My husband saved a life today.
Not because he did anything unusually difficult or esoteric, but because he actually knew what to do at all.
He was on his way to an afternoon meeting at work when he passed a commotion. Someone was having what turned out to be an epileptic seizure and was in the process of biting his tongue.
It's been at least fifteen years since my husband has had any sort of upgrading in his emergancy skills, going back to when he was still in the military.
There were people trying to help the man, but they had no idea that what they were doing would actually have killed him, had my husband not stepped in. He was able to position the man so that he wouldn't choke anymore, and managed to get his jaws apart to release his tongue before he bit it off. Using fingers and a spoon, because there was nothing else available.
Dh had already raised safety concerns up with management. He brought it up after discovering the first aid kit, which was last restocked before we were born! (We actually have it at home now.) He was told it couldn't be replaced yet, but they did at least mount it on the wall. Not that that was any use. Perhaps the only thing of any use in there are the tweezers. Not even the tensor bandages were any good anymore.
On another floor, the saftey equipment was fully stocked, including a defibrilator, but running to another floor wasn't exactly an option while helping someone in the middle of a seizure. Dh was given a bag of supplies to take back to his own floor after he approached management this afternoon, and that one bag has more supplies than the entire old kit.
There is a person trained in emergancy first aid. Somewhere. The phone number to reach this person is on signs in the bathrooms.
This is hardly unusual, though. When we were living in BC, Dh was working a government contract with WCB, of all places, and he bought the first aid kit for the office himself, because there wasn't one at all. The Workers Compensation Board didn't even have a basic first aid kit for their staff. Just think about that for a moment!
That they would be so unprepared amazes me. Even the grocery store I worked at a few years back was required to have a trained staff member for every shift to deal with basic medical emergencies. People who took the training got automatic raises. First aid supplies and safety equipment had to be checked and/or restocked regularly. I can understand it if some small company with barely a handful of employees didn't have anyone, but a government office with hundreds of people?
After this incident, the powers that be are going to look into his recommendations.
Too bad someone almost had to die for that to happen.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Sweet thoughts (updated)
A friend of mine sent me a link to this interesting YouTube clip. It's a 1 1/2 hour lecture by Dr. Robert H. Lustig called Sugar: The Bitter Truth. If you've got the time to spare, go ahead and check it out now.
He brings up some interesting things, but unfortunately, there's holes in his speech I could drive a truck through. I can't remember which one it was, but one of his claims was so over the top, Eldest, who came to watch with me about 20 minutes into the lecture, actually choked on her tea. I had to pause the clip so she could recover. *L*
Before I go into things in detail, though, I would have to point out the main problem I have with this lecture. If the good doctor's assertions were correct, I would be thin. Dh, Eldest and I should all be as thin as Youngest - if not thinner. Dh shouldn't have T2 diabetes, and neither should his father. My in-laws should be thin. My parents should be thin. My aunt should be thin. My late grandmother and her sister not only should have been thin, but they shouldn't have out lived all the thin members of the family. My aunt shouldn't have outlived her husband, and 3 of her 4 children should not have come down with cancer (though, ironically enough, my one cousin that hasn't had cancer is the chain smoker who drinks to much).
In other words, I and most of my family are living proof that the doctor's claims aren't quite as assured as he clearly believes.
First off, I will mention the points he made that I found refreshing to see. Right at the beginning, he blasts the myth that weight is all about calories in/calories out. He also debunks the myth that excrcise will help a person lose weight (while mentioning the benefits exercise does have). He also debunks the myth that eating a low fat diet will cause weight loss, and that eating fat makes us fat.
Unfortunately, he has his own myth issues. For starters, he talks about the Obesity Epidemic, which is largely a media and industry creation, pretty much the same way that everyone else does. The other is that he used the BMI as if it were a way to measure health, rather than just a tool for categorization. He mentions, for example, that our average weight has increased and that more people are obese, but he doesn't mention that we've also gotten taller, and that the definition of obese according to the BMI was changed, rendering large numbers of merely "overweight" people "obese," overnight. Throughout the lecture, he speaks of obesity, in and of itself, as a health problem no different than T2 diabetes or heart disease. He dismisses genetics right off the hop.
In a nutshell, the good doctor tells us that most of our health problems, including T2 diabeties, and obesity are the fault of fructose. Especially High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). He point blank calls fructose a poison, and claims it is toxic. Evidence to the contrary is only from those in the fructose industry.
I'm not going to go too far into the details of his claims. Instead, I will direct you to visit Sandy Szwarc's site, where she has quite a number of articles dealing with HFCS, fructose, sugar, etc. Other recommendations I'd make include Paul Campos' The Obesity Myth, Barry Glassner's The Gospel of Food, or visiting the site, Obesity Myths.
When making his case against fructose, Dr. Lustig frequently brings up carbonated drinks as the big enemy causing obesity in children in particular. Even after debunking the calories in/calories out myth, he uses the same sorts of mathematical abstractions to tell us that if we drink X amount of pop a day, we'll have gained Y amount of fat in a year.
You know, back when I was about 20-21 years old and thin, I started drinking a lot of Coke. It wasn't until I noticed my stomach was feeling really weird and made the connection that I realized I was drinking about 2L of Coke a day! I stopped buying Coke and it didn't take long for my stomach to stop feeling gross. While I do still indulge in Coke (usually Coke Zero, these days), I've never returned to the large amounts I drank back then. And I didn't start gaining weight until 5 or so years later, when I became pregnant. By his math, I should have gained huge amounts of fat in those two years or so that I was drinking so much Coke, then lost it when I stopped. It was pretty much the only significant source of HFCS I was ingesting.
