Ep. 1785 - How Healthmaxxing Is Destroying Men
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What historical health fads have influenced modern healthmaxxing?
For as long as we've had a country, we've had quacks who claim that they alone understand the secrets of human longevity. And they tell us that if we simply follow their advice, we can maximize our lifespan. Typically, the most popular quacks are the ones who demand that we sacrifice some enjoyable, commonplace activity in order to supposedly improve our health. Now, in the early 1900s, for example, a man named Horace Fletcher came up with the idea that if you wanted to avoid alcoholism, appendicitis, insanity, and a host of other illnesses, then you needed to chew your food obsessively hundreds of times to the point that it lost all of its taste before swallowing. He once chewed a green onion more than 700 times just to make sure that it was totally liquefied.
And appropriately enough, Fletcher became known as the Great Masticator. Not to be confused with the title claimed by Jeffrey Toobin on a Zoom call. This is Masticator. Fletcher quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, John Rockefeller, and the author Upton Sinclair. In fact, Sinclair reportedly wrote the catchphrase of the movement, which was, and I quote, nature will castigate those who don't masticate. Johnny Cochran himself could not have invented a better slogan. Now, in every case, when fads like this catch on, it's a sign of a deeper sickness that needs to be addressed. Fletcher was successful because at the time, the United States was transitioning from an agrarian society to an industrial one.
People began eating more processed foods and living more sedentary lifestyles, so indigestion became more common, among other health issues. There was also a widespread fixation on efficiency, and it became fashionable to see the human body as a kind of machine that could be optimized. Fletcher took advantage of the new health challenges and angst that the Industrial Revolution brought. The fact that his solution was nonsense didn't bother many people. They were terrified, and they wanted to extend their lifespans at any cost. Now, today we're seeing a very noticeable return of this kind of thinking. The health consciousness stuff, the health maxing, as it's called, has gone massively overboard, as you've probably noticed.
People are walking around with bracelets, tracking their vital signs every second of the day, like they're astronauts on the ISS. They're monitoring their heart rates, getting daily reports on their sleep habits, treating alcohol or sugar like it'll kill them if they look at it, counting their steps. It's now widely believed that it's impossible to live a healthy life without being an obsessive, paranoid lunatic, nevermind the fact that you're eventually gonna die either way. Just like the great masticator taught, people increasingly believe that they need to make life miserable in order to prolong it. Now, I feel it necessary here to issue what should be an entirely unnecessary disclaimer. which is that I'm obviously not saying that it's bad to try to live a healthy lifestyle.
Of course, that's not bad. That indeed is very good. You should generally eat healthy and exercise. I lift four or five times, four or five days a week. I run three or four days a week. Not exactly an Olympic athlete style training regimen, and I'm not exactly an Olympic athlete. But the point is that I'm saying all this as someone who gets a considerably above average amount of exercise. So this is not an anti-fitness, anti-health message. This is more of an anti-paranoia, anti-panic, anti-fragile OCD obsessiveness message. Now, in no small part, the panic I'm talking about is driven by podcasts that are going out of their way for one reason or another to turn people into weird hypochondriacs. And so here, for example, is footage from one of the biggest podcasts in the world.
And it's a clip that you may have seen in which Stephen Bartlett, speaking to Chris Williamson, describes the allegedly catastrophic effect of drinking a few glasses of wine. Watch.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What historical health fads have influenced modern healthmaxxing?
0:00–11:17
2
How has the obsession with health tracking affected men's lifestyles?
11:17–18:57
3
What are the dangers of extreme health consciousness?
18:57–29:32
4
How do healthmaxxing trends create anxiety around alcohol consumption?
29:32–48:39
Speakers
5 identifiedMore from The Matt Walsh Show
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