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171: The "best kept secret in environmental leadership"
Episode 171
I love watching Dr. Michael Gregor's videos on nutrition.
A common theme of his videos is how medical school barely teach doctors nutrition and exercise despite how important they are for health. He shows how industrial food companies promote profit over healthy diets and expensive, risky medicine over avoiding foods and sedentary lifestyles that cause the problems they purport to solve. He provide his videos for free to make available what saved his grandmother's life: healthy food.
I see diseases from eating junk and living inactively like headaches from hitting your head against a wall. You can take medicine to decrease the pain, but stopping hitting your head against the wall will work better, cost less, and result in no side effects.
Likewise, you can take medicine to fix the problems from a standard American diet, but you might as well switch to vegetables, fruit, legumes, and other foods that don't sicken you. They taste better and cost less when you learn how to shop for them.
Actually, changing to fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, etc in my experience worked better because besides the health and cost benefits, it's delicious, which not hitting your head against a wall doesn't match.
He's posted hundreds of videos worth reposting, but I'm choosing today's because it's relevant to environmental leadership.
He published the transcript, which I'm going to read from and comment on to show its relevance to environmental leadership. I believe what he calls the best kept secret in medicine can guide us to the most valuable lesson for environmental stewardship and clean air, land, and water.
I recommend watching the video if you haven't already.
https://youtu.be/0W_OBRmAz2Y
Dr. Gregor starts:
Even though the most widely accepted, well-established chronic disease practice guidelines uniformly call for lifestyle change as the first line of therapy, physicians often do not follow these guidelines. Yet lifestyle interventions are often more effective in reducing heart disease, hypertension, heart failure, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and deaths from all causes than almost any other medical intervention.
I add:
The same follows for environmental leadership. Everyone knows that lifestyle change to pollute less is the most effective way to protect the environment, but few environmental leaders do. On the contrary, they tell others to but they don't themselves.
Case in point: when I thought about, say, coal miners in Kentucky, when I thought about them losing their jobs, which would undermine their longstanding communities, I would say that while challenging, the coal miners have to accept that times are changing, that their field pollutes, and they have to change. However it affects their job, their family, and their community, they have to change.
But then when I asked myself about, say, reducing flying, I would think, “sorry, I can't change, my job requires it.” or my family requires it. Same with eating less polluting foods, reducing plastic, etc.
That is, when I thought about others changing, those others have to accept the change personally for the good of the species. When I thought about myself changing, the exceptions I didn't accept from others, I thought the world had to accept from me.
In other words, I was very slippery on applying difficult standards on others to myself. I don't know you, but if you've flown or used unnecessary plastic recently, you're probably equally slippery. You probably hide it from yourself, as I did, which we call denial. Denial is easier than changing your lifestyle, but it also twisted me up inside, since part of me knew I was lying to myself, which was all the more twisted for someone pursuing and teaching leadership.
Published on 6 years, 8 months ago