In the lecture, Dr. Lustig brings up Ancel Keys' Seven Country study chart. In it, Keys compares rates of heart attacks and stroke in different countries with diet and lifestyle. Keys concluded that low fat diets meant longer, healthier lives, and his study has been the basis of most nutritional guidelines ever since Lustig claims that Keys didn't look at fructose, so he did not make what he sees as the real association between those diets and fructose ingestion. What Lustig neglects to mention is that Keys also left out other countries that didn't fit, ignoring nations with high fat, low carb diets that also had low heart disease and stroke rates.
Lustig, unfortunately, is just as guilty as Keys. He shows several charts of his own, showing correlations between increased obesity and increased fructose in our diets. He doesn't factor in any of the many other possibilities that could be causing unnatural weight gain, including dieting itself, increased soy in our diets (in fact, when he shows a label for baby formula with the fructose highlighted, you can clearly see that it contained significant amounts of soy, too), stress and anxiety, sleep disorders, hypothyroidism, side effects of medication, and so on. None of these things even exist in Lustig's lecture. Only fructose is the culprit, and according to him, we're all eating huge amounts of it, and that's why we're fat and sick.
There are a number of other issues I had with the lecture (his claim about an obesity epidemic among 6 month olds, made without any substantiation, being just one of them), but I won't bother going into them too much. He spends a fair amount of time explaining how our bodies deal with fructose, describing it as "alcohol without the buzz." He equates giving kids a can of pop as being the same as giving them a can of beer - with the obligatory headless fattie photo of a man's beer belly, and a naked fat kid, both of which are familiar photos accompanying obesity scare articles. The implication, of course, that that's what obesity looks like, which has little to do with reality.
Near the end, Lustig names his 4 steps to solve our health problems. Number one was to remove all liquid sugar from our diets and drink nothing but water and milk.
Well, that would go over just great in our lactose intolerant family, or those with milk allergies.
For someone who spent so much time telling us that glucose is not fructose, it's interesting that he would go so far as to cut out all sweetened beverages. Even tea or coffee (both of which can be enjoyed without sweetener, if you like that sort of thing) is out.
Lustig seems to make a good case in his lecture. He spends time talking about how our bodies deal with fructose from a chemical standpoint. If I hadn't already seen contradictory evidence, I may have been convinced. Just as one example, I remember an ongoing study I read about a few years back - and I'm having no luck finding again. Lustig talks about the fructose in fast food, and while this study wasn't looking at fructose, if Lustig were right, it would have shown up in this study. A French university professor, having just seen the movie Supersize Me, and having some extra money in his budget, decided to see if he could test the movie's premise in a controlled study. He got volunteers - all young, healthy, male medical students at his university - to eat a minimum of 6000 calories per day, while doing as little exercise as possible. The calories all had to come from fast food, with two exceptions. They could have breakfast at home, but it had to be something like bacon and eggs and sausage - all high calorie, fatty foods. If, at the end of the day, they found they hadn't had 6000 calories, they had to make up the difference by measuring out enough of a high calorie shake they were provided to put them over the 6000 calorie goal. At the time the article was written, the first group of students had finished and a second group was in the works. I would love to know the results of this! To summerize the results of the first study group, there was none of the expected weight gain or health problems among the volunteers. None. They felt like crap, but their numbers all came back healthy.
Lustig's claim that we're fat and sick because we all eat lots of fructose is also disproved in my own family. We're mostly a "from scratch" family. We do eat use sugar and honey, but since we don't buy a lot of convenience foods, fructose isn't something we ingest a lot. Yes, we do get some, but nothing like the numbers described in the lecture. Also, with my parents, grandmother, etc., fructose outside of eating actual fruit was simply never part of their diets. It wasn't introduced until well after they gained weight, and even when it became common, they (or should I say, we) were still eating the same diets at before - meats and vegetables we grew ourselves, breads we baked ourselves, and so on. My in-laws weren't farmers, but they would not have been exposed to a lot of fructose until well after they'd gained weight, too.
In the end, I can't say how much I am willing to accept of Lustig's claims against fructose. The only thing I can be sure of is that the "obesity epidemic" and various other health problems are far more complex that the amount of fructose we eat.
ps: please excuse any typos or weirdly phrased sentences I may have missed. It's past 2am right now, and my editor's in bed. ;-)
update March 17, 2010: edited for blatant typos
Update March 19, 2010: I just wanted to add that I'm not outright dismissing Lustig's claims about sugar, and especially with how sugars are used so much in processed and, especially, "fat free" or "low fat" products. For those with insulin issues in particular, these hidden sugars would be a problem. It's just that, as I mentioned above, if his claims were true, it should be clearly seen elsewhere, and it isn't. Perhaps his views are effected by the fact that, as a pediatrician, he's seeing the sick folks only, and is making assumptions based on those. Unfortunately, since he's also a part of the anti-obesity/weightloss industry, his claims that only "industry" studies disagree with his is a whole lot of pot and kettle. Either way, blaming the entire "obesity epidemic" on fructose/HFCS (terms he uses almost interchangeably, much like people who use carbon and carbone dioxide interchangeably, as if they were the same thing - that alone should send the BS meter soaring) is simplistic and questionable.
He brings up some interesting things, but unfortunately, there's holes in his speech I could drive a truck through. I can't remember which one it was, but one of his claims was so over the top, Eldest, who came to watch with me about 20 minutes into the lecture, actually choked on her tea. I had to pause the clip so she could recover. *L*
Before I go into things in detail, though, I would have to point out the main problem I have with this lecture. If the good doctor's assertions were correct, I would be thin. Dh, Eldest and I should all be as thin as Youngest - if not thinner. Dh shouldn't have T2 diabetes, and neither should his father. My in-laws should be thin. My parents should be thin. My aunt should be thin. My late grandmother and her sister not only should have been thin, but they shouldn't have out lived all the thin members of the family. My aunt shouldn't have outlived her husband, and 3 of her 4 children should not have come down with cancer (though, ironically enough, my one cousin that hasn't had cancer is the chain smoker who drinks to much).
