It's one of the great contradictions of American life. We're obsessed with health—health trends, antioxidants, new workouts, new berries and juices, the bad effects of smoking, drinking, and obesity. We just can't shut the fuck up about health.

But our public-health system is about equivalent to Slovenia's. (Pozdravljeni, Slovenija! Brez zamere, fantje!)

Now it looks like our health-nuttiness might not just be hypocritical, but dangerous to our health.

We may be nearing a point where institutions of public health and the commercial interests that surround it, including the media, do more harm than good to the nation's health. The official version of health peddled by our current system is not only venal but potentially noxious. In some instances, public health has been transformed into a kind of iatric disease, a medically induced assault on the health of society. Our minders trumpet the obesity epidemic even as epidemiological evidence suggests that "yo-yo dieting" (repeatedly losing and regaining weight over a period of several years) actively damages the immune system. At any given time, it is estimated that 50 percent of all women are on diets, and 95 percent of all diets fail. The more we diet, the fatter we seem to become.

I love the title of this article: "Against Health," especially since all the public jabbering about "good health" seems to be about "long life," and why should longevity be the goal? "The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can." That's Seneca the Younger, who's not at all healthy (he ate a lot of junk food, smoked like a diesel, and eventually committed suicide) but is still wiser than the living, breathing fools who staff all those wellness magazines and write ad copy for diet fads.

Let's be against health—or at least health as we know it.

According to de l'Enclos, if a life in the best of vigorous health is without love, it is no life at all, only a long illness. Even health is illness without love; conversely, there is no illness that love cannot cure or make tolerable. At the same time, love is trouble. Like wind, it troubles the surface of the sea, but it also makes navigation possible. The agitation of love preserves the self, keeps it healthy even when—especially when—it is sick. The risk of love, which so often ends in shipwreck, is what keeps a person healthy.

But there are other classic paths to health. Socrates believed in dancing every morning. We could do more for public health if the government spent a fraction of what it spends curbing smoking on promoting dancing. An Epicurean approach asks not what temptations need to be avoided in the name of health. Instead it asks, "What is health, and how do you get it?" Imagine a world in which public policy declared that pleasure is the principal means to health.

And:

Whenever anyone asked Julia Child to name her guilty pleasures, she responded, "I don't have any guilt."

Atta girl!

Epicureanism not only absolves us of guilt but says that our guilty pleasures might actually be keeping us healthy—mentally, physically, or both.

Read the whole thing.

Thanks to Slog tipper—and well-practiced epicurean—Stuart.