10,000 Pundits

So I just found out that the “10,000 steps” thing is totally bogus.  And I am annoyed.

You probably know what I’m talking about.  That thing a few years ago where you were supposed to take 10,000 steps every day to stay at the peak of cardiovascular health.  It was on TV and in newspapers.  People debated the pros and cons.  There were whole-ass Web sites where people could log their number of steps.  I have heard, and still hear, both doctors and co-workers talking about the need to “get their steps in.”  And pedometers, even ridiculously expensive ones, still sell like wildfire. 

I assumed, as probably most of us did, that this came out of legitimate science.  That somebody did a bunch of studies and took the results to some exercise science geeks and they broke all the evidence down into the optimum number of minutes that a healthy human being should be physically active every day and translated that into walking, and it was maybe 9,883 steps or 10,211 steps or whatever, and they settled on 10,000 because it was a nice round number. 

Nope.  In fact:  A Japanese pedometer company wanted to sell pedometers in China.  They called their product Manpo-kei, which translates to “10,000 steps meter.”  Reason:  The character for 10,000, 万, sort of looks like a person walking.  Also, in Mandarin Chinese, the word for 10,000 means “a whole bunch” or “an awful lot.”  So it wasn’t exercise science.  It was just a marketing ploy.

Hey, walking is good for you.  Nobody’s arguing about that.  But the totality of the 10,000 steps thing, and how it came to dominate fitness chatter for quite some time (and still today), really disturbs me.  We all just decided this was true.  It became gospel.  And I gotta wonder what other accepted truths aren’t true.  Just in the last few days I’ve found out that, contrary to “what I’ve heard,” health insurance companies won’t really refuse to pay for a hospitalization if you sign out against medical advice.  That the European union won’t really require U.S. travelers to have a visa starting in 2024.  Oh, and that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s full name wasn’t really “John Jacob Oppenheimer Schmidt.”  Imagine my disappointment.

Which brings me to something else that’s really been bothering me lately.  (I’ll come back to the 10,000 steps thing.)  This question that should be taken out of the English language, and any other language it’s been translated into: “Why don't you just...”

I dunno about you, but I hear this one a lot.  Usually from someone who has no idea what’s actually going on with a person and who feels the need to state a (to them) screamingly obvious course of action that they think someone should have taken.  Of course, if it’s screamingly obvious and the person hasn’t done it, there’s a good reason, and the reason isn’t “this person is an idiot”.  More likely, the screamingly obvious course of action is impossible. 

Examples abound:

·       To a domestic violence victim--“Why don’t you just leave?” 

·       To a woman undergoing grueling fertility treatments--“Why don’t you just adopt?” 

·       To a fat person, for basically any reason but also no reason whatsoever--“Why don’t you just lose weight?” 

·       To a black gay trans person living in Texas --“Why don’t you just move?”

People, don’t ask this question.  For one thing, you’re going to feel pretty dumb when you hear the answer, because the answer’s just as screamingly obvious as whatever you think the person should be doing in the first place. 

·       The domestic violence victim--“Because he trashed my car and got me fired from my job, and he broke my cell phone, and he says if I try to leave he’ll kill me, and he has a gun, and the police do nothing.” 

·       The woman undergoing the fertility treatments--“Because I’ve had cancer (or a criminal history or I’m single or I’m gay) and no adoption agency will come anywhere near me.”

·       The fat person--“Gee willikers, I live in America in the 21^st century and, like, I never heard of losing weight, I never even knew that was an option, great golly goshes, it’s not like dieting my whole life led me to the weight I’m at now, or anything.”

·       The black gay trans person in Texas--“Sure, I’ll just quit my job, sell my house (if I can), find a new job in a strange place where I know no one, buy another house (if I can), find new doctors to treat my various medical conditions, qualify for new health insurance (if I can), take my kid out of school and away from his/her friends, pull my spouse away from his/her very good career, pack up everything I own, leave behind family members and friends of my own and maybe elderly parents who need care, and just haul ass across the country.  No problem.”

Look.  If someone wants to tell you the issues they’re dealing with, they’ll tell you.  If they don’t, they probably have reasons.  Such as, you’re the kind of person to dismiss someone else’s genuine experience of life by saying, “Why don’t you just…”.  Okay, great, you get to feel superior for five seconds.  Congratulations.  Meanwhile you’ve effectively shuttered any actual connection with that person, maybe forever.  Please don’t do this.  People have enough going on without being minimized, waved aside, and talked to like they’re stupid.

Speaking of being talked to like we’re stupid:  Wouldn’t it be nice if every single thing that comes out of the news media (which now includes scads of independent Web sites, YouTube and TikTok channels, blogs, podcasts, Facebook posts, tweets and tweet equivalents, and tons of other things that 24/7 churn out weird amalgams of wish, opinion and science fiction that really aren’t, and never will be, “news”) wouldn’t immediately be taken as gospel truth and splattered all over every TV screen by every pundit who ever lived?  It’s not really fair to expect people to be skeptical 24/7.  Sure, some of us are (I, for example, am famously skeptical) but why should we have to be?  Why are we being lied to, all the time, about everything, especially in the area of health, fitness and nutrition?  (Remember the four food groups?  Margarine is better for you than butter?  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day?)  

Media needs to do better.  Education needs to do better.  Science needs to do better, too.  Just because it involves weird hard-to-spell chemicals and body parts and physiological processes doesn’t mean it can’t be explained in a clear, understandable way.  Most people aren’t stupid.  (They may act like it sometimes, but that’s another blog post.)  We can grasp this stuff. We are more than sound bites. We can handle ambiguities. We can even handle maybes.  And we can accept that sometimes they don’t have an answer for us yet.  So stop force-feeding us pedometers.  

And stop asking, “Why don’t you just…”.  Or else I’ll tell you.  You have been warned.