Right now, somewhere in the modern world, a fifty-three-year-old man is sipping a protein shake made from whey isolate, creatine monohydrate, and something called "anabolic matrix." He's following a meal plan with six small meals a day because his trainer told him that's how you fight muscle loss after fifty. He's spending four hundred dollars a month on supplements. And he's still losing about a pound of muscle every year.
Meanwhile, a medieval peasant at the same age — eating two meals a day, most of it bread and peas — was hauling timber, swinging a scythe through barley fields, and carrying sacks of grain that weighed over sixty pounds. And his skeleton tells us something that modern fitness culture doesn't want to hear. He was building functional muscle well into his fifties on a diet that most personal trainers today would call starvation.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are subject to deletion if they are not germane. I have no problem with a bit of colourful language, but blasphemy or depraved profanity will not be allowed. Attacks on the Catholic Faith will not be tolerated. Comments will be deleted that are republican (Yanks! Note the lower case 'r'!), attacks on the legitimacy of Pope Leo XIV as the Vicar of Christ, the legitimacy of the House of Windsor or of the claims of the Elder Line of the House of France, or attacks on the legitimacy of any of the currently ruling Houses of Europe.