MALTA: Mortification of the Flesh

Editorial Comment Mortification of the flesh by Daphne Caruana Galizia ST.JULIANS, Malta, (Malta Independent), February 27, 2006 There was an exchange of words over supper the other night. Somebody suggested that people here are becoming unhealthier largely as a result of the food we eat and the exercise we don’t take. This runs counter to my own view, which is that the Maltese are healthier now than they have ever been before, and are living longer – a view that is largely borne out by the facts. The changes have not been slow, but fairly rapid in the context of our history, beginning mainly with the baby-boomer generation born in the aftermath of World War II. To my children, who live in a society where long life and rude health are the norm, anyone who puffs when climbing a long flight of stairs is unhealthy, and anyone who dies before the age of 80 has died too soon. To me, at that age, an unhealthy person was a sickly type – pale and weedy and possibly confined to a wheelchair – and 80 was an exceptionally great age. I remember my contemporaries expressing astonishment and disbelief at the fact that I had four grandparents. Many of them had never known or only dimly remembered one or both of their grandfathers, a factor that accords with the much shorter life expectancy of men. It was the same in the previous generation; neither of my parents knew their grandfathers. To very many of my schoolmates, the sole grandparent was a grandmother. There were even a few who had no grandparents at all. When people died at 70, it was considered a ripe old age and no one exclaimed “Oh my goodness, how did it happen?” It was old age, of course – things happened once you were past the age of 50. Now, if somebody dies at 70, we think it’s unusually young to leave the planet, because we have become accustomed to an age of departure hovering around 85. * * * Poor food, limited medical care, lack of awareness about health conditions, not enough self-care – all these were contributing factors to a shorter and less healthy life. And yet those who were old when I was a child were unusually strong and with a very efficient immune system, otherwise they would not have survived the dangers of infancy in early 20th-century Malta, at a time when around 50 babies and toddlers died every week. Today, children rarely die in infancy, unless it is because of the inexplicable phenomenon known as infant death syndrome (cot death), or a fatal congenital disorder. Even though the Maltese population is so very much larger than it was a hundred years ago, improved medical care, hygiene and better food mean that all of us are surviving into adulthood, with very few exceptions. The vast majority now reach what would have been considered a century ago as a truly grand old age. This is not the sign of an unhealthy or debilitated population, ruining itself with bad food and no exercise. * * * Of course there are going to be health problems. When you go on for so long, particularly if the main reason you survived infancy in the first place is because of strong medical care and minute parental attention, rather than an iron constitution and a strong immune system, then you are going to be tripped up by your health. You will also be living long enough to succumb to the sort of diseases that are associated with late middle or old age. In the first part of the 20th century, many people didn’t live long enough to develop cancer, or to be felled by a stroke or a heart attack – or, because of the horribly stressful nature of their lives (struggling for food every day, with no idea what tomorrow might bring), they got that stroke or heart attack at what would now be an unnaturally young age. I don’t think I am wildly off the mark in my observation that it is comfort, contentment and financial security, rather than diet and exercise, which are the major contributing factors to a long and relatively healthy life, as long as there is no wilful self-harm like heavy drinking and a great deal of smoking. Yet we have convinced ourselves somehow that the key to eternal life lies in restricting our food intake to starvation rations and punishing ourselves with compulsive exercise. Sometimes, this behaviour is contradictory: I know people who run for miles several times a week, and who eat tiny amounts and no sweets at all, but who then smoke. They would be better off giving up the cigarettes, throwing away their running shoes, and sitting on the sofa with a good book or DVD and a nice, big sandwich. Just as I suspect that happiness, together with moderation in all things, are the keys to a longer life, so I have noticed that sportive types who exercise all the time and who verge on the obsessive in watching what they eat do not live any longer than average, and sometimes die even sooner than couch potatoes. This might be because eating limited amounts of organic food, and exercising regularly, are not a barrier to certain diseases, including cancer. Yet it could also be because a regime of punishing exercise and restricted food rations mimics the unfortunate conditions under which the Maltese lived in the first half of the 20th century, when they died fairly young: hard physical labour and very little food. The mitigating difference is that today’s people are not starving and punishing their bodies in conditions of financial deprivation, but even that is not enough. I see women my age who are so thin they are practically begging to be struck down by disease. Those who are unnaturally thin in middle age have fewer defences against ill health, and this quite apart from the fact that skinniness after the age of 40 makes you look older, not younger. It’s a high price to pay for being able to wear your daughter’s clothes. * * * When you ask people who exercise several times a week why they do it, when they are already so thin, they all say the same thing: “It makes me feel so good.” This is not the right justification. Plenty of things that are bad for you make you feel good, and several of them are illegal. The positive correlation between the act and the feeling is erroneous. Compulsive exercisers interpret the euphoric ‘up’ feeling which they experience after a particularly tough bout of physical exertion as their body’s reward to them for having treated it well. Really, it is nothing but the body trying to survive. Evolution did not take into account situations in which people would run or exert themselves extraordinarily just for the sheer hell of it. It did, however, allow for the fact that sometimes a human being would have to run away from a predator or an enemy with murderous intent, or to save an infant in trouble or to chase food that was running away on four legs, and so it arranged to have the body “pass the pain barrier” with the help of endorphin, once a certain level of stress has been reached. These are peptide neurotransmitters that occur naturally in the brain and have pain-relieving properties. Incidentally, this probably also accounts for the feelings of ecstasy which are described as being associated with religious self-mortification and even the pain of martyrdom. But this is the body’s emergency reaction, and when you have passed “through the pain barrier” the body is in coping mode, fighting to survive. While you’re running from Mdina to Sliema, the feel-good factor is nothing more than a natural drug that helps you get through the suffering of racing away from an enemy with a spear, or a sabre-toothed tiger. Do this regularly into middle age, and you have a greater chance of reducing your life span, rather than extending it. Some years ago, a man I knew who ran every day and ate little died, while running, at the age of 55. Many of those who knew him expressed their astonishment at the fact that one so healthy could die so suddenly and so relatively young, but I wasn’t surprised at all, given the huge amount of punishment he put himself through. I have not read yet of a centenarian who, when asked the secret of her excessively long life, says: “Oh, I worked out at the gym four times a week, ran 10 miles every weekend, and ate only tightly-controlled portions of pulses, vegetables and fish.” Gentle exercise and the moderate consumption of food and drink are good. Compulsive exercise and obsessive self-denial of food are the modern-day equivalent of an impoverished past of starvation rations and hard labour at the coalface, if not also of that curious spiritual practice of mortification of the flesh. I always wonder why those who deny themselves enough food while beating up their bodies with crazy amounts of exercise hate themselves so much. It’s quite obviously not self-love or narcissism, but self-hatred. Suffering is never good for you. Those who suffer least live longest. * * * The Australian billionaire Kerry Packer is dead at the age of 68. His financial security and comfort should have ensured him a much longer life, but he was born with a health condition and spent large parts of his childhood in an iron lung. This is the second time he died, and the first time he did so, he described an experience which was very different to the accounts of those who had near-death experiences, and who said they saw lights at the end of tunnels, felt a welcoming embrace, or heard the voices of friends and family who had died. Mr Packer was clinically dead in 1990 and was resuscitated. He was besieged by questions from people who wanted to know for sure whether there is life after death, but had no one to ask because when people die, that’s the way they usually stay. His reply went around the world. “The good news is that there is no devil,” he said. “The bad news is that there is no heaven. There’s nothing.” This is when faith comes in very useful. Malta Independent © Standard Publications Ltd 2004