropology Blog discusses Obesity and family medicine – and the fact that some family physicians are starting to recognize family and environmental factors as decisive in treating childhood obesity.

I point this out in my comment on their site, but the author (and the physicians) forgot to include governmental subsidization of different food products (and governmental leadership, generally) in their factor-analysis.

As I’ve said before, the body follows the head. This is true in organisms, cultures, and governments.

In cultural/organizational terms, the Federal government is often the “head” of the social-body. It leads via policy (such as subsidies, land-usage policies, etc.), and also by example (accruing massive amounts of debt, etc.).

Further, much of what constitutes “popular” media takes its cue from the Federal government. “Truth in advertising” relies on governmental moderation. The nullification of the Radio Fairness Doctrine in 1987 had serious repercussions as to what type of messaging has dominated radio advertising since (see my post on the anti-smoking campaign of the early ’70′s and how the Fairness Doctrine was a decisive part of that movement).

I’m happy that MD’s are not as “isolationist” in their thinking as they may have been in the past, but the issue needs to be sussed out in its full depths – which includes holding governmental bodies, and the bodies (i.e., people) who make up those “bodies,” responsible for the way food is produced and marketed in our country.

What You See Is What You Eat

Posted on by
Reply

The Palm Beach Post did a great piece on some new literature about the frequency of junk food product placements in films.

A new study by Lisa Sutherland, assistant professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School, reveals the incredible amount of product placement occurring in popular movies.

138 of 200 films analyzed had some kind of product placement – food or beverage – most of it, what we could consider “junk food.”

How many products can we fit into one "placement?"

The problem with this is that the more we are exposed to a stimulus, the more likely we are to accept that stimulus as normal.

A lot of studies have shown dishabituation in people after being presented to stimuli a certain number of times.  That is, they cease to notice the stimulus as being novel.  Most of those studies have stopped there.  Yes, you cease to notice the thing.  But what does that mean with regard to how you treat it?

How do you treat something you don’t notice?

The fact is, we treat things we don’t notice as being non-threatening…as being “normal.”  When we notice something, we say it is “unusual” or “out of the ordinary.”  It is not “normal.”

Advertising achieves a few things at once.  First, it exposes you to a novel stimulus, and presents that stimulus as something desirable (for good or bad reasons) and as being socially acceptable or creating a certain social status.

Then, it continues to pummel you with the messaging, till you aren’t even aware of it.  For instance, if you watched TV last night, try to name ten commercials that you saw.  Specifically – what were they about, what were they selling, how were they trying to convince you to buy?

It’s a hard game to play.

Finally, every now and then the advertiser tweaks the message.  You receive a new stimulus.  Your “desire-reaction” grows.

Tweak the message

Children may be more susceptible to this type of messaging than adults, having not fully developed their “executive control” functions (though whether or not many adults have fully developed this is questionable as well…).

Scapegoats, Blamecasting, and Excuses

Posted on by
Reply

Scapegoating, as you may already know, is the act of selecting a single person and putting the blame for some ignominious action on their head. Typically, it is done to spare a larger group of people who are actually guilty of the bad deed. The term comes from the Bible (according to Wikipedia), and refers to the practice of a village placing the sins of their people on a goat and sending it into the desert/wilderness to die (and their sins die along with it).

Blamecasting is something similar to scapegoating, but slightly different. Blamecasting needs two parties who are trying to reconcile an issue. A mediator will then coerce the party that is not complying with the proposed solution to the problem by threatening to blame them for the entire issue. This is called “leverage.”

We all know what excuses are. They’re the reasons we make up so we don’t have to do things.

These tendencies (really all one tendency – the tendency to cast blame) reveal a strange aspect of human thought and behavior. Namely, that we (the human animal/individual) are somehow separate from ourselves or our environment – be it a kingdom (as in, human beings are somehow not a part of the animal kingdom), a community/village, an ecosystem, a corporation, a national banking system, a global economy, or anything else.

Not only that, but blame also assumes that, by blaming something outside ourselves (separate from us), we can escape our own part in the thing that has been done.

