So-called "soft" drinks and energy drinks have normalized unhealthy habits.
Americans are unhealthy, and not because we don't have nationalized medicine. This is not to say our medical system is perfect, only that it is hardly the Dickensenian dystopia our European friends imagine it to be. Even the poorest of Americans (particularly the poorest of Americans) qualify for Medicaid. Retirees and the disabled qualify for Medicare. And those in-between qualify for Obamacare or can afford their own health insurance. Sure there are issues - such as the gap in coverage between the very poor (below the poverty line) and Obamacare - in States where cold-hearted Republicans refused to expand medicaid. But the bottom line is, no one is actually paying these staggering medical bills you read about online. A poor person with a $100,000 ER bill from their motorcycle accident simply declares bankruptcy - a luxury that Student Loan borrowers don't have. Do I feel sorry for that guy? Well, he did own a motorcycle and thousands of dollars of tattoos. Guess he couldn't afford $100 a month for Obamacare.
But I have digressed already. I go to the local hospital once a year for a "checkup" and blood tests, because that's where my doctor's office is located - in the heart of the Death Star. And when you go there, you see a lot of unhealthy people, most of whom have health problems that are self-inflicted. If you go to the local Walmart, you see why. A guy in an electric wheelchair with one leg missing due to diabetes, is putting 2-liter bottles (like six of them!) of Mountain Dew in his grocery basket, filling the rest with potato chips and snack cakes.
We've known for centuries that rich foods and sugary foods are not healthy. But for some reason, in the last few decades, over-consumption of bad foods have become normalized. When I was a child, a Coke or Pepsi came in 6.5 ounce bottles or at worst, a 12-ounce can. Over the years, the soda wars have escalated. Pepsi started it all way back in the 1930's with the 12-ounce serving, arguing their soda was a better value than Coca-Cola's paltry 6 ounce offering. Such a deal, for a nickel!
I still remember the day, back in the 1990's when we were young and thin (-ish) that Mark came home and announced that the 7-11 now had something called a "big gulp!" that ran up to 44 ounces - a literal bucket of soda. Back then, we were young (-ish) and dumb (not-ish) and did stupid things like go to convenience stores to buy soda pops. And we bought big (-ish) big gulps (not ever the 44 ounce, as I recall) and gulped them down (as the name implies) and never thought about the long-term consequences.
It is akin to smoking. At one time in this country, nearly everyone - it seemed - smoked. Smoking was "normal" and anyone who was against smoking was seen as some sort of kook. How can smoking be bad for you? After all, the consequences weren't felt until later in life - at a time when people were not in general circulation anyway. So a 20-something smokes and thinks nothing of it. They will live forever.
The same is true for sugary drinks and other aspects of the American diet. When I was younger, I thought nothing of buying the occasional candy bar. Need a pick-me-up at work? A Coke and a Clark bar to the rescue - 400 calories and most of it sugar. Yea, that woke you up, the way cocaine wakes you up. Then you crash - so you repeat the process.
Energy drinks came along at a time when I sobered up with regard to soda pop. Most energy drinks are just concentrated soft drinks - but loaded with even more sugar (or worse, high-fructose corn syrup) and lots and lots of caffeine. But they are sold as being "healthy" and providing you with "energy" so they must be good for you, right? The gym rats at the gym all drink energy drinks, and look what great shape they are in! But again, the effects take decades to be realized and just because something doesn't make you drop dead right away doesn't mean it is healthy.
What is interesting to me is how these things became norms. The energy drink people didn't sell us energy drinks, but the idea of energy drinks and that they were "normal" and desirable. Oddly enough, they became popular not so much with health fanatics but with late-night partygoers and ravers, who would run out of energy after being wired on Ecstasy and dancing all night long. A quick shot of Red Bull and you've got wings, right? They created a normative cue that it was alright to do this.
Alcohol, of course, falls along the same lines. Drinking beer is a norm for younger folks, who later morph to wine and cocktails as they get older. Getting really drunk is a norm for college kids, and even as they pray to the porcelain throne and promise to God never to drink again, within a day or two they are having another beer.
Oddly enough, alcohol isn't far removed from the sugars that make soft drinks bad for you. I had to laugh the other day when a bartender (of all people) tried to tell me that drinking Vodka was good for you as it had no calories (after all, it is clear, right?). I laughed and told him, sorry, but alcohol does have calories, indeed about 100 per serving - at least what we used to call a normal serving. Like soft drinks and fast food, serving portions have increased over the years.
I am not sure what the point of all this is, other than to realize that what we think of as "norms" are often abnormal or self-destructive things. The television cartoon The Simpsons has been on the air a record 30 years or more. In an early episode over two decades ago, Homer decides to go on disability so he can "work from home" - another normative cue that has changed over time. To become disabled, he decides to gain weight and become morbidly obese - a whopping 300 pounds! That was considered to be alarmingly obese back then. I see a dozen people who weigh that much every trip I take to Walmart or indeed, anywhere these days.
Our norms have changed. Not suddenly so as you'd notice them, but slowly over time. It is only in looking back in time that we realize how dramatic these changes have been. Somehow, we've allowed ourselves down this road to unhealthiness in America and maybe the world. We've made a norm of over-consumption. Soft drinks, once an occasional treat for the children, are now adult beverages served at breakfast.
Yea, that. When I was younger, I thought nothing of going to McDonald's to eat. And I remember it was a big deal when they started serving breakfast. Breakfast at McDonald's? How weird! But we got used to that pretty quickly. Needless to say, though, I jumped out of my shoes the first time I saw someone order a McMuffin with a Coca-Cola at 8 O'clock in the morning. Soda-pop for breakfast? That's just not right. But somewhere along the line, people started doing this, or more precisely, no one told them it was wrong, weird, or bad for their health - probably by design.
It is akin to the opioid epidemic, which can be traced to one letter to the editor of a medical journal where the author - without any citation or evidence - opines that maybe opiates are not as addictive as first thought and that doctors should not be afraid to prescribe them for ordinary pains and aches. Dozens of medical journal articles later - many citing that letter to the editor as "proof" that opiates are non-addictive - we have an opioid crises, which profited certain people in the medical industry greatly and impoverished and killed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people in the process.
You see how this works. It's psychology and marketing. They convince us to do things that are contrary to our own interests by saying, "heck, everyone's doing it!" - sort of like how a teenager justifies his bad behavior to his parents - "All the other kids are doing it, why can't I?"
I guess that is why my mantra here has been act rationally in an irrational world - a world irrational by design. It is only after you've lived a life that you realize how much of what you thought were original ideas of your own are, in fact, suggestions made to you by others. I fell into the soft-drink trap and it took me years to bail out of it. I fell into other traps - health traps, financial traps, psychological traps - and like any trap, they are easy to get into, but often require you gnaw a leg off, to get out of.
So maybe there is a point to this. If you can spot these traps early on, you might save yourself a lot of grief. I recall that my parents warned me about drinking too much soda pop (yet the bought those two-liter bottles of the stuff, when I was a teenager). My Dad always told me to "save my money" but never got more specific than that. Deep down, we know when we are doing things that a bad for us - that little angel on our shoulder, our conscience, tells us so. But we talk over him and listen to the little devil instead.
It pains me to watch some of these folks who listened to the little devil. You can see they are going to be - or are in - a world of pain and discomfort - and there isn't much we can do about it.
Perhaps the only thing is to learn from it.