In other words, I and most of my family are living proof that the doctor's claims aren't quite as assured as he clearly believes.
First off, I will mention the points he made that I found refreshing to see. Right at the beginning, he blasts the myth that weight is all about calories in/calories out. He also debunks the myth that excrcise will help a person lose weight (while mentioning the benefits exercise does have). He also debunks the myth that eating a low fat diet will cause weight loss, and that eating fat makes us fat.
Unfortunately, he has his own myth issues. For starters, he talks about the Obesity Epidemic, which is largely a media and industry creation, pretty much the same way that everyone else does. The other is that he used the BMI as if it were a way to measure health, rather than just a tool for categorization. He mentions, for example, that our average weight has increased and that more people are obese, but he doesn't mention that we've also gotten taller, and that the definition of obese according to the BMI was changed, rendering large numbers of merely "overweight" people "obese," overnight. Throughout the lecture, he speaks of obesity, in and of itself, as a health problem no different than T2 diabetes or heart disease. He dismisses genetics right off the hop.
In a nutshell, the good doctor tells us that most of our health problems, including T2 diabeties, and obesity are the fault of fructose. Especially High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). He point blank calls fructose a poison, and claims it is toxic. Evidence to the contrary is only from those in the fructose industry.
I'm not going to go too far into the details of his claims. Instead, I will direct you to visit Sandy Szwarc's site, where she has quite a number of articles dealing with HFCS, fructose, sugar, etc. Other recommendations I'd make include Paul Campos' The Obesity Myth, Barry Glassner's The Gospel of Food, or visiting the site, Obesity Myths.
When making his case against fructose, Dr. Lustig frequently brings up carbonated drinks as the big enemy causing obesity in children in particular. Even after debunking the calories in/calories out myth, he uses the same sorts of mathematical abstractions to tell us that if we drink X amount of pop a day, we'll have gained Y amount of fat in a year.
You know, back when I was about 20-21 years old and thin, I started drinking a lot of Coke. It wasn't until I noticed my stomach was feeling really weird and made the connection that I realized I was drinking about 2L of Coke a day! I stopped buying Coke and it didn't take long for my stomach to stop feeling gross. While I do still indulge in Coke (usually Coke Zero, these days), I've never returned to the large amounts I drank back then. And I didn't start gaining weight until 5 or so years later, when I became pregnant. By his math, I should have gained huge amounts of fat in those two years or so that I was drinking so much Coke, then lost it when I stopped. It was pretty much the only significant source of HFCS I was ingesting.
In the lecture, Dr. Lustig brings up Ancel Keys' Seven Country study chart. In it, Keys compares rates of heart attacks and stroke in different countries with diet and lifestyle. Keys concluded that low fat diets meant longer, healthier lives, and his study has been the basis of most nutritional guidelines ever since Lustig claims that Keys didn't look at fructose, so he did not make what he sees as the real association between those diets and fructose ingestion. What Lustig neglects to mention is that Keys also left out other countries that didn't fit, ignoring nations with high fat, low carb diets that also had low heart disease and stroke rates.
Lustig, unfortunately, is just as guilty as Keys. He shows several charts of his own, showing correlations between increased obesity and increased fructose in our diets. He doesn't factor in any of the many other possibilities that could be causing unnatural weight gain, including dieting itself, increased soy in our diets (in fact, when he shows a label for baby formula with the fructose highlighted, you can clearly see that it contained significant amounts of soy, too), stress and anxiety, sleep disorders, hypothyroidism, side effects of medication, and so on. None of these things even exist in Lustig's lecture. Only fructose is the culprit, and according to him, we're all eating huge amounts of it, and that's why we're fat and sick.
There are a number of other issues I had with the lecture (his claim about an obesity epidemic among 6 month olds, made without any substantiation, being just one of them), but I won't bother going into them too much. He spends a fair amount of time explaining how our bodies deal with fructose, describing it as "alcohol without the buzz." He equates giving kids a can of pop as being the same as giving them a can of beer - with the obligatory headless fattie photo of a man's beer belly, and a naked fat kid, both of which are familiar photos accompanying obesity scare articles. The implication, of course, that that's what obesity looks like, which has little to do with reality.
Near the end, Lustig names his 4 steps to solve our health problems. Number one was to remove all liquid sugar from our diets and drink nothing but water and milk.
Well, that would go over just great in our lactose intolerant family, or those with milk allergies.
For someone who spent so much time telling us that glucose is not fructose, it's interesting that he would go so far as to cut out all sweetened beverages. Even tea or coffee (both of which can be enjoyed without sweetener, if you like that sort of thing) is out.
Lustig seems to make a good case in his lecture. He spends time talking about how our bodies deal with fructose from a chemical standpoint. If I hadn't already seen contradictory evidence, I may have been convinced. Just as one example, I remember an ongoing study I read about a few years back - and I'm having no luck finding again. Lustig talks about the fructose in fast food, and while this study wasn't looking at fructose, if Lustig were right, it would have shown up in this study. A French university professor, having just seen the movie Supersize Me, and having some extra money in his budget, decided to see if he could test the movie's premise in a controlled study. He got volunteers - all young, healthy, male medical students at his university - to eat a minimum of 6000 calories per day, while doing as little exercise as possible. The calories all had to come from fast food, with two exceptions. They could have breakfast at home, but it had to be something like bacon and eggs and sausage - all high calorie, fatty foods. If, at the end of the day, they found they hadn't had 6000 calories, they had to make up the difference by measuring out enough of a high calorie shake they were provided to put them over the 6000 calorie goal. At the time the article was written, the first group of students had finished and a second group was in the works. I would love to know the results of this! To summerize the results of the first study group, there was none of the expected weight gain or health problems among the volunteers. None. They felt like crap, but their numbers all came back healthy.
