Vegans of the Mind

In the period of time just after World War II food was plentiful and nobody would think twice about having eggs and sausage for breakfast, a cheeseburger with fries for lunch, and a steak with a baked potato stuffed with butter and sour cream for dinner. People did not think very much about the relationship between food and health. After all, there were a lot of starving people in the world. So, anyone who had plenty of food must be well off, and, as a derivative, healthy. This model of excessive consumption does not even address the vast number of cigarettes that were smoked, at the time, nor the rivers of alcohol that were consumed. And nobody thought of this as anything but healthy. To be fair, I suppose I should as that nobody thought of it as unhealthy, which is a little different.

But, as we moved into the 1960's we began to see some evidence that what you put into your body in the way of food did, indeed, have an impact on your health. In the decades since then we have turned that around as we become ever more compulsive about eating healthy. You could say that we have gone a little overboard with our obsessions with second hand smoke, sugar free drinks, starvation diets, and all manner of questionable supplements. I think in the future when, all this sorts out, we will looks at the food obsessions we have today like obsessions in the past where women stuffed themselves into unbearably tight corsets in order to have the proper figure and men dripped with sweat wearing hot suits to look professional and proper. But, I will leave that there as my point for this piece is something entirely different.

We are on a new exploration of good health that is analogous to the previous one, only we are now beginning to understand that well being and mental health are, indeed, realted to the things you put into your mind. Many of our beliefs and values are the cognitive equivalent of junk food. Salt and fat taste good so we eat it. Ridiculous ideas feel good so we adopt them.I am not going to mention any specific ideas that constitute ridiculous thinking as that would invite readers to defend ridiculous beliefs missing the point of this post. But, I will say that there have been amazing advances in the past couple decades in cognitive science, positive psychology, and the functioning of the brain which address happiness, well being, optimal living, will power, self delusion and a host of other related topics. As these studies advance our understanding, ridiculous, dysfunctional and counter productive ideas will begin to recede.