Preaching the gospel of anti-fitness.

Dear Running Times:

Enclosed is an article which I have circulated among fellow runners, and needless to say we were deeply awed to learn that running causes your skin to age faster than normal.

I've been running for over three years, am 26 years old, put in about 50 miles a week and really enjoy it. However, this little article has been in the back of my mind for about a year now.

Could you please let me know if there is any evidence to substantiate this? My friends would also much appreciate an answer.

Very truly,

Charmaine C. McCann

Dear Charmaine,

I read the article that concerned you, and I've been looking into similar writings. Wondering if someone might have a contract out for us runner-types, I did some research and learned that my hunch was not just the notion of a paranoid psychiatrist. Might I now share with you, and your friends, what I discovered about who was writing these things, and why?

The assertions in that article can be pretty frightening. You even mention being deeply awed, perhaps because what you read came from the mouths of doctors. Please, don't be awed. Doctors are human and can be wrong. You can excuse that. But here we are seeing wrong motivation, and I don't know if you can excuse that.

Let me explain. Look again at that article. Closely. See if you can't detect something very obvious, and that is that both doctors fabricate a danger, and then come nobly to the rescue. One says running will kill you, or at least harm you, and then comes out with a "how-to" book which will save you from the evils of jogging. As every publisher knows, "how-to" books make money. The other insists that running ages skin prematurely, and saves the day by devising a special elastic mask for the jogger. (Incidentally, the latter's mailing address in Los Angeles, I've learned, is an establishment called "Beauty Pavilion.") The game these guys play is like one we played as kids. One of the older guys then, Louie, would shove one of us into the path of an oncoming truck, then quickly snatch him back with the claim, "I saved your life!" It was play then, but with these other guys, the stakes are much higher and the consequences more serious.

Let's look first at the skin-aging issue, since this seems to be your most pressing concern. Realize this: runners, particularly beginning runners, lose weight rapidly at first. They, or anyone who loses weight, may temporarily have sagging facial skin because of a loss of underlying fat and water. At first a runner may appear a little gaunt, but all he or she requires is reassurance, because in time the gauntness disappears. Plastic surgery is certainly not required. With redistribution of fluids and/or a regain of weight, the person's normal appearance is restored. Haven't you noticed that heavier people with fuller faces have few, if any, wrinkles?

I'll say more about the other doctor, but at this point, I want to touch on another element that causes confusion, one I characterize as "media-hype." Reporters are always after a story, and the more controversial, the better. One recent headline screamed: "New Study Links Low Cholesterol to Male Cancers." The lead paragraph then read:

      After many years of telling Americans that if they eat less meat
  and eggs and lower their cholesterol levels they may help avoid heart
  attacks, the federal government has released a new study raising the
  possibility that men with very low cholesterol may suffer more
  cancers.

Again, pretty scary! The sensational newspaper article was based on a responsible scientific article printed in the January 16, 1981 Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors of the original article do not in any way imply that low cholesterol is linked to--or in any way predisposes to--cancer. Rather, they speculate that the low cholesterols were also part of the destructive process inherently associated with the cancer itself.

Distortion and sensationalism may be the business of newspapers, and to some degree I suppose we can just shrug it off. But when it comes to physicians, on whose opinions the lives and health of a trusting public depend, I find the use of conscious distortion hard to forgive.

I refer first to the whole matter of diet and nutrition. Here, probably, is medicine's weakest area. Nutrition is a required course at barely one in four American medical schools. So the void created by this neglect is filled by a lot of quackery in the form of fad diets, and in the unscrupulous doctors promoting them. They are fakers and phonies presiding over a multi-billion dollar industry!

As a runner, you are probably concerned with what you eat. You've learned, I imagine, to eat as much fresh food (vegetables and fruits) as possible, and run to supplement your weight control (actually it has been shown that even after a run your basal metabolic rate continues to be elevated, and you burn even more calories over the next few hours than you would if you hadn't run). I imagine, too, that you have cut down on refined sugar intake, and on foods that contain cholesterol, because you are convinced that these products can be harmful. Right?

