Modern, unhealthy food is making inroads in Japan as well. Not a good thing, but at least it beats the Middle Ages.

There are those who say that we live unnatural lives today, and suffer for it. Our genes are those who survived thousands of years of physical labor and a low-fat diet, so when we now have the opposite, our bodies don’t know how to react. The result is an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and atherosclerosis.

Hogwash, say others. The lives of our ancestors were nasty, brutish, and short. Human life expectancy is at an all-time high and still increasing, even in the mature west, with about 5 hours a day. In the developing world, progress is much faster, as people are fleeing in droves from the “healthy” life of backbreaking labor and periodic famine.

There is certainly a tendency to make the past more romantic. The people who do so tend to be on the political left, but not all liberals hold this opinion. Some liberals have actually studied history, and it is hard to think of any period of the past that was not worse than our own time in numerous ways.

That does not mean we can learn nothing from it, however. You’d think it would be the conservatives who tried to conserve the few good points of a sad time, but even these tend to yearn for a glorious past that never was: Only their imaginary good times were more recent, some time in the previous century usually. But the decades without condoms but with coat hangers were not a paradise either.

That said, there certainly are new challenges today. Childhood obesity is rampant, and unless some solution is found, it will be very hard for them to reach the age of their parents and grandparents who put on weight later in life. Every process in the body goes much faster in childhood, and this includes the harmful effects of fat in the body. We recently learned that fat has another effect apart from clogging up arteries: It acts as a pro-inflammation agent. This seems to be why autoimmune diseases are rampant in today’s high-fat population.

(Notice that fat induces inflammation when it circulates in the bloodstream. As long as it is stowed away in the fat cells, it is more or less harmless, so a person with lots of fat cells can be obese and have very little fat in the blood, and a person with few fat cells can look normal but suffer from chronic fat poisoning.)

We should certainly do our best to avoid a return to the past, with its backbreaking child labor and tooth-breaking chaff-laden diet. This does not change the fact that some physical movement each day is extremely good for your health. The question is, can we as a society do anything about this, without installing video surveillance in the homes?

Yes, we can, and we already do. In Japan, physical exercise in schools is quite a bit more frequent and more strenuous than in the US, and while children there are fatter than their parents were, they are still lagging greatly behind on the obesity wave. Here in Norway, it has become normal for schools to provide fruit for children to snack on as an alternative to bringing in chips and chocolate. As long as the child does not already have a chronic disease, the school is ideally positioned to boost public health. It is already a prison to most of the kids, after all, so a little extra torture in the form of running a few laps won’t cause an armed uprising.

For the most part, however, our lives are our own. In other words, it is up to you and me to learn from the past and the present, then use this knowledge to build a better future. This future should follow a middle way, I believe. Moderation in all things. Then again, there is a saying that “moderation is for monks”. Strangely enough, monks tend to live long and healthy lives, but the option still remains less than wildly popular.