The definition of "health" kinda sucks

[LeafUF]

Came across a pretty good blog article today talking about health and what it means.

http://evidencebasedfitness.blogspot...-to-house.html

The World Health Organization's definition of health, which I had to memorize in the first month of medical school, is, "The state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."

Personally, I think this is ridiculous because it's basically tautological. The term "well-being" is essentially synonymous with "health". In fact, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "well-being" as, "The state of being happy, healthy or prosperous." Way to go, 1948 WHO'er's. It's like looking in the dictionary for the definition of "happy" and seeing "not sad" and then looking up "sad" and seeing its definition as "not happy." (Flashbacks to being the child of immigrant parents inserted here. And yes, I was a weird kid and yes, my parents will tell you that.)

(Incidentally, the WHO definition of health hasn't been modified since 1948.)

So, since the World HEALTH Organization has no satisfactory definition of health, it's basically a free-for-all. Which means…ANYTHING can be sold to be healthy for you, up to, and including chocolate.

Some other stuff from later in the article I liked.

If a client comes to a trainer and says, "I want to be able to clean and press 100 pounds," but is unable to bend down (in any fashion) to pick the bar up off the ground without pain, the solution is not to critique their clean-and-press form ("You know, you could clean-and-press way better if you weren't whimpering in pain when you bend down…"). But the solution to too much food, is more food, just different food?

The idea that you solve a problem with more of the problem (just slightly different) strikes me as taking a backassward approach to the problem. If your problem is fat, and therefore eating, then changing what you eat isn't really the optimal answer. You don't pour a higher quality oil on a fire to put it out. Nor do you use distilled water if regular hydrant water isn't working. If your problem is eating, then getting at why you eat is probably more productive; which is still probably less important than learning how to NOT eat (which is different, but not distinct from fasting--before someone jumps all over that.)

If your "health" is already pretty optimal, then it begs the question of whether you can be "supra-optimally healthy" (oh, there's another blog post in the tube--the whole topic of "prevention".) Will adding ginger to your diet make you _more optimal_? Will _going out of your way_ to add ginger to your diet make you _more optimal_? What if you don't even like ginger, unless it's in a cookie or an ale? And the kicker question, "If you DON'T eat ginger, are you LESS healthy?"

[Dreamliner]

Interesting thoughts. I can tell you that, for awhile now, I've almost assiduously avoided the term 'health' as something that, as a fitness trainer, I'm all about. Really, I'm not about health at all, or at least using the term ... because it's just so downright squishy a term.

In fact, I make a point of reminding my audience that we're all going to die.

Nowadays I just talk up "how you look and move", two things that are relatively easy to quantify and change (which may indeed positively impact ... uh-oh, I'm going to say it - 'health').

Actually, I'm more prone to use the term 'health markers.' That much is true. But it still doesn't with any degree of certainty buy one another day.