This type of behavior has been commonly used among public figures in the past fifty years. I don’t want to enumerate all of the instances I can think of, because you’ll get even more bored than you are now, but here are a couple that come to mind. Enron – blamed on the CEO’s. Who was really to blame? FERC, and everyone working at Enron who didn’t blow the whistle. What about the recent banking crisis? Well, the SEC surely should have been paying closer attention, but are they to blame? And anyone working at Madoff’s firm, and any of the people who knew what was happening at the large investment houses, surely must have known.  But are they really to blame?  You can blame sub-prime mortgages, but that’s just a “thing,” it doesn’t “do” anything on its own.

The problem with the banking crisis is that we’re suddenly confronted with this tendency. We’re confronted with the fact that every individual is in no way “separate” from the rest of the world.

It seems strange to have to say it, and even stranger because of how difficult it is to say.

Have you ever heard that “you are your environment?” This goes down to something as fundamental as the ability to move. You cannot develop the ability to move without an environment. In a vacuum, you’d never move. And the environment you’re in will dictate the type of movement you actually do, once you do start moving. I’m talking strictly about the physical environment, not the psychological environment, which is equally large an influence.  You will develop different styles and patterns of movement depending on what your environment is like – you’ll move differently if you live in a jungle than you would if you lived in a desert.

Your psychological environment will also dictate how you move. People who feel threatened will naturally assume a “defensive posture” – which means that their normal posture will tend toward the fetal position. Have you ever seen someone who is depressed? Their head falls forward, their shoulders slumped, their belly and chest sunken. If they sat down, they’d curl up into a ball. How do you think that affects the way you walk? How do you think that posture affects the function of your internal organs? How does it affect the types and quantities of hormones that are released into your body?  Their psychological state, due to their environment (because, again, most of us don’t “make up” our psychological states, they’re a result of our daily interactions with our environments and ourselves), is leaving these people crippled.

What about your relationship with yourself? Excuse-making is no different than scapegoating. Frequently, our excuses use ourselves as the scapegoat – “I’m not good enough,” “I’m too out of shape to work out,” “I’ve never been good at [insert thing you've never even tried to do before].”  Here, “I” am the blamer and the blame-e.  Some close friends of mine used to always say “Oh, we’re all fat in this house.”  It was a way to escape their own responsibility for their physical state.  By saying it out loud, the blame had been cast.  There was no need to do anything to resolve the underlying problem anymore.  The goat had been sent out into the desert.

Scapegoating, blamecasting, and excuse-making, I argue, should not be seen as the fundamental problem we face. Instead, we should recognize that it is a dissociation between us and ourselves/environment – and I do mean the entire world when I say “environment,” not just the living room or office you might currently sit in – that is at the root of the problems we face as individuals and as a society.

You and your actions are not in any way separate from the giant pool of floating plastic that is suffocating the ocean. You are not in any way separate from the betting taking place on Wall St. (as some of us found out the hard way) – whether you take part in it or not! You are not separate from starvation in Rwanda, oppression in Tibet. Similarly, you are not separate from the good things happening all around you. You are not apart from the beautiful trees and plants growing in your area. The elements they exhale are the ones you inhale. You are intimately connected with everything in the world, at every moment.

Television, mass media, marketing/advertising, are huge distractions from you feeling, understanding, and believing in yourself and your own capabilities. They are the ghettos of the mind. They are “the Man,” keeping you in a state of self-doubt and subservience. Shy away from their messages.

What does this have to do with exercise? You tell me. I’d say it has everything to do with it.

Fortunately, we have the tools to explore, understand, and deepen our connections with our world. Unfortunately, in our culture (which is the dominant culture), this idea must first be seen as being profitable, before it will be shared and accepted on as broad a scale as “Judge Judy,” “Dr. Phil,” or “LOST.”

I need to end this rant, so let me do it by saying this – Watch out for blame, in yourself, your surroundings, and in the world. When you see it happening, uncover the source. Most often, it will be used as a way to keep two things appearing as if they’re somehow separate, when they aren’t.

Current thoughts on human fitness.

Posted on by
Reply

Okay, here’s just a bunch of random stuff I’ve been wrestling with recently. Sorry for the haphazard collection, but I want to get this stuff down, and if anyone out there can help further my understanding, even better!

