Let’s start with a truism: exercise is good for your health
Let’s be more specific: Regular and moderate physical exercise, for example one hour of walking a day, is excellent for physical and mental health.
Let us now be more documented: in the vast majority of disorders and diseases in the West, the benefits of physical activity are far superior to the action of all medications. The studies and publications that prove it are innumerable and one can even wonder why it is necessary to carry out studies to confirm millennial evidence.
Let’s end with a more peremptory and less expected assertion: this superiority of physical activity does not only concern diabetes, hypertension or obesity, as is already admitted, but also depression, cancers, heart failure , heart attacks, asthma, insomnia, autoimmune diseases, trisomy 21, bipolar disease, chronic pain and so many others that the academy does not even dare to mention for fear of cutting pharmacology .
However, the most serious disease of the West is excessiveness. After having once again consensually admitted the superiority of physical exercise over all ancient and modern therapies, we expected to see pedestrians again invading the streets and paths and rust corroding the elevators and escalators. Nothing happened, the muscle market masked the interest in emptying the trash by the stairs, walking to the bakery or school, and cycling to work. Because each threat on a market results in the creation of compensatory or collateral markets. The threats to tobacco have created the market for patches and vaporizers, which are probably also toxic, without weakening the tobacco companies. Similarly, threats to the pharmacology of physical inactivity have created the muscle market with its multiple fitness rooms, sometimes accessible by elevator from an underground car park. The villages have created health trails dotted with equipment that was soon abandoned and immediately dilapidated, instead of clearing their communal paths. We sold magnificent fluorinated sportswear and shoes that you just have to put on to already have the feeling of running.
The organization of competitions has become very lucrative. We programmed absurd and dramatic ones, ironman, ultra trail of Mont Blanc or marathon of the sands, leading to convulsions, dehydration or cardiac hypertrophies amputating the quantity of life.
The worst is the doping that professionals pay for in the sorry state of their old age, but which also, if not more, concerns amateurs, because the idea of competition quickly becomes obsessive in a world where nothing is free.
With unreason, chemistry always ends up winning.
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