“I gradually came to realize that I was old enough to die…” This is the contrarian theme that Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Natural Causes revolves around. This personal insight is the foundation for the ultimate point of the book which is this: as far as health goes, we are only ever partly in control.
Who Says The Body Should Be In Harmony?
The most widely accepted view of the body, at least in popular culture, is that the body is healthy when it is well balanced. If you eat the right things, engage in appropriate exercise across strength, cardiovascular training, and flexibility, and are mindful of your mental state—pun intended—then your body will function well. Essentially, the thinking goes, the body is designed to run smoothly and it only stops doing that when we disrupt it somehow. Ehrenreich questions this assumption.
Firstly, she writes, the body is not necessarily composed of parts that are based on harmony. In fact, the body can often be its own enemy. Immune cells, for example, do not always protect the body. Sometimes, they destroy it. (You may be familiar with this concept thanks to recent work and reporting on inflammation.) The inflammatory process, for example, is designed to bring immune cells called macrophages to an area of damage so that they can clean up the site and clear the way for healing. Their job is to show up and ‘eat’ whatever does not belong, be it pathogens such as bacteria, or damaged cells of our own. Usually, this process goes smoothly. The cells do their jobs, the healing happens, and the injury goes away. But sometimes, the macrophages add damage rather than fixing it. They are, as Ehrenreich puts is, “messy eaters” who leave debris, which attracts more immune cells that do more damage, leading eventually to a vicious cycle of inflammation. Such inflammatory processes may be the ultimate cause of diseases ranging from arthritis and atherosclerosis, to possibly even diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
Cancer is another disease process that might, we are beginning to suspect, be aided and abbetted by our own bodies’ immune response. In this case, scientists are investigating the possibility that macrophages both help cancer cells change shape and size, as well as clear a path for metastisis throughout the body. Basically, they help cancerous cells get bigger, then they pry apart blood vessel cells and create a passage for the cancer to travel through! Not exactly the kind of thing we expect our own immune systems to be doing.
Aging Isn’t Something To Be Corrected, So Should We Just Give Up?
If the body is not necessarily a fine tuned machine, designed to run perfectly until we mess it up, what does that say about aging? For Ehrenreich, it says that not everything can be controlled. Ailments like vision loss, processes like menopause, conditions like arthritis, and even diseases like cancer are not necessarily the result of mistakes we have made in caring for our bodies, she argues. Instead, they are inherent to our existence. An ailing body is every bit as normal as a seemingly perfect one.
You might be tempted to interpret this as an excuse to give up on exercise and wellness. You could be forgiven for thinking that Ehrenreich is basically saying screw it, I’ll eat, drink, and smoke what I like, doctors be damned! But that is not exactly her message. Instead, she is questioning our tendency to need control over everything. Much of fitness is based around the idea that you can make your body be whatever you want, that it just comes down to how hard you work. This, Ehrenreich points out, insinuates that if your body is not what you want it to be you must have done something wrong. By exploring the instances in which our bodies do not behave the way we expect, she is hoping to open our eyes to the fact that we are not always in control and therefore, not always to blame.
Ehrenreich goes to the gym. She knows what foods are more or less healthy. She tries not to be overly unhealthy in her choices. What she does not do, is expect that she can will her body into being perfectly healthy. Sometimes, you just have to roll with the punches.