Lustig's claim that we're fat and sick because we all eat lots of fructose is also disproved in my own family. We're mostly a "from scratch" family. We do eat use sugar and honey, but since we don't buy a lot of convenience foods, fructose isn't something we ingest a lot. Yes, we do get some, but nothing like the numbers described in the lecture. Also, with my parents, grandmother, etc., fructose outside of eating actual fruit was simply never part of their diets. It wasn't introduced until well after they gained weight, and even when it became common, they (or should I say, we) were still eating the same diets at before - meats and vegetables we grew ourselves, breads we baked ourselves, and so on. My in-laws weren't farmers, but they would not have been exposed to a lot of fructose until well after they'd gained weight, too.
In the end, I can't say how much I am willing to accept of Lustig's claims against fructose. The only thing I can be sure of is that the "obesity epidemic" and various other health problems are far more complex that the amount of fructose we eat.
ps: please excuse any typos or weirdly phrased sentences I may have missed. It's past 2am right now, and my editor's in bed. ;-)
update March 17, 2010: edited for blatant typos
Update March 19, 2010: I just wanted to add that I'm not outright dismissing Lustig's claims about sugar, and especially with how sugars are used so much in processed and, especially, "fat free" or "low fat" products. For those with insulin issues in particular, these hidden sugars would be a problem. It's just that, as I mentioned above, if his claims were true, it should be clearly seen elsewhere, and it isn't. Perhaps his views are effected by the fact that, as a pediatrician, he's seeing the sick folks only, and is making assumptions based on those. Unfortunately, since he's also a part of the anti-obesity/weightloss industry, his claims that only "industry" studies disagree with his is a whole lot of pot and kettle. Either way, blaming the entire "obesity epidemic" on fructose/HFCS (terms he uses almost interchangeably, much like people who use carbon and carbone dioxide interchangeably, as if they were the same thing - that alone should send the BS meter soaring) is simplistic and questionable.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Just another number
Dh and I had a conversation tonight that has left my brain rumbling around in different directions. Which leaves me up and writing past 2 am. Well, that and my chronic cough is keeping me up... :-P So if I tend to ramble off in this post, chalk it up to sleep deprivation.
The subject of our conversation was intelligence and what it means. I've thought of myself as a reasonably intelligent person, but no more than anyone else. I did do an IQ test about a dozen years ago. I don't even remember who did the test. I just did it, got the result, and went on my merry way.
The reason it came back to mind was a recent status update from someone on my facebook friends list. It was a comment on Jim Morrison, and how he was so much more than people assumed. Having read a biography on him back in high school, I knew he was quite intelligent and had a photographic memory. I didn't remember reading any IQ, but it's just not a detail that would have stuck in my mind. What caught my attention was someone's response, saying he was really smart and had an IQ of 140.
I remember looking at that and thinking, "is that high?" I had no idea, but I wouldn't have thought so, since my own result was 143. As I've never thought of myself as being smarter than anyone else (and definitely less so than some), I figured it was average. So I went and looked it up.
It turns out that, depending on which test is done (and that far back, I don't even know if there was more than one available), I am either a genius/near genius, very superior or highly intelligent.
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Well, lah dee frickin' dah. Who'd have thought that?
Apparently, my husband did. When I mentioned this to him, he told me he always knew I was smarter than him. Really? I had no idea. He then pointed out something that I did at least already know; I come from a very intelligent family. My parents may have almost no schooling at all and my mother might have a mental illness, but they are both very smart in their own ways. I recall one of my brothers telling me about when he was building some stairs and was using trig. to calculate how many stairs to fit in and what their measurements should be to do the job right. My dad? He just built the stairs. How did he get the calculations right? I have no idea. I remember helping him build a desk for me and watching him write out some quick calculations on a piece of paper. Whatever method he used to do math, it wasn't anything like what I'd been taught in school. It was also faster, and he did most of it in his head.
I can't do that.
Oh, and the brother that shared this with me? Something else I'd forgotten about. He's a card carrying Mensa member. Or at least he used to be. I don't know that he's kept up his membership, as he got it more than 20 years ago. Thinking about my siblings, they're all quite intelligent in their own ways. My sister, the farmer, designs houses and other buildings freelance for extra cash. One brother has forgotten more about computers than most people will ever know. Another brother is in demolition's and understands forces and mechanics and all sorts of things you'd expect from a trained engineer. If they don't have a piece of equipment for a job, chances are pretty good he can invent it. Even the brother that, had he been the school system today would be considered learning disabled is an aircraft mechanic with a gift for understanding everything about airplanes, whether it's a little Cessna or a Boeing 747. He can barely read a menu, but can understand some of the most technical textbooks I've ever tried to wrap my mind around. All my siblings, as well as my parents, are artistically gifted, even though only my sister has developed it to any extend.
But are they all "near genius" or "very superior" intelligence?
I hadn't thought so. Most of our neighbours were much the same. I don't think I came from a town of unusually smart people.
To me, an IQ score is just another number. Like the BMI. Useful for the purpose of organization, but you can't judge a person's knowledge by their IQ any more than you can judge a person's health by their BMI. The numbers are really meaningless - but many people put great store on them.
