"I can't believe people were so dumb about smoking in the 1950s.. how were they so dumb? did they not know it caused cancer?"
this is a kinda modern equivalent, imo..
this is a kinda modern equivalent, imo..
Smoking tobacco is inhaling an acrid a mix of chemicals that makes you cough, kind of feel sick and lightheaded, smells awful and leaves a tan stain - it’s not hard to guess that it’s not healthy. Remember that half of people who die from tobacco die from heart disease, too, not cancer.
Same with football. I was never attracted to sports where participants beat each other in the head repeatedly, whether it’s boxing or football. I don’t think it’s surprising to find out that people who experience concussions every week as part of their jobs and hobbies end up damaging their brains.
Edit to add, It’s a bit frustrating, because surely if one was to stand up 30 years ago and say “hey, I don’t think this high school football program is a good idea because I’m worried about all these young people knocking their heads together with full force”... The response would have been to mock you and dispute it, if they paid any attention at all.
With the benefit of 70 years of medical research this is an easy statement to make, but at the time this was far less clear - smoking was for a long time actively promoted as having health benefits [1][2]
It's easy from a modern perspective to look back and apply our accumulated wisdom, but it was not self-evident that smoking was necessarily bad. Otherwise millions would not have signed up for an early death.
[1]https://www.healthcare-administration-degree.net/wp-content/...
[2]https://i.pinimg.com/736x/40/50/4f/40504f0de983d78f3c0f0b22c...
For example, lore is replete with stories of young people's initial experiences with smoking involving coughing, choking, turning green and feeling nauseous or vomiting. There's also the fact that nicotine has long been known to be a poison as strong as cyanide, and has been used for insect control by Europeans as far back as 1763.
Of course after the first few sessions you’ll start to get used to it, and actually feel better after exercising. Just like how you feel better after smoking once you’re addicted.
For one, if exercise makes you dizzy, nauseous, sweaty, and all your muscles ache, you are either severely out of shape are overdoing it.
I smoked for a fair portion of my life. The main motivation for addicts is to relieve the craving for tobacco. It’s pleasurable in some ways other than that, but cigarettes did not leave me feeling well most of the time.
> cigarettes did not leave me feeling well most of the time.
Sounds like an easy habit to kick!
Extremely vigorous sports is different than your average exercise. I’m still happy to assert that it’s a twisted analogy - If you compare the feeling from exercise to cigarettes, it’s obvious that they are not qualitatively similar, despite the fact that each involves some unpleasant sensations.
Another significant thing to note is that over time, exercise clearly has positive effects on your body – you feel healthier, more muscular, lose weight, breathe easier. Cigarettes do not have a healthy effect on your body over time, and it doesn’t take a doctor to tell or modern medical technology to tell they are staining your teeth, making your breath bad, making you cough, and so forth.
This was not lost on Europeans went tobacco was first introduced.
This is an odd view on the nature of physical addiction. I personally know more smokers that hate their smoking than smokers who are ambivalent or actually enjoy it.
> "[...] the wound itself is its own healing when seen from another standpoint." [0]
> "As for smoking tobacco, Shapiro argues that quitting is hard because smoking does not disrupt the smoker's life, not because of the mild effects of nicotine on the brain" [1]
etc. I expect up-in-arms responses to views like mine, but even neuropharmacologically, speaking there is really less of a danger to ~"the disease known as addiction"~ than there is to codifying addiction as a metonym for "sepulcher for all the lost people". I say this for all substances, even something as malicious and unforgiving as carfentanil..
[0] https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/slavoj-zize...
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=dcK6-h1ngtcC&pg=PA281&lpg=...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/teddy-roosev...
Except for 'Varsity Blues' (1999) I guess, and I'm sure other examples, where the evil coach telling the kid to play when another head injury could kill him was a main plot line.
That said, I do think the destructiveness of football in knees and backs has long been known. I remember them being detailed when reading “where are they now?” articles in Sports Illustrated as a kid (I’m 30).
