Runs In The Family

      An old joke goes:  Doc., "Does obesity run in your family?"  Patient, "Nobody runs in my family".   Funny, but obfuscatory.  Much is made these days about chronic diseases that are hereditary in nature.  A constant refrain is, (insert chronic disease of your choice) runs in my family".  The clear implication is that there is nothing to be done.  Genetics wins out in the end, or if that doesn't convince, you may prefer the unhelpful verdict of "bad luck". 

     This is all, to put it gently, blithering malarkey.  Look at what your family ate and drank in the previous generations.  The degenerative and chronic conditions they suffered were directly related to what they ate. drank, and smoked.  Not bad luck, not genetics, and not the will of the almighty.  It is what they stuffed down their pieholes that was responsible for their many ills and seemingly inevitable cognitive decline.  And more and more frequently the sick aged population is expanding into not only into the middle-aged, but children as well.  No age group is immune to chronic diseases anymore.  Diseases which in large part are the wages of decades of carboholism.

     Obesity, diabetes, epilepsy, autism, and a wide variety of chronic diseases ever more afflict all age groups.  It's entirely fair to characterize this as an epidemic.  Our population is almost violently fatter than our parents generation, and their parents before them.  Walk into any grocery or big box store and behold the numerous parade balloon shaped people, male and female, old and young, galumping through the aisles.  Watch shopping carts fill to the brim with sugary sodas, cookies, crackers, chips, candy, ice cream, bread, pastry, potatoes, mac & cheese, pizza, "skim" milk, and margarine, on and on carbs without end.  Merely witnessing this is liable to spike your own blood sugar.  Those parade balloons did not get that way through "bad luck".

     So America, enjoy your diabetes, arthritis, psoriasis, heart disease, Alzheimers, atherosclerosis, fatty liver, kidney failure, depression, cognitive decline etc. etc. etc.  None if it is your fault because as we all know, those things run in the family.