Health and Fitness Lies Exposed

By The Fit Advocate, Craig Pepin-Donat, International Fitness Expert and Author of “The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie”

If history has taught us anything, it is that when a business concept exhibits the potential for growth, companies and industries spread like a virus to expand and exploit the opportunity. From the meager beginnings of muscle-bound body builders, steel barbells, medicine balls and once-a-day vitamins, the health and fitness industry has transformed into a multi-billion dollar juggernaut. Health and fitness professionals have evolved from spandex and headbands to being highly trained sales and marketing snipers and your cash is their target.

Although the expansion of these industries and advances in modern technology have helped usher in a new era of quality health and fitness products, it has also opened the door for liars and con artists who could care less about your health. The trick is to understand how to maneuver through the marketing madness to find the truth. Sadly, the number of people who fall victim to quick-fix solutions that have no chance of helping them, is in the tens of millions. All the while, companies that sell cheap and ineffective products and services that guarantee unrealistic results profit at our expense.

Beyond the scams and rip offs designed to separate you from your hard-earned cash, there are people, companies, industries and even government agencies with hidden agendas designed to sabotage our attempts to improve our health. This is the big, fat health and fitness lie at work. It's not a conspiracy theory; it is simply the undeniable truth that you will see once the facts are known. There will be no shortage of people who stand to profit from those who do not know the truth and they will do everything possible to refute these facts. Just remember that when it comes to big business and their profits, the fix is in and billions are spent to keep consumers in the dark. You will need to rely on the one thing that marketing cannot spin - your common sense.

Let's start with a simple truth that helps feed the big, fat health and fitness lie. That truth is that the average person would much prefer to go on a diet or take a pill than exercise. This is why the fitness industry at $15.9 billion in annual revenue pales in comparison with the diet and weight loss industry, which exceeds $40 billion. Even the supplement industry outperforms the fitness industry with over $20 billion in annual revenue. Yet with a success rate of sustained weight loss as low as 5 percent, more than 50 million Americans line up each year to go on a diet. Why? The answer was simple. When people think about exercise, they relate it to work. Even the phrase we use to describe exercise is to "work out." The truth is that the average American spends the majority of waking life working, so who wants more work? When work is done, we want to play, we want to relax, we want to escape from the reality of work and exercise is the last thing most people want to do. This creates the desire for a shortcut to attain health and fitness results. Once the need for the quick-fix solution has been established, enter the parasites who feed off that desire.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The smoking gun that reveals the real truth about the state of health in the U.S. is the stratospheric revenue within the pharmaceutical industry. Between 1995 and 2005, prescription drug sales have increased by 249 percent to a staggering $251 billion on over 3.6 billion prescriptions written annually. This doesn't include the $17 billion we spend on over 100,000 over-the-counter drugs that contain more than 1,000 chemical compounds. As you peel back the layers of the lie, you quickly realize that these record-breaking numbers are made possible by drugs that treat conditions and diseases that are largely self-inflicted or forced upon us by accomplices that stand to profit from our ill health.

Not convinced? Consider that heart disease is indisputably the number one killer in the U.S. and claims approximately 700,000 lives each year, which according to the Centers for Disease Control accounts for 29 percent of all deaths. Now consider that two of the main risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease are high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol. Although both conditions can be mitigated largely with improved eating habits, physical activity and other lifestyle changes, there are over 100,000,000 people diagnosed with these two diseases every year and given prescription drugs instead of given preventive measures. The 2007 estimates of direct and indirect costs associated with cardiovascular disease are $431.8 billion and $66.4 billion for high blood pressure. Drugs designed to reduce cholesterol and triglycerides are the top therapeutic class of drugs with $32.3 billion in sales.

The Federal Drug Administration has an interesting way of dealing with or modern-day health crisis, which is to label as many conditions as possible as a "disease." This is important to know because according to the FDA, only a drug can diagnose, mitigate, cure, prevent or treat a disease. It is interesting that even obesity is now categorized as a disease. The truth is that obesity is not a disease at all. We didn't catch obesity; we developed it bite by bite, pound by pound. Big Pharma would have you believe the mantra of "Better living through chemistry," but I'm not buying it and neither should you. Yes, there are drugs that are necessary and many that save lives, but the truth is that we have become a nation of prescription drug addicts who look to our physicians as the first line of defense for whatever ails us. The solution we find is in the cure-all prescription pads that provide us with toxic, synthetic chemicals that only trick the body and treat the symptoms while the true cause of our failing health is left to fester. When was the last time you walked out of your doctor's office without that little piece of white paper? How quickly did you drop it off at your local drugstore?

Unfortunately, the problem with our failing health is not one-dimensional. Beyond the obvious lack of preventive measures to fend off deadly, life-threatening diseases, there are many forms of addiction that contribute to unhealthy lifestyles and lead us down the path towards poor health. Many of these addictions go unrecognized or fly under the radar of conventional thinking. Consider that the number one reason people do not exercise regularly is that they can't find the time, yet the average American watches over four hours of television per day. Not many people would consider watching TV as an addiction, but with one click of the remote, we enjoy instant escape from all the work we want so much to put out of our minds at the end of the day.

Then there are those who like to unwind at the end of each day with a few drinks. No one is trying to bring back prohibition, but could you give up your happy hour for a month? Consider that an average drink has approximately 125 calories. That means just two drinks per day equals over 7,000 calories per month. It only takes 3,500 excess calories to pack on one pound of fat, not to mention the fact that when consuming a few drinks before a meal you are eating under the influence. It's always easier to say yes to seconds or that chocolate mousse cake with a little help from an increased blood alcohol level. It's the little addictions like these that sneak up on us.

Okay, so you can't live without the brew. So you decide to at least cut back on those dreaded calories by purchasing low-calorie, sugar-free, fat-free packaged foods to make sure that we don't get fat. But just as these products have increased in mainstream America over the past few decades, so too have our waistlines. We have been duped into believing we can eat more and weigh less, but it doesn't work that way. If you want to weigh less, you have to eat less and move more. Weight gain or loss is a simple formula of calories consumed versus calories burned.

Another critical issue that impacts our health is toxic exposure. There are many forms of toxicity that most people don't recognize that can slowly and quietly destroy our health and make us ill. Consider the synthetic chemical sweeteners designed to keep us thin that are laced in thousands of packaged foods, or the industrial waste product, sodium fluoride that is pumped into our water supply and dental hygiene products. Or what about the chemicals that are routinely injected into our food supply to extend shelf life and improve the color, taste and texture? It's all good, right? Wrong! It's all bad.

Our bodies operate with 11 complicated systems all designed to work together to create a state of homeostasis in an ever-changing environment. There are literally trillions of natural chemical reactions that take place in order for the body to operate optimally. When we introduce synthetic chemicals into the mix, they disrupt the body's natural function on a cellular level. The effects of toxic exposure may not be recognized immediately, but over time, they eat away at our health and ultimately, there is a price to pay. Symptoms of disease will rear their ugly head, and when they do, we treat them with more chemicals in the form of prescription drugs.

Perhaps the biggest toxic exposure of all is the one that is responsible for as much as 80 percent of all disease - stress. We are forced to work harder than ever before in history to make ends meet. We strive to live the American dream of financial freedom, but only a small fraction of the population realizes the dream. The rest are left struggling under a mountain of debt. The majority of every waking moment is spent trying to make more money to buy things we have been conditioned to believe are important when our health and the time we spend with the ones we love are really the most important things in life. Indeed, the big, fat health and fitness lie runs deep, but there is also truth and where there is truth, there is hope. The answers are there for the taking, if you dare open your eyes to see them.

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