Obesity pandemics

Obesity is one of the most significant challenges that humanity faces today, especially in the developed world. Here is a quote from the World Health Organization’s website: “At the other end of the malnutrition scale, obesity is one of today’s most blatantly visible—yet most neglected—public health problems. Paradoxically coexisting with malnutrition, an escalating global epidemic of overweight and obesity—‘globesity’—is taking over many parts of the world. If immediate action is not taken, millions will suffer from an array of serious health disorders.” All responsible governmental and non-governmental health organizations have been sounding the alarm with a great sense of urgency as loud as they can about obesity as the United States’ number one cause of preventable death.

The very complex and diverse causes of obesity can be put into two main categories. First, the significant changes in our food culture in recent decades and, second, the way we live our lives in the modern world, with much less activity and movement than before. In the first category, humanity increasingly and systemically eats more irresponsibly and unhealthily. What we eat and how we eat are very often unwise, counterproductive, harmful and mostly driven by corporate greed and commercial craziness. In addition, sedentary lifestyle has become the norm for so many of us. We move a lot less than our ancestors did. We have invented so many toys, gadgets and machines that do even the simplest things for us. The demand for physical energy in our personal and professional lives has declined significantly. As a result, humanity pays a huge price and the obesity monster threatens our physical health in many horrific ways. More than half a billion people, many of whom live here in the U.S., already suffer tragic obesity-related health problems and millions more join this group every year.

The solution is simple, but simultaneously profoundly difficult to achieve. It is very easy to say but almost impossible to actually do: We have to change the way we live our lives. Humanity at large has to take the nearest exit and start driving in the opposite direction as fast as possible in terms of how we eat, how our food industry works and how we spend each day’s 24 hours.

Most of what I said so far is repeating the known. I think what is less know and less discussed is another type of obesity that threatens and destroys other, possibly more important, aspects of our lives. I wish God could have given Steve Jobs another 30 or 40 years to live. I was convinced that he eventually was going to invent an app that would take pictures of our souls, our psychological and spiritual worlds. We then could see the obesity problem in our metaphysical world is much more dangerous, destructive and ugly than the obesity problem in our physical world. In almost the same patterns, through strikingly similar means, humanity increasingly has become obese, therefore increasingly unhealthy and dysfunctional in its metaphysical world.

The causes, tragic ramifications and solutions of this other type of obesity are very similar. Humans increasingly and systemically feed their souls, their psychological and spiritual worlds, with unhealthy and harmful things. I am always amazed how anyone sitting in front of a TV or a computer for hours for many days of their lives—letting exceedingly refined and processed information into their minds and hearts, without filtering it—can think that they will have a healthy soul or a sound thinking and judgment system as a result of such a lifestyle. How different is that person from someone who never moves and constantly eats trashy, unhealthy food? What we put into our stomachs and what we put into our minds and hearts have critical consequences. I believe we often at least know, and pay some attention to, the former category, but much less to the latter one. The way we feed ourselves and how active we keep our bodies will determine the future of our physical health. The sources of information that we choose and the kinds of things that we put into our hearts and minds will determine the health of our metaphysical world. With a great sense of responsibility we have to attend to the deteriorating health conditions of humanity in both the physical and metaphysical realms.

Additionally, this problem of physical and metaphysical obesity is not only a dire health problem. It is a moral and ethical problem as well. Many of the core teachings of the world’s religions care deeply about both of these types of health. In the face of the mountainous challenges that these two main kinds of obesity present, we will have to redefine and once again re-crystalize those teachings in a more relevant way in order to empower humanity at large against becoming physically and metaphysically unhealthy and dysfunctional.

I wonder how many of us, after looking into a mirror and examining our physical images, also reflect on the images our souls would present? How many of us think and care about how in shape, how beautiful and how healthy that metaphysical image might be? I hope and pray that we will have the kind of determination that we need to change our lifestyles to make both of those images what they are meant to be.

Abdullah Antepli is Duke’s Muslim Chaplain and an adjunct faculty of Islamic Studies.