Personally, I think intelligence is something that's malleable. Sure, we all have aptitudes and skills that are either there, or not. My husband, for example, could do the calculations for navigating a ship in his head faster than his fellow officers could on calculators. He can look at a bunch of computer code he's never seen before and understand what it does. I can't do either, but I can look at a 2 dimensional object and mentally convert it into a 3 dimensional object. I can flip it around in my head, or even turn it inside out. My skills are in spatial reasoning and pattern recognition. My husband can't do these things. That doesn't make either of us smarter than the other.
As far as I'm concerned having a high IQ tells only part of the story. It says, first and foremost, that a person can take a test and do really well on it. Some very intelligent people lock up when faced with a test, no matter how thorough their knowledge may be. Plus, just because a person is smart in one thing, that doesn't mean they're smart in all things. There are some really stupid smart people out there. Heck, Albert Einstein may have been a genius, but he held some rather unfortunate notions, too, and he sure wouldn't have been someone to turn to for relationship advice! That magic number doesn't confer infallibility.
I also feel that, given the opportunity and desire, anyone can be as intelligent as they choose (barring any physical problems that might prevent this, of course). Use it or loose it, is how I see it. As long as we are constantly learning new things, asking questions, exploring concepts, and thinking critically, we can develop our intelligence. When we stop questioning, stop learning, and just accept what those around us tell us, I feel our intelligence suffers.
Which is why I kind of wish I never looked up what that 143 of mine actually means.
You see, as I get older, I find myself a lot less patient with what I see as willful ignorance. It seems that, everywhere I turn, people unquestioningly accept whatever steaming pile of bovine feces fits their preferred viewpoint without digging any deeper. I've found myself wondering how so many people can be so, I'm ashamed to admit this, stupid. I don't really think they *are* stupid, which is why these behaviours confuse me so much. It irritates me when I see people I know are smart, accept such dumb things. With this number of mine defined, I might have to resist the temptation to think that maybe, just maybe, they really aren't that smart. I know better than that, and I don't ever want to start judging or looking down on people on such a perception.
It's also why I find it so condescending when someone insists on dumbing down information for the masses, because they just don't think we, the great unwashed, could possibly understand such complex issues. Screw that! People are smart. They can figure things out. They can ask questions. They can learn. Having some grand high mucky muck from on high telling people what they think we should be thinking bothers the heck out of me. They assume people are too stupid to understand. Sadly, too many people have been convinced that they're really not as smart as the grand high mucky mucks, so they have no right to question those who decree from on high. Instead, they not only accept these decrees, they embrace them, and defend them against any who might question them.
My habit of delving to the core of various claims and being able to counter a lot of these cherished beliefs can make some people rather angry. My concern is that, now that I know where that meaningless number puts me on the scale, the next time someone condescendingly asks me, "who do you think you are, that you question these really, really smart people," I might start thinking, "I'm the one with the IQ of 143, what's yours?" Because I don't ever want to use a number instead of an explanation. It's a lazy cop out.
Who do I think I am to question the grand high mucky mucks? I'm the one who believes that we all are just as worthwhile as the grand high mucky mucks. I'm the one who believes we're all just as smart as they are, just as capable as they are, and just as deserving of being treated with equal respect. Their titles, their letters after their names, their status; these things do not make them better or smarter than me. Or you. They just give an idea of what sort of training they might have, what schooling they've had, or maybe it shows that they've kissed a lot of butt to get where they are.
Their number on the scale is every bit as meaningless as mine.
The subject of our conversation was intelligence and what it means. I've thought of myself as a reasonably intelligent person, but no more than anyone else. I did do an IQ test about a dozen years ago. I don't even remember who did the test. I just did it, got the result, and went on my merry way.
The reason it came back to mind was a recent status update from someone on my facebook friends list. It was a comment on Jim Morrison, and how he was so much more than people assumed. Having read a biography on him back in high school, I knew he was quite intelligent and had a photographic memory. I didn't remember reading any IQ, but it's just not a detail that would have stuck in my mind. What caught my attention was someone's response, saying he was really smart and had an IQ of 140.
I remember looking at that and thinking, "is that high?" I had no idea, but I wouldn't have thought so, since my own result was 143. As I've never thought of myself as being smarter than anyone else (and definitely less so than some), I figured it was average. So I went and looked it up.
It turns out that, depending on which test is done (and that far back, I don't even know if there was more than one available), I am either a genius/near genius, very superior or highly intelligent.
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Well, lah dee frickin' dah. Who'd have thought that?
Apparently, my husband did. When I mentioned this to him, he told me he always knew I was smarter than him. Really? I had no idea. He then pointed out something that I did at least already know; I come from a very intelligent family. My parents may have almost no schooling at all and my mother might have a mental illness, but they are both very smart in their own ways. I recall one of my brothers telling me about when he was building some stairs and was using trig. to calculate how many stairs to fit in and what their measurements should be to do the job right. My dad? He just built the stairs. How did he get the calculations right? I have no idea. I remember helping him build a desk for me and watching him write out some quick calculations on a piece of paper. Whatever method he used to do math, it wasn't anything like what I'd been taught in school. It was also faster, and he did most of it in his head.
I can't do that.
Oh, and the brother that shared this with me? Something else I'd forgotten about. He's a card carrying Mensa member. Or at least he used to be. I don't know that he's kept up his membership, as he got it more than 20 years ago. Thinking about my siblings, they're all quite intelligent in their own ways. My sister, the farmer, designs houses and other buildings freelance for extra cash. One brother has forgotten more about computers than most people will ever know. Another brother is in demolition's and understands forces and mechanics and all sorts of things you'd expect from a trained engineer. If they don't have a piece of equipment for a job, chances are pretty good he can invent it. Even the brother that, had he been the school system today would be considered learning disabled is an aircraft mechanic with a gift for understanding everything about airplanes, whether it's a little Cessna or a Boeing 747. He can barely read a menu, but can understand some of the most technical textbooks I've ever tried to wrap my mind around. All my siblings, as well as my parents, are artistically gifted, even though only my sister has developed it to any extend.
