Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise?

Health, or gesundheit, is a universal human concern - few, if any, people or cultures delight in illness and the discomfort it can bring. However, different societies have very different strategies for maintaining health, and some worry about maladies that are unknown elsewhere. The French smoke like fiends and have little idea of vegetarianism, yet take days off work for heavy legs, a solely French affliction. South Koreans fear fan death - untimely demise caused by sleeping in a closed room with an electric fan left running overnight. In short, every culture has it's own health phobias and ideas about what is good for you and what is not.

Germans are no exception. Despite drinking almost more beer per person than any other country (except the Czechs) and downing bread and processed meat products at alarming rates (a more specific food oriented post will be forthcoming), they live on average around two years longer than Americans. What are their strategies? Some initial observations, in no particular order:

• Fresh Air. Germans are seemingly obsessed with "frische Luft", and rarely miss the opportunity to "lüften" a room even on the coldest day. Rarely a seminar has gone by without some of the students opening all the windows, letting all the nice heated air out and exchanging it for cold damp chilly air. If they haven't done it, the professor usually requests the opening of windows, lest we run out of oxygen. In most German homes that I've been in, bathroom windows are often left open. Because, you know, the room where you get naked and stand under running water is most pleasant when kept within a few degrees of freezing. Leaving the house for the day? Turn off the heat and open the windows! Shiver the sickness away! I'm hardly someone who likes the house well-heated in Winter, but this particular German propensity baffles even me.
•  Bio-everything. Bio (pronounced bee-oh) is just the German word for organic. You can basically get bio versions of whatever you want, and bio supermarkets abound. Everything from milk to potatoes, broccoli to bratwurst. It is WAY more prevalent here than in America, the Whole Food US upper-upper-middle-class notwithstanding.
• Sneaky exercise and the great outdoors. As was recently pointed out to me, Americans can be seen jogging around our cities, Germans only jog along lakes and rivers. Where they do most of their exercise, I don't know. There are gyms, sure, but even then, there are simply fewer really fat people here than in the US (not that Germany is exactly a thin land, in fact, women seem to be/feel less pressured here to maintain ultra-slim standards). This may all come down to Germans simply walking or cycling more, given the less suburban (in the American sense) layout of most towns and cities here. They do love their outdoors, witness the Schrebergarten - a bizarre backyard for hire, away from home, usually along a rail road track. 

And there you have some wild generalizations about German strategies for health maintenance.