Setting Up Sailors for Failure

As YodaMan and I get old and gnarled, our bodies have begun to break down and do funky things. For example, after a lifetime of eating what he wants, running five miles four or five days a week, and living large, YodaMan suddenly has hit a wall with his running times, has trouble building muscle mass like he used to, gets an upset tummy (aww, poor baby) when he eats shit food, and has elevated cholesterol.

This last issue has become a definite issue for him. He's going to be tested again in December, and if his levels haven't improved, he'll end up on statins.

Now, I fully back pharmaceuticals. Well, maybe not fully. There are plenty of bullshit drugs and prescription frequencies out there that I think need to be questioned. Examples: just because a kid as never been disciplined a day in his life and is therefore prone to random acts of tantrum doesn't mean he needs to be on Ritalin; just because someone pees five times a day doesn't mean she's got an issue and needs meds for hyperactive bladder - she probably just drinks enough fucking water, thank you very fucking much; when a dude shows up because he can't get a boner, maybe instead of prescribing a boner pill, perhaps we should teach him about proper nutrition and see if his healthier arteries don't get the boner job done for him.

But overall, I thank the gods I live in an era with antibiotics and blood pressure pills and thyroid hormones and the like. They've saved lots of people who perhaps couldn't be treated normally for a variety of reasons.

At the same time, I'm loath to see our population prescribed a bevy of drugs, and especially as we age, considering it normal. It's not normal. Check out the China Study and tell me we can't live drug-free and healthier through proper nutrition and exercise alone. Tell me we can't tell subsidized factory farms to stuff their disease-producing foodstuffs up their asses (for one, we could at least stem the looming threat of drug-resistant bacteria and rising tides of avian (poultry farm) and swine (pork farm) flu).

One of the drugs I'm very nervous about is statins. My sperm donor cycles through statins. He needs them because he functions under the common belief that eating chicken and turkey instead of steaks and pork means he's not overconsuming cholesterol. He goes off of them because of sudden onset of pain that has landed him in a morphine cloud in the hospital for a week. This is a NOT uncommon side-effect of statins. A friend of mine was prescribed statins, and he also started feeling pain within a week of taking his first pill. It was a slow build for him, but the man who once hiked and swam and sky dived and did all sorts of mad crazy physical activity suddenly was too tired and hurting too much to deal with them. Until he took himself off the statins. And then he was fine.

But statins are apparently the Thing To Do when you've got someone with cholesterol problems. Never mind that cholesterol consumption happens any time you eat an animal product. It's in dairy. It's in meat. And yes, meat includes fish. The thing is, despite what the meat industry lobbyists FDA recommends, we don't need meat or animal products every day. In fact, we don't need them at all. We only consume them because we have this mistaken belief that they're healthy. Also, we're just *absofuckinglutely certain* we just couldn't live without these ingredients in our diet. "OMG I'd be a vegan, but I can't live without cheese!" I used to say that. Then I developed a dairy allergy. Guess what? You can have something even tastier, and it's not going to clog your arteries and induce a heart attack when you're 48.

Shocker, I know.

YodaMan is Southern born and bred, and he was raised in his family's grocery store, so he's accustomed to eating whatever the fuck he wants to eat. Ding Dongs? Sure! Steak and mashed potatoes? Absolutely! A huge glass of milk with sugar and vanilla in it? Um, okay. He's never really questioned his diet until I started making healthier food full of legumes and leafy greens and fresh fruit and raw, soaked nuts (the best kind of nuts, hur hur) ground up and flavored and made into alfredo that won't induce a heart attack (did you know fettucine alfredo is the most common last meal of heart attack victims? now you do).

Now that he's being threatened with statins, which he will be forced by the government to take as a requirement of his continued employment, he's interested in dialing back the added chicken and steak and fish and shit he's been preparing for his own meals. I figured it was time for The Talk every vegan inevitably has with an omni spouse.

Me: Have you considered maybe only eating meat maybe two days per week? You could even just cut out all animal shit for the month prior to the cholesterol test, and that will put your numbers back to normal.
YM: Yeah, but I'm actually interested in not dying, too. Heart attacks suck.
Me: [wiping away tears of joy] Reeeeeeeally?! We can do that.
YM: Except that it will all go to shit when we deploy.

And he's right. The options for food on the ship are absolute shit. There have been vegetarians and vegans serving with YodaMan who had to dip into unmentionable meals because they were on the verge or already suffering from malnutrition. It's understandable that it's hard to get fresh fruit and veg on the ship when you're trying to be all sneaky or are relying on unreliable food sources. But what the fuck? If our government is so interested in having healthy sailors, shouldn't they be more diligent in ensuring nutrition is healthy? None of these fat-laden, cholesterol-heavy, meat-centric meals with the occasional canned-veg side dish. It makes no sense.

Why isn't our military looking at ways to cut health care costs to Tricare by providing solid nutrition to deployed service members? Why aren't they trying to extend their service members' energy levels and mental acuity by ensuring they have the proper balance of vitamins and minerals from sources as fresh as they can possibly make them? Why are they subjecting service members to fatty, high-sodium piles of cooked corpse and soggy boiled veggies, and then dinging their service records when their physical readiness takes a downturn?

Thank the gods that hasn't happened to YodaMan. Yet. We might have to find a way to get him healthy food on the ship during his next deployment and just take the financial ding when he's charged for meals he can't or won't eat*.

Better yet, let's see if the military will ever step up and introduce meal options that are actually a little bit healthy. I bet, if nothing else, the food will actually taste better. It couldn't get much worse, from what I hear**.

*Since officers are charged for a full day of meals during underways and deployments, regardless of whether they're actually eating the food.
**Unless you're serving on a submarine.