But are they all "near genius" or "very superior" intelligence?
I hadn't thought so. Most of our neighbours were much the same. I don't think I came from a town of unusually smart people.
To me, an IQ score is just another number. Like the BMI. Useful for the purpose of organization, but you can't judge a person's knowledge by their IQ any more than you can judge a person's health by their BMI. The numbers are really meaningless - but many people put great store on them.
Personally, I think intelligence is something that's malleable. Sure, we all have aptitudes and skills that are either there, or not. My husband, for example, could do the calculations for navigating a ship in his head faster than his fellow officers could on calculators. He can look at a bunch of computer code he's never seen before and understand what it does. I can't do either, but I can look at a 2 dimensional object and mentally convert it into a 3 dimensional object. I can flip it around in my head, or even turn it inside out. My skills are in spatial reasoning and pattern recognition. My husband can't do these things. That doesn't make either of us smarter than the other.
As far as I'm concerned having a high IQ tells only part of the story. It says, first and foremost, that a person can take a test and do really well on it. Some very intelligent people lock up when faced with a test, no matter how thorough their knowledge may be. Plus, just because a person is smart in one thing, that doesn't mean they're smart in all things. There are some really stupid smart people out there. Heck, Albert Einstein may have been a genius, but he held some rather unfortunate notions, too, and he sure wouldn't have been someone to turn to for relationship advice! That magic number doesn't confer infallibility.
I also feel that, given the opportunity and desire, anyone can be as intelligent as they choose (barring any physical problems that might prevent this, of course). Use it or loose it, is how I see it. As long as we are constantly learning new things, asking questions, exploring concepts, and thinking critically, we can develop our intelligence. When we stop questioning, stop learning, and just accept what those around us tell us, I feel our intelligence suffers.
Which is why I kind of wish I never looked up what that 143 of mine actually means.
You see, as I get older, I find myself a lot less patient with what I see as willful ignorance. It seems that, everywhere I turn, people unquestioningly accept whatever steaming pile of bovine feces fits their preferred viewpoint without digging any deeper. I've found myself wondering how so many people can be so, I'm ashamed to admit this, stupid. I don't really think they *are* stupid, which is why these behaviours confuse me so much. It irritates me when I see people I know are smart, accept such dumb things. With this number of mine defined, I might have to resist the temptation to think that maybe, just maybe, they really aren't that smart. I know better than that, and I don't ever want to start judging or looking down on people on such a perception.
It's also why I find it so condescending when someone insists on dumbing down information for the masses, because they just don't think we, the great unwashed, could possibly understand such complex issues. Screw that! People are smart. They can figure things out. They can ask questions. They can learn. Having some grand high mucky muck from on high telling people what they think we should be thinking bothers the heck out of me. They assume people are too stupid to understand. Sadly, too many people have been convinced that they're really not as smart as the grand high mucky mucks, so they have no right to question those who decree from on high. Instead, they not only accept these decrees, they embrace them, and defend them against any who might question them.
My habit of delving to the core of various claims and being able to counter a lot of these cherished beliefs can make some people rather angry. My concern is that, now that I know where that meaningless number puts me on the scale, the next time someone condescendingly asks me, "who do you think you are, that you question these really, really smart people," I might start thinking, "I'm the one with the IQ of 143, what's yours?" Because I don't ever want to use a number instead of an explanation. It's a lazy cop out.
Who do I think I am to question the grand high mucky mucks? I'm the one who believes that we all are just as worthwhile as the grand high mucky mucks. I'm the one who believes we're all just as smart as they are, just as capable as they are, and just as deserving of being treated with equal respect. Their titles, their letters after their names, their status; these things do not make them better or smarter than me. Or you. They just give an idea of what sort of training they might have, what schooling they've had, or maybe it shows that they've kissed a lot of butt to get where they are.
Their number on the scale is every bit as meaningless as mine.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Another manufactured controversy?
First, people were up in arms of prorogation, with all sorts of twisting of facts and grand hyperbole. Then Ignatieff tried to manufacture another controversy by bringing up abortion and trying to tie it to helping women and children around the world.
Now the controversy is over changing the lyrics to Canada's official anthem. There are already hundreds of articles about whether or not we should change our "sexist" lyrics, facebook groups against the idea have started, and people are suddenly all upset about the words to a song I doubt 3/4s of them even know the words to in the first place.
Now, I'm not too keen on the idea of the lyrics being changed - more for the reasons behind it than anything else - but why is it getting to over the top? It's not like these are the original lyrics, anyhow. The lyrics have gone through several changed. When I first learned to sing it in elementary school (30 odd years ago), I learned the line "in all our sons command" ("thy sons," in the official version) as "in all our hearts command." If fact, it's still the one word I get wrong when I sing the anthem, because I keep forgetting it's not the official line.
Here's a quick look at the changes O Canada's English lyrics have gone through.
(source)
1901?
Richardson version:
1908
McCulloch version :
1908, popular in BC
Buchan version:
adapted from 1927
The version adopted pursuant to the National Anthem Act in 1980 reads as follows:
Wikipedia has more.
Weir's original 1908 lyrics
Proposals to change the lyrics are hardly new, either. From Wapedia
I can understand people feeling passionately about proposed changes to the lyrics. I have no problems with a pro- or con- debate. What I don't get, however, is what a big, stinking deal is being made of the whole thing. The rhetoric is just as silly as the anti-prorogation freakouts.
