Lately I've taken a minor interest in nutrition, paying a bit more attention to some of the many nutrition/health related stories featured on the meme sites over the past couple of years.

My primary motivation is my offspring: I have a concern that my children, 1 and 3 years old, might miss some nutrient or other, preventing them from reaching their potential. Omega-3s (DHAs, EPAs, and ALA/LNAs), 6s, 9s, minerals, vitamins, macronutrients: something that we're not providing in their diet -- we evolved, presuming you believe in that whole concept, with a diet much different than we generally eat today -- or something in the foods that they've aesthetically chosen to reject (children have an amazing ability to pass judgement on foods before it's even on their plate, spurning it for months on end based upon that initial rejection), that they really need to grow and stay healthy.

Something that won't be there for the building of their brains, or their circulatory systems, or in the creation of necessary hormones, and so on.

I'm also always on the lookout for anything that might harm them -- trans-fats, for instance, which has long been banned from our household, a prohibition that's becoming easier and easier as food products are being reformulated to eliminate them (sidenote: McDonalds -- hardly a bastion of healthy food, but still -- has been really dragging its feet on reducing or eliminating trans-fats. They don't need to rush because it doesn't financially hurt them: So many customers are completely ignorant of, or in denial about, the whole issue that it is reducing the consumption of their foods).

My secondary motivation is, of course, ensuring that my wife and I's "machine" (living creatures are the most extraordinarily complex, and still much unknown, mechanisms) run optimally, and with the greatest MTBF. I've circled the sun some 33 times now, so there is a growing sense of mortality that just isn't there when you're younger. Actions and decisions now, and in the decades already past, can make the difference between being a sedentary, chronic-disease-ridden 50 year old, or a healthy, active 65 year old.

My interest has me stopping at the "nutrition" section of the local grocery stores, and even specialty nutrition stores such as GNC when I pass one at the mall, perusing some of their wares. I don't go out of my way as a trip unto itself, but if I've gone to Walmart to pick up a sprinker or toy, I might drop into the supplements section to see what sort of Omega-3 products that outlet stocks (mmm, fish oil gelcaps. You aren't supposed to bite them?).

What I've learned is that it's a massive industry, predominately catering to the elderly and sick. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of products, covering virtually every supplement imaginable -- if there was ever a study that found the benefits of some compound or nutrient, even if the study used dubious methodology and was refuted by dozens of followup studies, there will be a supplement on the shelves containing large quantities of it. The aisles are generally full of fearful of quickly approaching death seniors looking for something that'll undo a lifetime of damage.

The gamut of available pills, usually monstrous throat clogging pills, is extraordinary.

What fascinates me, however, is how reactive most people are, rather than being proactive. To give an example, I generally use artificial sweetener (Sucralose aka Splenda) in drinks, and drink diet drinks containing the same (the possible carcinogenic factor is a completely different topic). Yet I'm not overweight, or at least I don't think I am. I've gotten comments, of the sort that only a male would get, that this perplexes people because I'm not overweight.

Exactly.

I drink lots of drinks in a day, so I try to limit the amount of sugar calories. It doesn't mean that I'm trying to lose weight, and it doesn't mean that I've bought into some sort of Atkins no-carbs B.S. It's simply an easy way to slightly reduce the number of calories I ingest in a day -- not to mention that sugars have always been a no no for nutritionists, and a single can of soda often features twice the sugar of two whole bowls of Fruit Loops, themselves hardly a low-sugar option -- with minimal/no impact on my lifestyle, to prevent the situation where I'm overweight. If I didn't have the sugar substitute options, I'd drink less, or I'd drink water.

On the same theme, the supplement section is overwhelmingly filled with a) the elderly, b) people suffering from serious ailments, such as cancer. It isn't full of 20 year olds realizing that the next couple of decades will determine how long they live, and more importantly how well they will live during that period.

It's a perplexing, destructive situation that many of us only start caring about our bodies in our twilight years, when something has gone seriously wrong, or when we look in the mirror and realize that we're obese. It's like getting your car rustproofed after half of it has crumbled away, and changing your oil after your engine has seized. It's carefully applying layers and layers of wax after the paint is scratched and dinged, and discoloured by the sun.

Of course this isn't to say that the elderly or those suffering from terrible afflictions shouldn't be concerned with keeping themselves as healthy as possible -- of course they should, and of course it's rightly important to them -- it's just that people need to think more preventatively: If an occasional cup of lycopene rich tomato juice wards off prostate cancer, for instance, well then I'd rather have an occasional cup of tomato juice rather than drinking gallons of it after the fateful diagnosis, in an often futile attempt to stop what's already been done. If some extra lutein, in the form of a delicious salad containing spinach leaves, provides anti-oxidants that maintain vision and skin health, well then it's probably a good idea to keep it in mind before the eyes are dried, degraded orbs, and the skin is withered and destroyed.

It seems like nutrition and fitness should be something all of us should be concerned with, especially when we're at the seemingly epitome of health. We shouldn't only worry about calories when we realize we're medically obese, and we shouldn't only start paying to nutrition when our body has mostly broken down.