Despite our myriad of national issues with nutrition and the obesity epidemic, Americans are taught about the importance of exercise and healthy eating at a very young age. Chances are, even at his age, President Donald Trump was too. He almost certainly learned about calories, both consuming them and burning them, and how fat and muscle develop.
However, you’d never known the man had even a passing familiarity with how the human body works based on his newly released comments on why he stopped working out. In the recent biography, Trump Revealed, he shared the reason he no longer works out.
According to the account (via Deadspin), Trump believes:
The human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.
Hmm. Interesting. Firstly, that’s incorrect as a metaphor or simile. A human body is like an engine. Food is like the battery.
Secondly, the logic is also completely wrong. Here’s a piece from The New York Times (which Trump would quickly rebuke) which explains why exercise leads to a longer life.
Trump either wasn’t properly educated in the most basic elementary school fundamentals of how a human’s body works (possible, but not likely), or he’s crafting a narrative out of thin air to confirm his whimsical and thoughtless assertions. Recent history indicates we should bet heavily on the latter.
Either way, other accounts suggest Trump may very well believe this theory, regardless of what led him to it. Years ago, when he learned one of his casino managers was training for an Ironman triathlon, Trump scolded the man, warning him, “You are going to die young because of this.”
Trump’s misguided belief is, on one level quite, funny because it’s so characteristically wrong and impulsive (as well as incredibly stupid).
Comedy aside, this is a man who is in charge, to some extent, of health care, schools, and managing the obesity epidemic. Not only is his comment demonstrative of a terrible, presumably willful ignorance of basic science, but also of a man who is unable to change his mind or enlighten himself to one of the basic truths of the human existence.
As painful as it is to imagine, the next time you think a reasoned argument could sway the president’s stance, remember that this is a man who, at age 70, believes exercise drains a finite supply of energy from one’s body.
