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Hospital work in medicine often tends to deal with bizarre manifestations of the wom-out dying, while office practice is more concerned with the careless living.
I don't dismiss the doc or his assertions. But I find it interesting that 110 years ago, his practice was filled with overweight, unhealthy people. Of the upper classes, probably - Manhattan?
Most people back then couldn't AFFORD to eat themselves fat. Which is why the Monopoly Man is always drawn to look like a meatball - that's how you revealed your class, back in 1932 when Monopoly was created. Overeating, idle, fat, and eventually sick.
Now it's the lower classes that really suffer - the same way.
What do they share, apart from a rich diet, and too much of it?
They share inactivity. People expect to ride/be taken just a couple of blocks. And this is a 70-year trend. Seen it in my own family - my father, overweight, sent to Europe to work for a year as the on-scene liaison between the (American) company he worked for, and a plant being put up for a subsidiary to be partly State owned.
So, foreign work, government money, American abroad...the whole nine yards. He was in Paris for a year.
His hotel was about a mile from his office. He had no car, of course - and no driver or account with any taxi service. He was expected to walk or pay his car fare.
He did walk, and on his own time he wanted to see more. He walked. And walked.
In a year's time he lost 50 pounds and was in the best health he'd been in decades. Or ever again - and that was including all the French lunches with cognac and other alcohol. They didn't mind heavy drinking, but they had no pity for Americans who couldn't walk. Or, who wouldn't learn French, but that's another story...butcher the French, and Parisians would politely help you with words and pronunciation. Start talking in English, and they'd turn away from you like you were dog droppings.
But the point is, this. PHYSICAL ACTIVITY is the key, here...I haven't read the book; maybe I should; but people who can't even read, are able to get some health back by just getting of their dead @ss.