Weekender: Too Good

Just in case you haven’t heard about this odd, yet sad and telling story, here it is – the kid’s too good to play against his peers. Funny – I don’t recall getting to this point in my life by having someone tell my competition to stop, but maybe that’s just me…

New Food Revolution

This is one revolution that I hope takes hold – Slow Food Nation. It’s the counter to our culture of processed, fast food, and could certainly help people live healthier, although it’ll take time and a shift in the way we live and work. The USA Today article caught my eye because I’ve been trying macrobiotic cooking over the past couple of months, which is essentially the SFN concept, and I’m glad to see at least one (relatively) large-scale movement toward educating people of the option. More importantly, it appears to show people how it can actually be done in an accessible way for the masses, rather than only to those who have the discretionary income to shop at grocery stores like Whole Foods.

I think it’s possible for a movement like this to take hold, but people generally need to feel a little pain before finding the motivation to change behavior long-term, as in the case of $4 gallons of gas – suddenly everyone’s interested in oil independence and new modes of transportation. What would be the pain that would drive people to eat more whole, natural foods? I don’t know. The threat of disease alone usually doesn’t spur people into action, whereas simply improving the way you feel day-to-day might. Rising food prices may do it – it can be cheaper to grow your own if that’s an option. Maybe a need to connect with nature or other people, or to leave the rat race and slow down.

Whatever the motivation may be, I hope more people find it. I’ve personally felt a difference eating this way recently, and can tell a difference the times that I don’t. I don’t consider myself a revolutionary, but I’ll hop on the bandwagon for this one.

Safety Doesn’t Equal Obesity

An opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal about two weeks ago came to my attention just this week, and it features some conveniently faulty logic. i give the author credit though for trying bring attention to the negative impact that excessive litigation has on our lives – the premise of the piece is that children are so overly protected today that they’re not allowed or able to simply go outside and play anymore, which is contributing to the obesity epidemic among children. Fair enough.

However, my problem with the article is summed up by his statement that, “According to the Centers for Disease Control, this [obesity] problem would basically cure itself if children engaged in the informal outdoor activities that used to be normal.” Not quite, and I don’t buy that as the stance of the CDC either – the organization isn’t perfect, but it’s too good at what it does to suggest something as simple and so wrong as that. Would increased outdoor activity help? Absolutely. But there are other, major factors that influence our kids’ weight, like decreased physical education in schools, the prevalence of unhealthy food served in schools, and the increasingly unhealthy meals they eat with parents, whether at home or on the run as fast food. Getting our kids outside for informal play is only a piece of the puzzle.

Aside from that being my main issue with the piece, there’s also the problem of equating safety to obesity. Even if we were to assume for a moment that childhood obesity is primarily caused by a lack of outdoor activity, it’s not safety that’s causing that lack of outdoor activity – it’s litigation. Certainly, safety itself is a concern in some neighborhood unfortunately, but what the author is talking about is a restriction on activity that’s meant to eliminate the lawsuit likely to follow an injury, not the injury itself. Without focusing on legal reform, for which the author actually advocates through the non-profit organization, Common Good, the lawsuits would simply shift to another issue once outdoor play was regulated to death.

I do think we adults take safety issues a little too far at times and subsequently rob our children of opportunities to learn about life, and yes, that includes learning the hard way. But it alone is not making our kids fatter. We’ve used a few different tools to accomplish that feat.

In Our Grasp

This weekend I finally watched a show from the Discovery Health channel that I taped a few months ago – You: Staying Young. It was a spin-off of the book of the same title by Drs. Roizen and Oz, and featured a fascinating case study of a couple who undertook lifestyle changes to reverse the accelerated aging that their previous lifestyle had created. I’ve been aware for years of the anti-aging benefits of exercise and healthy eating, but coming across books or shows on this topic is so interesting and I always learn something new from them.

In this show the couple went through a series of tests to determine their health status, and decided to act based on the results. Great for them, although I couldn’t help but think of the number of people today who have the same information about themselves, yet don’t follow through, and even the people who don’t have the same hard data that this couple had, but still fail to act. Obviously, knowing often doesn’t equate to doing, otherwise the world would be a much better place in general for a variety of reasons, including healthy decision-making. Instead, I think that emotion needs to get involved for a lot of people to act and consistently follow-through, and specifically, the emotions of fear and/or pain. I guess for the couple in the show, the fear or pain associated with not changing their behaviors eventually became larger than the fear or pain associated of taking action. We can try to bottle the effects of exercise in a pill, but I think it would be just as effective to figure out a way to get people to identify and face their fears and pain related to healthy behaviors – people wouldn’t need the pill then, they’d simply take action themselves and derive the benefits naturally.

At any rate, I agree with a statement within the show by Dr. Mehmet Oz that we have more control over our health than we tend to believe, and that genetics doesn’t lock us into prescripted life story. The question is when each of us figures that out and does something about it.

A Step in the Right Direction

I wrote in a post earlier this week that our primary and secondary schools need to increase their physical education requirements, and Florida has done just that this summer. The state will now require that elementary schools provide 30 minutes of continuous activity each day, and middle schools must offer one period of PE each day for one semester. Doesn’t sound like much? I agree, but unfortunately, our school systems have removed PE so far from their curricula that this can actually be considered progress.

According to the 2006 Shape of the Nation report (the most recent year of the report) by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, while the majority of states require physical education at some level for primary and secondary schools (although less so for the latter), very few regulate the actual minutes per week of physical education. As a result, we have states that, for example, offer PE, but only require it twice per week, with as little as 20 minutes of activity. Or a state may simply have a blanket requirement that the schools offer PE, but regulate nothing else and leave it completely up to the schools.

What’s wrong with leaving it up to the schools? Well, there are a lot of stakeholders in a given community who have influence over a school system’s curriculum, and as I’ve mentioned previously some of these folks are more interested in other, “more tangible” things like math and science. Those are the subjects that drive standardized test scores, which in turn drive college admissions. Heaven forbid we raise well-rounded kids who also have regular and frequent exposure to PE, as well as art and music. I’m often not a fan of the government intervening in things, but education is one area where I support it to an extent, and PE is one subject on which it needs to intervene.

If nothing else comes of the current state of obesity in this country, maybe we’ll figure out how to help our kids get an early start on healthy living instead of digging them a hole to get out of.