30 years ago? I bet you’d get this reaction today in large swaths of America. I’m positive you would have gotten it 5 years ago.
That disclaimer out of the way, nicotine's prevalence is mostly due to it's addictive qualities. However, the usage of nicotine in WW2 and the industrialization of it's manufacture shortly before the war cannot be missed when talking about nicotine's prevalence mid-century.
Nicotine, like any drug, has a multitude of effects. In certain situations, these effects can be beneficial. The only reason I can think of is: if you have a reasonable suspicion of major bodily trauma occurring before the side effects of nicotine wear off (you are about to die). Nicotine promotes alertness, calmness, and an adrenal response, lowering the flow of blood to the periphery and increasing blood pressure. At high concentrations, it also causes sedation.[0] Also, there is interesting research about those sedative properties in connection with schizophrenia.[1]
Smoking a cigarette while on/near a battlefield is not a terrible decision. You may be more alert, calm and less panicked, already primed with adrenaline, and may experience less blood loss to limb wounds. Back at camp when you can smoke to your heart's (mal)content, you can sedate yourself as well. I'm not certain on the effects with PTSD, but as a sedatory drug, I would imagine it would lessen PTSD (no evidence here, just speculation).
So, if you sling crack and have been sought after by your creditors, you may want to pick up a pack. If you are a SWAT team member about to go into a building, you may want to chew some gum. If you are in Aleppo currently, you may want to light up.
Other than that, stay away from the stuff like the life killing poison it is meant to be.
That said, when it comes to these types of sports, benefits may exist as well. For some people, those HS/Pop-Warner football years may be the best they have. The concept of 'hoop-dreams' is alive and well 30 years later [2] and is not just limited to basketball.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Psychoactive_effects
Nah, the modern equivalent is sugar.
Most people don't do enough sports to suffer from it (except for broken bones etc.)
Talking about sugar will make many enemies. For example, the dairy industry. Or worse, fruit-farming. How do we convince people their smoothie is actively bad for health?
Because at the end of the day, we don't know for sure. There are of course, some benefits to eating fruits. There are also likely downsides as well.
I don't want to poop on keto but I suspect a lot of people can't follow it through and even if they could, I don't know if it is good for them.
How many young people play tackle football in college?
How many parent allow this?
I looked it up, and apparently the stats for tackle football are about 4.5% of kids 6-12 and 9% in the 13-17 range.
Football is clearly the worst offender, but at the high school level the rate of concussions really isn't that far behind for hockey, lacrosse, soccer, wrestling, and basketball. Even a complete non-contact sport like baseball has a concussion rate that is 10% of football's rate. So the question isn't really what percentage of American children play football, it is what percentage play any sport and how can these sports be changed to increase safety.
Imagine a person moving at full speed. That person collides with an identical person moving at the same speed in the opposite direction and they both hit each other at their center of mass. These two people now come to a complete stop. Newton's laws of motion say that every part of their body wanted to continue moving forward, but this collision causes a chain of events that stops the entire body. First their torso might stop. Their extremities might lurch forward until they are eventually stopped by the pull of the bodies muscles and ligaments from the stopped torso. But even as the head stops, the brain still has inertia of its own. The brain doesn't stop until it collides into the front of the skulls. This is the type of trauma that is common in football and will occur regardless of whether a player wears a helmet or not.
The reason other full contact sports like rugby aren't as dangerous is because football is unique in that it has regular stoppages that realign all the players in the direction of their objective. You therefore have offensive and defensive players colliding head-on regularly on each play. In rugby this doesn't happen because the game is mostly continuous so offensive and defensive players are often moving in the same direction so collisions are less intense.
For a little video evidence, this [1] is the first result for "rugby biggest hits" on Youtube and this is the first result for "football biggest hits" [2]. Notice how in a majority of the rugby hits either the offensive or defensive players is at a complete standstill before the hit while in the majority of the football hits the players are both moving towards each other. It is a physics and rules problem not a problem with protective gear.