Think Integral: Healthy Eating, Happy Living

An Ongoing Dialogue with Michael Ostrolenk about the Integral Concept

Kevin Rollins: You’ve said you’ve just recently read Fast Food Nation [by Eric Schlosser].

Michael Ostrolenk: I’m actually just finishing it. I find it really fascinating and it adds to my growing critique of the misnamed free-market system that we have. It gives more ammunition about the corporate socialism that we have. That there are maybe five to ten major companies in any arena that control the various industries. 12 meat processing companies that control everything -- that means all of the cattle and dairy farmers are slaves to twelve companies. And 12 companies can decide what happens to any one farmer by just cutting them off and just destroying them if the farmers decide “we don’t like what this producer in our region is doing.”

KR: It’s hard for one farmer or one small group of farmers to stand up against the massive infrastructure that’s there. We see consolidation in a lot of industries, and on the other side the worker, who has basically been turned into a machine and they’re disposable and replaceable, doing one thing that they’re committed to doing until they’re useless and thrown away..

MO: And that’s exactly the message I got from the book. and it leaves me some interesting questions about markets and liberty.

I’m a free-marketer. I believe that two equal people should be able to exchange goods and services based on their own decisions. But, a foreign-born worker who barely speaks English, or an undereducated American teenager or non-teenager -- are they really equal to a corporation?

KR: There’s definitely an information problem, one person has all the information about the job, because they’re running the company and they’ve been running it for a long time. The other person doesn’t even understand the legal systems. Not to say government will fix this, but there is definitely a problem there that should be discussed.

We can have compassion for the worker and think about ways to fix it without going to big government and getting government involved in every aspect of the process, because government is also a giant bureaucracy that people don’t understand and much like the foreign worker feels about the corporation, the average citizen feels that the government is foreign -- its rules, its language -- “bureaucratese,” so its almost a similar kind of situation.

MO: And then you have the whole infrastructure -- how all the cattle farmers and potato farmers, with McDonald’s for example or one of these other companies, control vast marketplaces for their end products -- french fries or hamburgers --and that control is kind of disturbing. And as someone who believes in the principle of the free-market -- is it really free if a select number of organizations or companies control such vast amounts of resources in such a way that they would actually reduce and limit competition and in the marketplace and then go to government to advance their own goals abroad and to control competition in the states-- to limit unionizing of the workers?

And unions have their own problems, similar to governments and corporations, in terms of when they get too big and bureaucratized and to concentrated in power, where they no longer serve the interests of the union members. But, the more I read these things, the more I become pro-union... and pro-business at the same time.

KR: What kind of solutions did you think about when you read these problems in the book or that you know about otherwise?

MO: I think this is about how the infrastructure of our food system, but I would take even another step back from that. It is not just about that, it is about our choices, how we live our lives, and what’s leading us to, as a culture, and as a society to choose fast food.

People can decide what to buy and what not to buy and if they decided to spend their money differently. I think some of these restaurants would follow suit. So even before questioning the whole infrastructure of the fast food industry, I would question the cultural infrastructure of the choices we’re making in terms of the food we eat.

KR: So, it goes back to our personal decisions? So the big picture problems aren’t going to go away until we fix our individual decisions?

MO: Individual and collective decisions. There are some decisions that any one individual cannot effect. I’ll give you an example... You went to public school?

KR: Yeah.

MO: You really can’t choose what you eat when you’re at public school -- in terms of the school food provided. Someone in the school bureaucracy decides what to be brought in and what’s served to the students. If you changed the food that was provided in the school system, which are fed to young people, there is great evidence of changed behaviors of young children. In terms of how they learn, their ability to sit still and concentrate, their grade levels, just by changing their diet.

KR: But I would imagine that the food meals program in the schools is plagued by the same kind of bureaucratic mismanagement we have in the rest of the school system.

MO: They have no idea about nutrition, no idea about food. The same mindset which would create a McDonald’s and make it a cultural phenomenon is the same mindset that would create the food choices that are available in school. Processed. That kind of covers everything. It offers very little nutrition. And then you have these corporations that are joining in with schools to provide them income because the schools are hard up for money. They’re putting in soda machines. Caffeine, phosphoric acid, and sugar that’s in the soda is all crap. And you wonder why kids can’t keep still and have trouble learning. Well, they feed them crap, basically. Crap in, crap out. Maybe we can clean this [interview] up with better language.

KR: We can have “crap” in the Free Liberal.

MO: Short term decisions... I can see wanting to bring in money to the school district. To bring in that crap is disturbing. But, it’s understandable because that’s the way most people think.

