Observing people and environment is my favourite activity when travelling. Like behavioral activation but without the clinical connotations. Particularly, if air travel. There is not much choice of to decide what to do and what people to meet. It’s just a random airport, with pretty much defined route to follow to the designated gate, confined space behind the security control of the airport and fellow travellers which are there by definition and irrespectively of one’s choice. We’re talking public, not corporate, airport terminals.

Air travel forces to down time – to be in some waiting hall or lounge and just wait for your plane to start boarding. That give plenty of time to watch people. And plenty of people to watch.

My recent trip was through Charleroi airport near Brussels. That’s a medium size airport connecting mostly low-cost flights all over Europe. I had several hours of wait time in between the flights. Not much to do. Observing people.

Before end of the travel the thought what stuck in my mind, based in the observations during this travel were that the landmark sight of the air travel is an obese person eating a sandwich.

That’s the second unscientific, if statistically significant, ‘data set’. The first one was done a few months earlier in Barcelona and wrote about it here.

But both data sets produce the same results – the observation implies that majority of people are obese and/or sick and do not seem to care about it.

What leaves me puzzled is the question Why? Is it their life choice to be fat and somewhat sick for the ‘privilege’ of being able to consume junk food and remain sedentary? If so, it’s OK. Or they do not know what to do to regain their health?

I guess the answer is a combination of the two. What makes me think so? First, why people don’t care. Once the majority is fat, this becomes the mainstream ‘look’ and the social pressure disappears. More than that, ‘fat shaming’ has become socially unacceptable behaviour. So, no pressure dear fat person – keep doing what you’re doing, you’re fine, you’re like most people, we [the system / the matrix] got you covered. And, yes, don’t worry – once you get really sick [and collective health stats suggest that it is a very high probability event], we got you covered as well [all those hospitals and doctors …].

Second, do people know? My guess is that the general answer is ‘no’. What makes me think so? Conversations with people from another group – who are not yet obese but have put on some weight and starting to do something about it. That something usually is to start to go to gym. Great, but it will not help to get slim per se. Experiment with fasting. Great, if done right. Then seeing me eating top quality ham and wondering out loud ‘how can you lose weight eating ham?’. Big fail. We’re talking here Iberian ham from free range acorn-fed Iberian pigs from brands like Joselito of 5 Jotas. Teach your body to burn fat, and nothing teaches it better than eating low carb, high protein food. That ham falls into that category – it’s clean from any nasty stuff like residual antibiotics, has around 30% protein and no carbs. Do fasting, but keep you stress hormones in check and vary length and frequency to maintain efficiency. Gym? Great healthy benefits, but weight loss is unlikely to be one of them (the opposite can easily be true). Indeed, by far the most people don’t know.

There’s a third factor. Indoctrination and conditioning. Indoctrination comes from as early as primary school years when the concept of healthy eating was based on infamous food pyramid by Ancel Keys. Conditioning comes from, like a grandmother who’s lived in post-war era when food was scarce, and a typical thesis was ‘to treat bread with dignity’ – to the point of as to kiss it if it falls on the floor. That’s all fine. But fast forward to nowadays. The food pyramid is written off as outright wrong and promoted based on manipulation of research data so that the data fit the curve and ‘prove’ the hypothesis. Hardly anybody looks at Ancel Keys as the initiator of mass murder. Well, what about the grandmother? Even with that content there are at least two problems. First, the ‘bread’ was used as synonym for food. In those years when food was scarce, grains were the easiest available ingredient – and still remains so. But it does not mean that it is the best of food. Reframe this conditioning from grandmother – respect food, but take grains out of equation. Second, at the times when the grandmother was performing this conditioning the bread was not as it is today. The grains the bread was made from did not contain residues of nasty pesticides and herbicides and were not grown in soil depleted by modern agricultural methods, and the bread itself was not neither fortified by adding synthetic form of vitamins (as an example, folic acid) and plentitude of other chemicals – oxidants, emulsifiers, preservatives.

Basically, bread is not the bread it was. It never was the best of food but by now it’s outright junk food. It is so widespread because it can be produced from highly subsidised crops (predictable and profitable income for farmers), it is easier to harvest, transport. And storage is the easiest. This makes bread a great product for business at all stages from field to local sandwich shop. The flour is an addictive substance – metabolically one step from sugar. And who has not heard that sugar works through the same pathways in the brain as cocaine??? This makes it easy for the sandwich shop to sell it with the best of markup. Cheap, addictive, easy to store …

Unfortunately, this commercially bright bread story comes at expense of consumers’ health. There’s even claim that consuming white bread is worse than starving as white bread leads to losing vital minerals. Yet, people willingly consume it. Most of them daily with every meal without giving much thought to it. Those people willingly chose to play within the matrix.

The matrix is a controlled environment created by big corporations for their self interest, accidentally not aligned with the interests of the consumers, and exercising their influences that the world functions in line with what is their view how it supposed to function. Any doubts about it? Try to find the history of how folic acid, soya lecithin and canola oil among others came to existence – indeed, those were waste of industrial processes and/or in surplus production, by-products/waste which through lobby of the corresponding corporations were directed into the food chain where they should never belong. Then, this redirection was made the new normal and obligatory. By now, it’s omnipresent and pushed forward in even more countries.

The consumer is effectively ripped of choice if to eat unfortified bread or fortified or to have tap water with fluoride added or not. There’s one choice. Choice made by the corporations and people running the matrix.

And most people seem to be comfortable living within the matrix. Even if it means being obese and sick. For the ones who make this choice and are unwilling to question if there are better options, all is good. For the rest of us, who are aware of the matrix the environment becomes more challenging by the day but still possible to manage.

Let’s try to live healthy and do not give our money support corporate interests. Let’s try to deliver other people who are ready to listen. There are numerous innocent victims. They didn’t know and, therefore, they died. At any moment of time there with high probability there’s somebody who’s dying from lifestyle diseases. Some of them are ones who could be saved –  they wanted to live differently, they wanted to preserve and regain their health but they lacked knowledge, they were unconscious about the matrix, they trusted the system … and they died or soon will die. It’s too late to save them, but there are millions of people who can and should be saved. That can be done by delivering to them the knowledge (not easy, the truth is being obscured more and more) for them to decide if they are willing to chose themselves and do what’s best for them.