Somatic Therapies

I’ve been reading up on Laban, Bartenieff, Feldenkreis, Alexander, etc., techniques recently. I’ve also been speaking a lot with Charlie Reid about the Egoscue method. All of the strictly “movement” therapies (i.e., everything but Egoscue, which has other elements) are aimed at increasing the individual’s awareness of their own body in space and in motion. “Amazingly” fundamental problems in structure/function can correct themselves simply through awareness of dysfunction.

This isn’t so “amazing,” as I’ll point out in more detail in a second.

“Physical” Therapies

Egoscue is more of what I’d consider a “physical” therapy technique, since it diagnoses problems (typically based on posture or movement dysfunction) and then attempts to correct those problems through movement prescriptions. These prescriptions are aimed, like somatic therapies, at increasing the person’s awareness of their body (and dysfunction in their body), but also in doing this in a very specific way, addressing specific muscles and patterns of muscles throughout the body.

In fact, we could create a continuum of approaches to human function/dysfunction based on how specific the approach is in its corrective tactics. Along the lines of Egoscue, here, but a little more specific, would be Vojta’s reflex-locomotion techniques for improving function in cerebral palsy and similar disorders. Still more specific would be things like Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF). The most specific would be physical therapy techniques aimed at correcting or rehabilitating imbalances or injuries to specific muscle groups or joints.

However, that’s not to say that any of these are better or worse than the other. Instead, one approach might be better or worse for a particular person at a particular place and time. I think it’s crucial to recognize the similarities in these approaches, and their differences, and know when it’s important to use one versus the other.

Central Pattern Generators, the Body, and the Environment

Central Pattern Generators (CPG’s) are neural networks that create the rhythmical/cyclical motor patterns that determine/allow for things like gait. These circuits operate independently from the larger nervous system, or any type of brain-driven control. They are the basis of Vojta’s “reflex-locomotor patterns” mentioned above, and are the way that we are able to walk on two legs, and turn that walk into a jog or a sprint.

However, the generators don’t exist in isolation. Feedback from the body is needed. You can’t walk if your feet don’t know that you’re standing. You can’t run if you don’t know where your legs are in relation to your arms. This is “internal” awareness, or proprioception – your body’s awareness of itself in space. There is another, equally important factor that is often overlooked – that is, the body’s relation to its environment, let’s call it “external” awareness.

Research by Goma has shown that the body, and the generation/instantiation/sustenance of CPG’s relies just as much on the perceived environment as it does on internal factors. You can’t walk if you don’t know how fast the ground is moving beneath you. You can’t run if you don’t know where your feet are going to fall next.

Further, environmental awareness not only shapes the ability to do these things, but the environment itself shapes the things we’re capable of doing. This is true from a physiological perspective – if you grow up in an area short on uninterrupted, long distances, but long on heavy stones that have to be moved, you’ll likely become a miserable long-distance runner, but a very good heavy lifter. It is also true from an anthropomorphic perspective – the relative heights of the Amazonian native and the Masai warrior are no mistake – it’s helpful to be short in the jungle, and very tall in the desert.

The point here is that your body is designed by nature to move in certain ways. These CPG’s already inhabit your body as a function of your very anatomy/physiology itself! So it isn’t “miraculous” when a somatic therapy cures some ill (related or not). It’s simply that your body has been shown the path to normal function again, and is now able to deal with all of the other junk it needs to fight off.

Posture Makes Perfect

That’s the title of an excellent book by Dr. Victor Barker. In it, he outlines some of the things that happen when you have good or bad posture. What I’m most concerned with, is the effect that consistently poor movement has on posture. More than any other factor, limited motion contributes to poor posture. In fact, I would go further and guess that 90% of the “stretching” that is done out there would be completely unnecessary if full-range movement was carried out on a regular basis.

Postural correction is necessary. Proper posture is fundamental for proper movement – neither can exist without the other. However, I think that many of the ways that current methods attempt to correct poor posture and movement are faulty at best, and just a waste of time at worst.

Basic, fundamental movement

Fitness is all well and good, but of what use is it if you have no fundamental movement skill? I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about here. I worked at Gold’s Gym years ago, and there was a guy who worked out there who was a strongman and powerlifting competitor. The guy was incredible. He was currently only benching 450. He wanted his bench press to go up to 500 by the next meet. For those of you who don’t know, 500 pounds is an incredible bench press.