KR: We see obese kids. And kids are supposed to be active -- it’s unbelievable that we’ve let this happen.

I heard a commercial on the radio, “Is your kid morbidly obese?” Well, take away the video games, take away the sugar coke, give them something nutritious and send them out to play with their friends. These are all signs of a highly unnatural way of living.

MO: Very unnatural.

MO: A client of ours, the Campaign for Better Health, has a project that we’re working on with them to bring in organic food grown from farmers locally into school districts, which has multiple benefits.

One benefit is you bring in fresh produce, which isn’t full of all the herbicides and pesticides, and is full of vitamins and nutrients, so it’s really good for the children. It’s good for the farmers, because there’s a relationship that develops between the school district and the farmers. It is good for the local economy, because these are all locally grown foods, and the transportation is local.
KR: I was reading Kathy Oddenino’s newsletter, she was talking extensively about how we think we are going to be happy even if we don’t eat right. And we put garbage into our chemical bodies and we expect to be chemically happy. Are we crazy?

MO: It is like your car, would you put sugar water instead of oil? Would you put milk instead of gas? No!

There are appropriate things to make something run. Our bodies require certain things to operate appropriately. The crap that most people eat is just not appropriate for them.

Now, I’m not a food-Nazi, I don’t want to take the choices away from them, but more people need to be educated and some of these collective decisions being made on others’ behalf they need to think more clearly on the long term effects of decisions that they are taking. Like school lunches for children.

KR: What would you say are the most unhealthy things that people eat and what are their consequences psychologically, socially, and so on?

MO: I think the amount of soda people drink. Diet has its problem, regular soda has its problems. Let’s just say your regular soda -- sugar, empty calories -- it provides nothing for you except increasing your chances of getting diabetes. Caffeine dehydrates you, its a diuretic. What happens when your body dehydrates, your body is a living ecological system and it needs certain levels of liquid for you to survive. As you’re drinking the soda you are dehydrating your body and urinating more of your liquids out, not replenishing them with just plain water. Your body will attempt to reserve the liquid it already has in it, for the primary functions it needs, like the brain, which means it has to take water away from other organs and systems in order to protect the ones that keep you alive. Well, if you dehydrate these other systems, you are just asking for trouble. I think you are setting the stage for chronic disease.
Aspartame and the other additives that are found in the sugarless sodas or the diet sodas have their own problems. They are neurotoxic and yet kids are drinking five, ten sodas a day. They’re drinking this stuff which is having a deleterious effect on their brain and nervous system.

Caffeine, besides being a dehydrant, is a drug. I’m not in favor of regulating by the FDA and taking it away, but especially parents, need to realize that it’s a drug.

When I would work with people, they would come in with anxiety disorders and I would work on it integrally -- asking tons of questions about lifestyle, family life, and medical life and all that stuff and they would say, “I can’t sleep at night, and I can’t stay asleep when I’m asleep and I wake up really early.”
I would say, “OK, great, well tell me about your life.” And I would find out they were drinking coffee all day or sodas or day.

KR: No surprise, they can’t sleep.

MO: A can of soda is 60 mg of caffeine. And you drink 8-10 of those a day. Short term you might get something done, but what are the long term consequences of overstressing your body with caffeine, what does it do to your adrenal system? What will it lead to in terms of chronic health conditions -- which will make you less fun, healthy, happy and productive?

KR: One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how one biological problem can lead to a larger social problem. Let’s say you drink a lot of caffeine, and you eat a lot of food to feel good and get a lot of stuff done and then you get fat and out of shape. And then you feel bad about yourself , and if you’re looking for a person to go out with, have sex with, have a healthy relationship with, it’s harder to find. You become more ill and you eat more and more and you drink more and more caffeine... it’s kind of an endless cycle. Plus it costs money to do all these things. It’s a deadweight loss. It doesn’t make you happy. It doesn’t really grow the economy.

MO: Yeah, I think that’s interesting, the economy actually experiences secondary effects of less productivity, less happiness, medical costs. Can you imagine what it is going to cost to deal with all these fat people? The diseases that are going to result from it, and the cancer that’s going to result from it.

KR: Some might say that medical treatment increases the GDP, it creates a job for someone. But wouldn’t it be better to have a job for a service someone actually wants, rather than having to correct a problem that they didn’t want.

MO: There are some people that say storms are great because they destroy houses and then people have to come in and rebuild them.

KR: But that’s a loss because wouldn’t it be better if that same money was spent on something that would make someone’s life happier rather than just fixing damage? Moving forward rather than just keeping us where we are now?

MO: Which is the health care issue you just mentioned. You can employ doctors, but that’s because people are sick. Sick isn’t a good thing.