Well, some people in authority say they are convinced otherwise. From the ivory towers of Harvard University, we have heard from the famed nutritionist Frederick Stare, MD, that refined sugar is harmless and that junk food is "fun food." Stare has championed the cause of saccharine, additives, and white flour, and even testified before Congress, in 1970, on behalf of Kellogg, Nabisco, and the cereal institute. A grateful Kellogg Company, I've read, contributed $2 million to his department at Harvard soon after. There have been other such contributors over the years. An article entitled "Issues" by John L. Hess in Nutrition Action (9/8/78), lists about fifty large industries, a veritable who's who in American business, as generous donors to Stare's department. There is also a plaque over the entrance to Harvard's School of Public Health gratefully acknowledging the generosity of General Foods Corporation (the nation's second largest user of sugar). Is it any wonder then that in 1976 Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal, DNY, stated that Harvard's department was "riddled with corporate influence"?

Since I'm pointing a finger at the university's school of Public Health, that branch of the medical art dealing with preventive medicine, I should, to be fair, mention that preventive medicine is another weak sister in our field, but for a somewhat understandable reason: that we, as physicians, are geared by our training to treat sick people. This is where we derive gratification, and that is where--if it exists--lies the glamor. Unfortunately, there's much less immediate gratification and excitement in the prevention of an illness than in the successful treatment of one. If I told someone to exercise and eat sensibly, and he or she never had heart trouble, how would I ever know it was my advice that did the trick? I can remember the doctor coming to our home when my grandmother was in acute heart failure, and giving a shot or two that brought a dramatic turnabout in her condition. I was indeed impressed, and that experience was, I'm sure, part of my motivation to become a physician.

The anti-preventative bias of the food companies, I'm sorry to see, has now moved on from sugar to cholesterol. Just as most of us have learned (from our doctors) to reduce our consumption of refined sugar, so we've learned to cut down on the steaks, eggs, fries, and other sources of saturated fat which we understand to be a major risk factor in heart disease. Just last January, for example, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a study in which hundreds of men were followed closely over a twenty year period. The conclusion was that the fatty composition of the foods did indeed correlate directly with the level of the blood cholesterol, and therefore directly with the risk of death from coronary heart disease. Yet, just a few months ago, I noticed some very large headlines proclaiming that a new research report had found that healthy Americans need not reduce their intake of cholesterol after all!

This report was promulgated by the food and nutrition board of the National Research Council, a part of the National Academy of Science. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? But as it turns out, the National Research Council includes no clinicians, cardiologists, or public health experts; and no public or government agency had sought its opinion. Rather, it consists of two food company executives and some members who serve as paid consultants for food companies and egg producers. What better way to hype egg and meat sales than to generate newspaper stories "vindicating" the consumption of cholesterol, under the guise of the National Academy of Science!

Well, Charmaine, I'm getting there. But before I deal with the other doctor in the article, let me enlighten you, by way of two anecdotes, on how some scientists may arrive at their conclusions.

First, there is the fable of the researcher who first cuts off one leg of a frog, then commands the frog to jump. It complies. He cuts off another leg, then another, yet each time the frog obeys the command to jump. Finally, when all the legs of the hapless amphibian are cut off and he no longer jumps, what does the scientist conclude? It is that frogs without legs cannot hear.

Or, take this story from Doctor Irving Oyle's book, The New American Medicine Show:

     Every day, for twenty five years, a lady named Blanche from
  Brooklyn stepped out onto her front porch in Flatbush and shook her
  feather duster. She faced each of the cardinal directions, and
  solemnly shook it three times to the East, three times to the West,
  three times to the North and thrice to the South.
     On the particular day on which we observe her, her neighbor Bernie
  comes out and says, "Blanche, why are you doing that?"
     "To keep the tigers away," she replies, shaking vigorously to the
  East where Bernie is standing.
     "But Blanche," says Bernie, "There's no tigers in Brooklyn. I
  lived here twenty-five years, and I never seen a single tiger--except
  in the zoo."
     "Exactly!" beams Blanche as she triumphantly tucks her clean
  feather duster under her arm, goes inside, and triple-locks her door.

The point again is that scientists are human and have preconceived notions that are sometimes strong enough to influence the results of their experiments; that we all make our observations through personally colored lenses; and that our attitudes and conclusions are often influenced by what threatens either our life style or our livelihood.

