Diet, Nutrition and Active Lifestyle
Thousands of pages, millions of words, appear daily on the subjects of Diet and Nutrition. Nearly everything that appears in newspapers and magazines is hopelessly inaccurate, dangerously bad and stupid. Nutrition is a science whose main principles were laid down nearly 100 years ago and have been added to rather little since in spite of what some propageese say about 'recent advances'. The important thing from a practical point of view is how to use that science in advising what a person should eat, and here we can go back even further to words written more than 200 years ago. In brief, informed common sense will do: unless there are special complications of a medical kind there is no need for any fuss about diet and the world would be a healthier place if all the nutrition writers were sacked.
For more detail see "Simple Simon's Guide to Diet and Nutrition", published jointly and available from us, Amazon or bookshops. The book includes simple ways of working out the calorie (energy) content of foods and your Body Mass Index. Don't expect the usual guff. This is the truth as near as we know it, and may make uncomfortable reading.
We call it Simple Simon's Guide for two reasons. The first is the old English drinking game where you have to do exactly what Simple Simon says. (It must be what he says. If he says one thing but does another, and you copy what he does, you buy the next round of drinks.) The second is the old English nursery rhyme where Simple Simon wants to buy a pie but hasn't the money to pay for it. (Healthwise, he was better off without the pie.)
The main messages are simply these, that if you eat a sensible range of foods and only enough altogether to maintain a sensible body weight, there is nothing to fear. Deficiencies of vitamins and other nutrients are rare except in people who for some reason like drought, famine, isolation, ignorance, mental illness, advertising or being locked up in prison are unable to make those choices for themselves.
Activity and Lifestyle
Millions of years of evolution have produced a species, Homo sapiens, modern man, built for strenuous effort every day to escape being eaten by leopards. Sitting down all day was not an option. Because of that inherited, genetic characteristic we need activity to remain healthy; yet our technology is now so advanced that we can almost completely avoid exercise and many people do. Lack of exercise is one of only two reasons for the present-day epidemic of obesity. It is also one of only three reasons for the epidemic of heart disease. We must plan deliberately to replace the exercise that once was unavoidable.
21st Century advises that every able-bodied person should make arrangements so that their ordinary daily life includes ample walking, to and from work, out to the shops and so forth. By walking 4 or 5 miles a day you may not approach the amount of activity required of someone living in Africa 100,000 years ago, but you get 90%, of the protective effect of exercise on the heart and arteries. Plus, it will help you lose weight! Sport and the gym are extras, good for you perhaps, but inessential.
Active Life - for ever?
Physical and mental activity need not decline as we get older, nor will a normal man want to be like an ageing pop star with bouffant hair and a pseudo-tan. At VIR, we think more about function than appearance and say with confidence to our clients that the average man can have a fully active and enjoyable life in respect of sports, work (if necessary), travel, pleasure and sex, at no matter what age. This is a step beyond ordinary medicine, which treats only people who are actually sick or seeks only to maintain an average quality of life. We say that the average is already unnecessarily low and we can help almost everyone to an experience of health well above that. How is it to be achieved? There is no single answer. We evaluate you without preconceptions and then make recommendations based on a detailed knowledge of the person concerned and the various tests necessary to exclude pre-existing diseases or to indicate what would be the best form of help.
Strength and Fitness
Sheer bodily strength and muscle bulk have little to do with health except that a man may feel better about himself, and that is already important. A gym is not the best place to achieve good health; muscle strength and bulk, yes, but not health; useful preparation for certain sports, yes, but not health itself. The best approach to health for a man is through moderation - building strength but not to an obsessive extent, ample activity but not necessarily to run a marathon, a mixed diet just sufficient to maintain an appropriate body weight, no smoking, alcohol in moderation or not at all, proper handling of stress, no worries about details like vitamins or fats. Moderation but not idleness. We believe that modern lifestyles are harmful precisely because they fail the moderation test - too much food, too little exercise, too much competitiveness, employers deliberately inducing stress, too much alcohol, smoking (the first fag of the day is one too many), too little time on the razzle or relaxing at home, too little variation in the day's activities, too many newspapers with their so-called Medical or Health correspondents. Most of these latter have no professional knowledge of what they write about, and are therefore dangerous.