Whose Elephant Is This Anyway?!

Why does the idea of a multifaceted solution concept seem so absurd in a multifaceted world?

In a world plagued with differentiating views, ideas, resolves, stances and approaches, is it fair to approach health and health literacy in a single linear fashion?  I mean, a one size fits all approach to multifaceted health problems.  Well, if we look at obesity and disease they seem to have distinct identifying marks.  Obesity, simply put is excess weight on the body, which in turn may lead to more severe co-morbidities.  Disease, in the same fashion, is a disorder or malfunction in the body.  Two very simple definitions, but very difficult opponents to sack.  In reading February 2011's Scientific American by David H. Freedman on, How To Fix The Obesity Crisis, they found that there are a lot of confined ideas that, though with good intention, were isolating or relating obesity and its causes to individual (or linear) aspects of life.  For example, claiming that soda is linked to obesity, and causes obesity.  Though, soda does have high concentrations of sugar and carries three percent of your daily sodium intake; it isn't equitable.

The parable of the four blind men and the elephant (which was referred to in the article), lends to an idea, a notion of looking at the same problem and finding different faults or causes within it.  The men, though genuinely impartial, described an animal based on two factors 1) their position, or vantage point, and 2) their feelings, or interpretation.  The fable continues to lead the reader to assume that what object their identifying is completely different and in stark contrast to one another.  All this, later to find that it's all the  same and the view point of each man is correct and justified.

If compared, we too at times look as if we're grasping for answers blindly, as the four men were.  Not confident in any one approach and hoping to find something to slow the mountainous ebb of increasing obese and diseased populations in America.  If lucky or fortunate, we'll find something, anything to stand behind and sell to the nation and the world that will "fix" this serious problem.  However, there is a Judas amongst the crowd, a modern day adversary.

The adversary is just as diversiformed as the solution that insist to tame it.  This adversary is all of us, and in that same breathe none of us at all.  The way we eat, and exercise, gives light that we are our own enemy.  On the other hand our ability to exercise in safe or adequate areas and what we have access to eat confers that the inculpation lies with another entity.  Is the enemy soda, juice, sugar, bread, fat or even salt?  Or is it exercise, behavior, location, ethnicity, demographic, race, money, or infrastructure?

Instead of looking to best define and isolate the elephant that lies in our grip, we would do well to unite the differences and understand why they exist in such close proximity.  In other words, the causes of obesity and its abhorrent cousin disease exist in close proximity with many other problems in our society.  For instance, fast foods versus whole foods, exercise versus cultural influence, and to these points they can be argued pro for both ends to some extent.

The parable doesn't answer the questions of health and in many cases answer very little at all.  However, it opens our minds to stop being answer gathers and shifts us to question "askers".  Our linear perception can be the very intangible thought that separates us from asking the right questions.  So, whose elephant is this anyway?!  ...It's mine, ...and yours and the person a far off from you.  The elephant isn't so much the problem as much as our insistence on what we feel as being absolute and without variance.

The article suggests that fixing the ongoing  problem could find great success by using best practices from other like conditions (alcoholism, drug addiction and autism) to slow or even reverse the effects. Isn't it true that there are so many different ailments we face and contend with today?  Hundreds of different disease, and chronic conditions that afflict so many people everyday.  If we could describe all of them they would look, sound and feel so different from one another; but to our surprise they belong to the same elephant... health. 

"By logic and fact alone can perception be laid waste..."