If you're interested in studying poorly-arrived-at conclusions, I highly recommend Doctor Peter Steincrohn's How to Cure Your Jogger Mania, which, the cover says, tells you how to "enjoy fitness and good health without running."

My purpose in discussing Doctor Steincrohn is not to dignify his claims, but rather to present his type of rationale as it typifies the thinking of the anti-running backlash. For example, he tells us there is a dread disease called "jogger mania," which drives its frantic victims to the roads in search of fitness; causes doctors (who are also infected by it) to practically force their patients at scalpel point to run; and eventually causes all joggers to drop by the wayside with debilitating injuries, or even to die--which he "medically" documents from a local newspaper. Though the famous doctor professes to knowing no good studies showing benefits of jogging, his book itself is without references, without bibliography, without description of one single study.

The lure used by those exercise-haters (such as Steincrohn) who would like to get us runners off the streets and into our La-Z-Boys, is an appeal to that school childish part of each of us that wants to say "no more homework forever!" Using insidiously clever (but faulty) reasoning, the anti-fitness people deprecate anything requiring discipline, and pander to a quality which Steincrohn urges us to be thankful for, i.e. that we are lazy. The half truth to this is that there is a part of us which wants instant relief, instant gratification, with no effort or sweat required to get it. In the Land of Oz, a fantasy land, but nevertheless one symbolizing a part of our nature, the people sing:

   We get up at 12:00, go to work at 1:00 Take an hour for lunch and at
   2:00 we're done.

But this does not express our better nature, our higher instincts. As the great American physician and psychologist William James once said, "Human emotions seem to require the sight of the struggle going on." That's what we do when we condition ourselves, when we set up one attainable goal after another.

That we are by nature lazy is at best a half truth; but using things which have a small kernel of truth to mislead the reader is a Steincrohn device. My favorite is his advice on page 132 of his book: "Don't rely on exercise for weight loss. You'd have to walk forty or more miles to burn off one pound of fat." Right. But what he doesn't say is that you can do those forty miles in a week, and still lose that pound. At that rate, you can lose a leisurely 52 pounds in a year. You can add up your calorie deficit by increments. He knows that, too. Funny he didn't mention it. By the way, why didn't he also mention that you'd have to starve for forty-eight hours to lose that same pound?

Still, by extolling laziness and confusing discipline with masochism, he caters to a large, receptive audience. You can see the eternal wooing of that same audience merely by turning on your TV and watching the ads which promise us instant relief for our thirst, constipation, minor pains, headaches, and grey hair, without any effort or work. If such a need did not exist in all of us, these commercials and the products they sell would not survive.

This need for laziness or instant gratification is the subject of Steincrohn's Chapter 7, entitled "Be Thankful You Were Born Lazy." Now, if you've gotten this far, he's got you. You are lazy because you've read this far, and Steincrohn is thankful--the only one who should be. If up to now you endorse his sophist reasoning, swallow his half truths, listen to him constantly stroke himself, and have not screamed or thrown the book out of the window, you are indeed masochistic.

With rickety planks of misleading statements, half truths, and pure sophistry, Dr. Steincrohn builds his soapbox. Yet despite all his wizardry he is still not devoid of all humility and would probably never brag about the book's most notable accomplishment. So I will boast for him, and tell you what it is. If you buy his book and read it you can be sure that you will never be attacked by a tiger while walking the streets of Brooklyn.

What I have tried to do, Charmaine, is to tell you where some of the anti-fitness propaganda is coming from, and what motivates it; and also to point out that how you see things depends a lot on the color of the glasses you are looking through, and that for some people the color of their glasses is green.

I've also tried to provide you with the unvarnished truth, for you certainly won't find it in Dr. Franklyn's Beauty Pavilion, in the offices of the white-coated stooges for the food industry, or in Steincrohn's "how-to" books. Come to think of it, you probably won't find it with me either, for I'm not totally without bias myself.

But I know of one place you can find pure unadorned truth. You can find it in yourself, in your letter where you say you run fifty miles a week "and really enjoy it." That's what really counts. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

By Paul Kiell, MD

Dr. Paul Kiell is former editor-in-chief of the AMAA Journal. His new book, American Miler: The Life and Times of Glenn Cunningham, comes out May 2006 from Breakaway Books (ISBN 1891369598). This article originally appeared in the May 1981 issue of Running Times.