As far as I'm concerned, it's becoming just another manufactured controversy.
Now the controversy is over changing the lyrics to Canada's official anthem. There are already hundreds of articles about whether or not we should change our "sexist" lyrics, facebook groups against the idea have started, and people are suddenly all upset about the words to a song I doubt 3/4s of them even know the words to in the first place.
Now, I'm not too keen on the idea of the lyrics being changed - more for the reasons behind it than anything else - but why is it getting to over the top? It's not like these are the original lyrics, anyhow. The lyrics have gone through several changed. When I first learned to sing it in elementary school (30 odd years ago), I learned the line "in all our sons command" ("thy sons," in the official version) as "in all our hearts command." If fact, it's still the one word I get wrong when I sing the anthem, because I keep forgetting it's not the official line.
Here's a quick look at the changes O Canada's English lyrics have gone through.
(source)
1901?
Richardson version:
" O Canada! Our fathers' land of old
Thy brow is crown'd with leaves of red and gold.
Beneath the shade of the Holy Cross
Thy children own their birth
No stains thy glorious annals gloss
Since valour shield thy hearth.
Almighty God! On thee we call
Defend our rights, forfend this nation's thrall,
Defend our rights, forfend this nation's thrall."
1908
McCulloch version :
" O Canada! in praise of thee we sing;
From echoing hills our anthems proudly ring.
With fertile plains and mountains grand
With lakes and rivers clear,
Eternal beauty, thos dost stand
Throughout the changing year.
Lord God of Hosts! We now implore
Bless our dear land this day and evermore,
Bless our dear land this day and evermore."
1908, popular in BC
Buchan version:
" O Canada, our heritage, our love
Thy worth we praise all other lands above.
From sea to see throughout their length
From Pole to borderland,
At Britain's side, whate'er betide
Unflinchingly we'll stand
With hearts we sing, "God save the King",
Guide then one Empire wide, do we implore,
And prosper Canada from shore to shore."
adapted from 1927
The version adopted pursuant to the National Anthem Act in 1980 reads as follows:
"O Canada! Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North, strong and free!
From far and wide, O Canada,
We stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free !
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee."
Wikipedia has more.
Weir's original 1908 lyrics
- O Canada! Our home, our native land,
- True patriot love thou dost in us command.
- We see thee rising fair, dear land,
- The True North strong and free;
- And stand on guard, O Canada,
- We stand on guard for thee.
-
- Refrain
- O Canada! O Canada!
- O Canada. We stand on guard for thee.
- O Canada! Where Pines and Maples grow,
- Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow.
- Thou art the land, O Canada,
- From East to Western sea,
- The land of hope for all who toil,
- The land of liberty.
-
- Refrain
- O Canada! Beneath thy shining skies,
- May stalwart sons and gentle maidens rise;
- And so abide, O Canada,
- From East to Western sea,
- Where e’er thy pines and prairies are,
- The True North strong and free.
-
- Refrain
Proposals to change the lyrics are hardly new, either. From Wapedia
Weir's original lyrics from 1908, consisting of three verses, did not contain the word sons, instead using the somewhat archaic "thou dost in us command", and it contained no religious reference. [1] [10] [19] Weir decided to change his lyrics to "in all thy sons command" in 1914, [20] and in 1926 added a fourth verse of a religious nature. [21]In June 1990, the city council of Toronto voted 12-7 to recommend to the Canadian Government that the phrase "our home and native land" be changed to "our home and cherished land", and "true patriot love in all thy sons command" be changed to "true patriot love in all of us command". Also proposed, but rejected, was the idea of a phrase "with patriot love, thy sons and daughters stand". City Councillor Howard Moscoe said that the words "native land" were not appropriate for the many Canadians who were not native-born, and that the word "sons" implied "that women can't feel true patriotism or love for Canada." [22]Feminists such as Senator Vivienne Poy have criticized the English lyrics of the anthem as being sexist. [23] In 2002, Poy introduced a bill to change the phrase "in all thy sons command" to "in all of us command". The throne speech of March 2010 announced that the federal Parliament will be asked to review the "original gender-neutral wording of the national anthem". [24] In 2006, the anthem's religious references (to God in English, and to the Christian cross in French) were criticized by secularists. [25] [26]
I can understand people feeling passionately about proposed changes to the lyrics. I have no problems with a pro- or con- debate. What I don't get, however, is what a big, stinking deal is being made of the whole thing. The rhetoric is just as silly as the anti-prorogation freakouts.
As far as I'm concerned, it's becoming just another manufactured controversy.
Monday, March 01, 2010
One Year
We have officially been at our current address for one year.
Unofficially, it was really a few days ago, since we got the key and spent the last 2-3 days of February moving in. As far as the paperwork is concerned, we have been co-owners of this complex for a full year as of today.
It feels kinda good.
I still don't get any sense of permanence. With so many of our moves being totally unexpected, I don't know that I will ever feel that way again. After all, even if nothing bizarre happens again, eventually the kids will move out and we'll have no need for such a large place. Even if we end up moving into a smaller apartment within the complex, it's still a move. I sometimes wonder, though, if we'll ever have that permanent place that will be totally and completely our own? I thought we had that when we moved back to my home town - both times - but ... well, life happens, right? *L*
One thing about all these moves - my definition of "home" is a lot more flexible. In one way, "home" will always be the farm I grew up on, but it's also wherever we happen to be living at the time. While I still feel vaguely transient, even after being here for a year, no other city we've lived in has felt so much like "home" to me. Youngest and I got to meet up with a local family that just started home schooling and was looking to connect with other hs'ing families. The mother is originally from Norway, has had a few trans-atlantic moves over the years, and has been living in this city for about half the time that we have. While we were talking, she happened to comment that, of all the places she's lived, this was where she felt the most at home in! It was interesting to hear someone else using the exact same words I have in the past about this city. I've lived in interesting, diverse and downright enjoyable places before, but somehow, here is where I've felt the most... well... at home! There's just no better word I can think to use. I hadn't noticed the lack of this sense in our previous moves, but after moving here, there was an unexpected feeling of comfort. Like putting on a soft, cozy sweater and suddenly realizing how my other ones were actually rather stiff and uncomfortable.
