October, 2026. The days are darkening, pumpkin-spiced-everything is long out of season, and once again humanity had proved to itself that its greatest advantage in the evolutional struggle is a boundless ability to ignore good advice.
This month we have: a sports business claiming the Olympic games (because playing the usual games is not tiring enough), a group of men in Guangdong who learned that doing 300 sit-ups on the first day isn’t actually a quality of theirs, an outbreak of Ebola that’s actually terrifying, and a QR code that can trace the origins of your lettuce. There’s a lot here. Let us unpack it with a suitable degree of British resignation.
Fitness: The Cult of Suffering Gets a Sponsorship Deal
Start with the good news: endurance racing is booming. Hyrox, the German phenomenon that combines a race with a fit-camp-attitude, and the feeling that you pay to hear a coach scream in your ear, is aiming for a whopping 2.2 million participants this season, and they hope to have 2.5 million by 2027. They have also teamed up with Xenom, a CrossFit-inspired platform, with the shared goal of making fitness “the largest sport on earth”. They also harbour dreams of making it an Olympic sport by Brisbane 2032.
Now I am all for physical activity; indeed, I am. But there is something deeply funny about the phrase: “Athletics as an Olympic sport.” What kind of sports? The 100-meter Sled Push, followed by the 400-metre “Questioning Your Life Choices”? Will there be a winner in the “Most Efficient Burpee” category? Surely it must be some sort of big-business venture; after all, the Olympic motto is “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together.” For Hyrox: “Sweatier, Sorer, More Expensive – Sign Here.”
For a more accessible form of exercise which does not require a flight to Miami or a second mortgage, we have the return of the ’90s aerobics craze of Tae Bo, in a manner of speaking, thanks to TikTok, for evidently the only way we can make sense of the present day is by pretending to be in the music video for “Rhythm Is a Dancer.”
Nevertheless, let’s spare a thought for those brave pioneers of Guangdong: Seven fellows, perhaps enamored of the new “thin-muscle” theory and replete with a group chat and some high-quality supplements, took up the challenge of developing their abs, with especial emphasis on the flat-abs trend, but, by the end of the day, four of them were in the hospital with lower-back pain, and one gentleman, with an extant herniated lumbar disc and a history of “sedentary with frightened panic attacks”, spent seven days in hospital because his spine decided it was tired of bending.
The advice, delivered with the weary wisdom of a man who has seen things, is that one should not blindly follow the latest fashion, one should first warm up, one must take one’s time… Revolutionary. It’s almost as if the human organism, which evolved over the course of millions of years to walk and toss a spear or two, is not made to go from zero to three hundred crunches because a fellow on the Internet said it would give you a nice stomach to show off your vest.
Food: QR Codes, Pulse Proteins, and the Slow March of Progress
And now, on to food. Good and bad news.
At the end of 2026 World Food Day passed, with the theme “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.” It’s a serious message and one that deserves far more attention. The United Nations and the World Food Programme were quite right to drum up support for new ideas and tools to help fight world hunger. That we can come up with a vegetable burger that bleeds from beet juice, but fail to guarantee the right to food for a child in a war zone is a moral outrage. Invention is good. In-vention without distribution is merely a very expensive laboratory.
In the field of science, it is good to see that India and Canada are getting cozy over pulses. NIFTEM-K hosted a roundtable on pulse protein innovation with delegates from Saskatchewan, discussing everything from protein extraction to value-added food products. These are extremely important events for anyone who enjoys lentils and also enjoys the planet not being on fire.
Pulses are sustainable, nutritious, and-crucially-do not require a rainforest to be cleared to produce them. The two countries are working towards a joint Centre of Excellence, because nothing says international diplomacy quite like a really good chickpea.
Farming in China: From field to fork. In Shandong province, the Chinese government has rolled out an Agricultural Safety Code system that allows consumers to scan a QR code and trace their produce from field to fork. The system covers over 220 types of agricultural products, with details on fertilisation, pest control, and harvesting uploaded by the farmers themselves. Over 250,000 certificates have been issued, and 195,000 tonnes of produce have been sold with the accompanying code.
