Simply not commonsensical

Americans have no common sense.

I’ve had the sneaking suspicion this might be the case for quite some time. But now, I’m sure of it.

Even when we do have the right ideas, which is pretty hit-or-miss, we go about them in all sorts of wrong ways. Our ends are questionable, and our means are downright irrational.

For instance, in 2008 Youfa Wang of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health drew a line from recent trends and projected that 100 percent of Americans would be overweight by 2048. His model predicted health-care costs attributable to excess weight would approach a trillion dollars a year by 2030.

But that’s not to say that we Americans don’t try. We spend about $40 billion a year on weight-loss products and programs. We’ll go for weeks eating nothing but hamburger meat and pork chops, avoiding those atrocious carbs. We’ll take non-regulated, non-FDA-approved diet pills.

A BusinessWeek article summed up the business model nicely: “Like psychic readings and astrology hotlines, the weight-loss industry sells hope to desperate people.” Unfortunately, hope doesn’t reduce your chances of suffering from diseases like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and cancer – four of the top 10 killers of Americans.

You’d think living your life at a healthy weight was impossible. But the problem can be tackled with common sense. Michael Pollan, a professor of science journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, describes the entire concept in seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

I might add that exercise doesn’t hurt. But the main thrust here is that, in reality, it’s just not as difficult to be healthy as we make it out to be.

Our waistlines aren’t the only things we are failing to grasp logically. Take, for instance, being “green.” I came across an “eco-friendly” dog bed in Women’s Health magazine not too long ago. It boasted all the key words – organic, natural, hemp, no harmful products – and a $120 price tag.

Common sense would tell me that the most eco-friendly option would be to make your dog sleep on the floor. But “green” has become trendy and therefore people are clamoring to waste money on everything from over-priced and far-from-useful products to cars that won’t stop.

What we as individuals need to focus on is simply not being wasteful – you know, the old “three R’s” – and supporting government measures to help our planet. The fact that your dog sleeps on organic material really makes no long-term difference whatsoever.

In so many important aspects of our lifestyles, we fail to be commonsensical. From our health to our environment and beyond, we seem to have lost the ability to apply rationality and perceive hoaxes.

We need to remove ourselves from the trendiness and the hype and return to what we know. We need a retreat to simplicity.

Improve your life today: Have a locally grown salad for dinner and let your dog sleep on the couch.