This man was a behemoth. He was easily 6’5″ and probably weighed around 300+ pounds. He looked like classical pictures of Paul Bunyan – big, barrel chested, thickly muscled, with a heavy beard and deep-set eyes.

He was also a heck of a nice guy. But that didn’t stop him from tearing all of the ligaments in his knee when his foot accidentally got stuck under the concrete stopping-block in the parking lot one night. This is not a joke.

For all of his strength, and his size, the man only practiced one thing all of the time – lifting heavy weights, in the sagittal plane (that is, straight ahead or directly up and down). He didn’t spend any time developing basic movement abilities.

Why have we lost the practice of these abilities in our gyms? Gyms these days (though the tide is slowly turning) more closely resemble factories than they do places to explore and develop optimal human movement. Look at a picture of any gym prior to 1970, and you’ll see something very interesting – LOTS OF OPEN SPACE.

Yes, there is a TON of open space. All of the weights either stack nicely against the wall, or in a closet somewhere. There are gymnastic rings hanging from the ceiling, and stall-bars along one wall.

What is that space for?!

Well, it reflects one of the central tenets of Asian philosophies, which is this – until you create space, Nature cannot express itself through you. You’ve heard it said in many ways, probably the most popular is the koan of the overflowing cup – how can the Master give you knowledge, when your cup is already overfull. Empty your mind to be able to accept the great learning.

The space in those gyms was used for tumbling and acrobatics. Things that are strangely relegated to their own, separate gyms these days. Remember how to do a somersault? Okay, go for it. You don’t need a gymnastics gym to do that.

Why has this disappeared, though? Funny enough, a large component of the feats of the early “strongman” – the predecessor of today’s bodybuilder – were exactly these “gymnastic” abilities (not to mention – WRESTLING). These guys had to do back-bridges with five people sitting on their chest. They did 1-arm handstands from the backs of chairs while holding dumbbells in the other hand.

This ethic, this part of physical culture, continued to “muscle beach” in Venice, CA, but then mysteriously vanished with the advent of Gold’s Gym and the bodybuilding craze.

I guess it was too complicated, and required too much practice. It wasn’t as easy as going into the gym and mindlessly blasting your muscles with rep after rep of the same movement pattern.

Or maybe it was too much fun. It didn’t satisfy the deeply-ingrained Puritan work-ethic that we thrive (and die) on in this country. Too much lolly-gagging. To many laughs when you had to somersault out of that 1-arm handstand.

Don’t get me wrong, I love bodybuilding. Arnold, after all, was one of my big idols as a kid. But so was Bruce Lee. I’m just sort of shocked at how little REAL MOVEMENT is a part of any modern workout routine. Instead, it’s mostly STATIONARY – go to this station, do 10 reps, go to this station, do 12, this station…

From now on, all of my clients are starting with somersaults.

And what about Nature?

The gymnasium/gym comparison relates back to the topic of environment, and it is worth noting another idea I’ve been dealing with recently regarding that topic, which is the effect of “natural” environments on human physiology. A paper by Tsunetsugu, et al., reveals the effects that simply “taking in” a natural woodland setting have on humans. I quote: “1) blood pressure and pulse rate were significantly lower, and 2) the power of the HF [high-frequency, the relaxed-state component] component of the HRV [heart-rate variability] tended to be higher and the LF/(LF+HF) [low-frequency] tended to be lower. Also, 3) salivary cortisol [the main "stress hormone" in your body] concentration was significantly lower in the forest area.”

If that’s true, what are the effects of EXERCISING in a more natural environment? Would those effects be heightened?! Would recovery be increased?! Would fatigue be diminished?!

But what about Nature? All of this talk of “greening” nowadays is really just a bunch of advertising. Nothing substantial is changing in the hearts and minds of people around the world. Their perception of nature and the natural world remains as it always has been – something distant, somehow separate from themselves.

I’ve already written a ton about the benefits of being barefoot, but let me outline them again here – reduced blood pressure, greater environmental awareness, improved proprioception and balance, improved movement ability and posture. But what about a more natural diet? Lower cholesterol, lower salt, lower CRP (i.e., lower inflammation levels, reduced risk of heart disease), reduced risk of diabetes, reduced instance of arthritis, etc., etc., etc.

Well, that’s a lot of words, and, that’s all for now. I’ll be chewing on all of this till we meet again. If you have any words or ideas, please share!