This is a very good idea on the face of it: to make the consumer feel secure, to make producers responsible, and to provide clarity in regard to food hygiene. It is precisely the kind of system that will be employed by the type of person who always insists on telling you the zip code of the avocado they ate for breakfast. “It was harvested on Tuesday,” they will announce, “and it rained in the morning. The farmer’s name is Kev.” You will nod, wishing in your heart of hearts that you could just have eaten a sandwich without being handed a report on its life history.
Health: The Genuinely Grim Bits
Here is where it gets a little serious, because while we were arguing whether crunches are bad or whether Tae Bo is cool, the news of real health was quietly alarming.
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a severe and ongoing crisis. As of mid-October, there were over 9,200 confirmed cases and more than 4,400 deaths. A medical worker was medically evacuated to the Netherlands for treatment, and Kenya confirmed its first imported case, with a second case subsequently reported in a close contact. The outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo virus, has affected 65 health zones across seven provinces, with Ituri province the hardest hit, with over 6,800 cases. A vaccine clinical trial has begun, which is a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak picture. But this is no ‘wellbeing’ trend. This is a health emergency of a scale that demands action and resources, not just a trendy hashtag.
Closer to home—at least, nearer the European continent—the still more serious, and perhaps less noticeable, resurgence of the infectious diseases of the tropics is evident, and the cases of chikungunya and dengue, previously regarded as tropical diseases, are being met with in France and Italy. A study from India highlighted the co-circulation of both viruses, with 20.2% of suspected dengue cases showing dual IgM seropositivity for dengue and chikungunya. The Aedes mosquitoes that carry these diseases are adapting, and as the climate warms, their territory expands. A slow-motion invasion that does not make headlines but is quietly reshaping the map of infectious disease.
On the medical side there are a few genuine successes: The FDA has approved insulin efsitora alfa (Onswik) for type 2 diabetes, a weekly injection that reduces the annual injection count from 365 to 52. To anyone who has been forced to inject himself daily, this is not a small thing; it makes the difference between a constant reminder of the illness and a somewhat more bearable routine. Also the drug atogepant shows great promise for preventing menstrual migraines in women with menstrual periods, and the medicine sibeprenlimab has produced significant results in slowing kidney function decline in IgA nephropathy. These are the quiet victories of medicine; modest, unnoticed, but life-changing for those who need them.
The Verdict: A Mixed Bag of Human Endeavour
Then, in this same month we learned that it takes more than a day to get an eight-pack, that fitness could become an Olympic sport (Lord help us), that lentils are the future and that a QR-code can reveal more about your dinner than you ever wanted to know.
What we are seeing is that we are going through a period of innovation in food and medicine, with the discovery of vaccines and the tracing of aliments, and at the same time we are being warned that we live in a fragile body and that the public health service is as strong as the weakest link. The Ebola outbreak reminds us that infectious diseases do not respect frontiers or Instagram trends, and that mosquito-borne illnesses in Europe are a present-tense health crisis, not some abstract future problem.
And what about the man in Guangdong who had a bad back? He is just a reminder of the comedy that can be found in the sabotaging of human beings in their pursuit of self-improvement, and always will be.
So this week, if you want to exercise, first stretch yourself; if want to eat, try reading a little. And if one must fear for the world, one should do it on foot; a Japanese walking is, so I hear, a great thing to do. It is low impact, high return, and you can do it while listening to a podcast about the collapse of civilization. Fitness, food, and health: it is all about balance.
GINA DOLIOTIS
- European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) – Ebola Outbreak Data
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/ebola-outbreak-democratic-republic-congo-and-uganda
This is the official EU public health agency page, updated daily with confirmed case numbers, deaths, and geographic distribution for the DRC Ebola outbreak. It is the most reliable source for the figures cited in the article (over 8,900 confirmed cases and 4,300+ deaths as of mid-October 2026) . - U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – Onswik (insulin efsitora alfa) Approval
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/news-events-human-drugs/fda-approves-once-weekly-insulin-type-2-diabetes-mellitus
The official FDA approval announcement for the once-weekly insulin. It confirms the drug name, indication, dosing schedule (once weekly), and the clinical trial basis for approval—exactly the details referenced in the health section . - China Daily – Hyrox Fitness Racing Growth
https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202606/20/WS6a35c670a310986e2b460e6b.html
A detailed English-language report on Hyrox’s expansion in China and globally, including participation figures and the sport’s commercial partnerships. Useful for verifying the fitness racing trend discussed in the article .