As most of you know, aside from my time spent as a traceur and a fitness advocate, I am also an employed personal trainer at my university’s gym. Sometimes I enjoy my work, and other times I feel horrible that I am part of an industry that makes its billions by misleading the general community as to what it means to be “healthy” or “fit.” This is one of those cases.
After a slight scheduling error with a client of mine, I found myself with an hour of time and no idea how to spend it. After some lounging around, a few Oly lifts and some muscle ups, I ventured my way back to the desk to find this magazine lying on the counter:
Fitness Magazine appears to be one of the many well known magazines that run a campaign based on good deeds, up to date health and fitness, and hope for their subscribers. This particular magazine enticed me in as one of their headlining articles was “Fitness Magazine’s 3rd Annual Healthy Food Awards!” I know better, but given the wide popularity of my “Planet Fitness. Scam.” article, I would like to share my thoughts.
The article can be found here and to demonstrate my point I want to go through this list with you and help you realize a very important trend. 50 Foods, not a one of them is actually food. No, the Reduced fat “natural” peanut butter is not real food. No, sir. Neither is the sliced ham, black bean burger, fruit chunks, or the “nature” chocolate chip cookies.
All of these food products are all highly processed, highly manufactured imitations of what food actually is. Yet a wide majority of them advertise in their name the buzz-words: Nature, natural, fiber, whole wheat, organic, fresh (there’s nothing fresh about them), healthy, or 100 calorie!
There is nothing healthy about these products and their ingredients labels are literally cluttered with chemical compounds that I’m convinced most chemists cannot pronounce. And yet, these people know the right answers. In fact, only several issues ago, they interviewed Michael Pollan and asked him his stance on food and what it means to eat healthily, and yet, none of his knowledge can be found in this magazine. This is the explanation for this inconsistency:
Fitness magazines are not created to help you become more knowledgable or more fit.
It’s against their business model. They are there to make money and if you were to learn the awful truth that there is nothing to sell in the health and fitness industry, you would no longer buy. Fitness magazine is a magazine full of well placed ads for their sponsors. It’s not obvious, I know. Everyone who buys magazines knows to shut your brain off when those big full page ads for Edy’s Ice Cream pop up, but the articles?
The articles are advertisements and the articles are big business. A fitness magazine with a subscriber base such as Fitness has a lot of market potential and power. Put an ad in, and demand has a potential to increase. Get a positive article, and you’re sitting in advertisement gold. This entire list is an advertisement for industrialized companies that sell products based on health fads. Low-fat this. Low calorie that. *
Here is a link to the nutritional data for 1 cup of raw kale. 33 calories?! Highly anti-inflammatory? 684% of your daily Vitamin K? I dare you to eat another cup of this and not feel full. Why is it hard to find this in a nationwide publication? Because the person selling kale lives in a house, down the road, and tends his small farm. He/she grows it, probably organically, and trucks it off to your local farmer’s market every couple of days to sell to you. He has no corporate sponsor. Answers to no industry. He doesn’t have some huge office building and I guarantee you he doesn’t feel the need to pay for adveritsement in a fitness magazine.
Knowing this, however, let’s go back and explore the wording used by these very clever editors.
Only nationally available products qualified.
or
Healthiest packaged foods.
These words are meant to confuse you. We live in a nation of multiple climates and regions. Not one locally produced good will always be available in every region. Thus, they must settle for industrially produced processed goods that can be packaged and shipped across the United States. To ship products in this way is only accomplished through massive processing to remove the food from it’s nutrients in an attempt to lengthen shelf-life. These foods are calories and calories only. Not nutrients. This list proved nothing, told you nothing, so you learned nothing.
Every purchase you make to these magazine companies is just money spent on pretty pictures, advertisements, and wasted paper. Cancel your subscription and go give that money to one of your local farmers, who have been growing and selling “Low-Calorie!” and “Healthy!” produce for generations. It does not have long shelf-life. It rots when you leave it out too long. It takes time and care to prepare. But, it is the only fool-proof method to eat healthy.