There's a strong and active arts community here; a wide range of ethnic diversity, and an acceptance of a variety of lifestyles and religious beliefs. There are the back-to-the-earth granola crunchers next to big industry complexes; luddites next to bleeding edge technophiles. In no other city have I seen so many Hummers and Smart Cars.
While some of these groups may not like the others much, compared to other cities I've lived in, they are remarkably tolerant of each other. There's a general acceptance and "live and let live" attitude that's more tangible than in other places we've lived in. Ironically, this is also one of the cities that I've heard many nasty jokes about how people here are such backwards neandrethals. Mostly by people who've never lived here, and quite a few who've never even visited. Funny, that.
With the first 3 1/2 years in this city spent in a perpetual state of "we're just living in this spot temporarily!" I guess it'll take a bit longer before I get over the feeling that we're just waiting to find our permanent home. Heck, we're still slowly trying to buy furniture without needing to think of having to move it again. It takes a lot longer when we only get things we can pay for in full, rather than on credit. ;-)
Is this move permanent? Probably not, as I mentioned earlier. Still, I do expect to live here for quite a few years, at least.
Who knows what the future will bring?
Unofficially, it was really a few days ago, since we got the key and spent the last 2-3 days of February moving in. As far as the paperwork is concerned, we have been co-owners of this complex for a full year as of today.
It feels kinda good.
I still don't get any sense of permanence. With so many of our moves being totally unexpected, I don't know that I will ever feel that way again. After all, even if nothing bizarre happens again, eventually the kids will move out and we'll have no need for such a large place. Even if we end up moving into a smaller apartment within the complex, it's still a move. I sometimes wonder, though, if we'll ever have that permanent place that will be totally and completely our own? I thought we had that when we moved back to my home town - both times - but ... well, life happens, right? *L*
One thing about all these moves - my definition of "home" is a lot more flexible. In one way, "home" will always be the farm I grew up on, but it's also wherever we happen to be living at the time. While I still feel vaguely transient, even after being here for a year, no other city we've lived in has felt so much like "home" to me. Youngest and I got to meet up with a local family that just started home schooling and was looking to connect with other hs'ing families. The mother is originally from Norway, has had a few trans-atlantic moves over the years, and has been living in this city for about half the time that we have. While we were talking, she happened to comment that, of all the places she's lived, this was where she felt the most at home in! It was interesting to hear someone else using the exact same words I have in the past about this city. I've lived in interesting, diverse and downright enjoyable places before, but somehow, here is where I've felt the most... well... at home! There's just no better word I can think to use. I hadn't noticed the lack of this sense in our previous moves, but after moving here, there was an unexpected feeling of comfort. Like putting on a soft, cozy sweater and suddenly realizing how my other ones were actually rather stiff and uncomfortable.
There's a strong and active arts community here; a wide range of ethnic diversity, and an acceptance of a variety of lifestyles and religious beliefs. There are the back-to-the-earth granola crunchers next to big industry complexes; luddites next to bleeding edge technophiles. In no other city have I seen so many Hummers and Smart Cars.
While some of these groups may not like the others much, compared to other cities I've lived in, they are remarkably tolerant of each other. There's a general acceptance and "live and let live" attitude that's more tangible than in other places we've lived in. Ironically, this is also one of the cities that I've heard many nasty jokes about how people here are such backwards neandrethals. Mostly by people who've never lived here, and quite a few who've never even visited. Funny, that.
With the first 3 1/2 years in this city spent in a perpetual state of "we're just living in this spot temporarily!" I guess it'll take a bit longer before I get over the feeling that we're just waiting to find our permanent home. Heck, we're still slowly trying to buy furniture without needing to think of having to move it again. It takes a lot longer when we only get things we can pay for in full, rather than on credit. ;-)
Is this move permanent? Probably not, as I mentioned earlier. Still, I do expect to live here for quite a few years, at least.
Who knows what the future will bring?
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Well, golly gee, I guess I'm doomed - unless I spend lots of money!
(updated to, hopefully, find and fix all my typos 25/02/10)
I pretty much never buy newspapers anymore, but thanks to a charity fundraiser, we did get a subscription to the National Post. Normally, I find the NP pretty reliable. Like most papers, they tend to lean one way more than the other politically, but they tend to be informative about both sides of an issue.
Today (or should I say, yesterday, since I'm writing this past midnight), they weren't.
The section, Media Planet, was focused on obesity. Titled, "The Heavy Truth; Your guide to what obesity is, how one gets there, and the way to get out," made it pretty clear which side they weighed in on (no pun intended), but in case there was any doubt, the full page graphic cleared up any doubts. A light coloured profile of a fat body, made up of a mosaic of cookies, is surrounded by the browns of chocolate bon bons. Because, of course, we all know that us fatties are fat because we stuff our faces with sweets all the time.
Actually, when my daughter first held the section out to me, my first thought was that I was looking at a full page weight loss ad, as this graphic seemed to be part of the weight loss clinic blurb across the bottom of the page. In fact, in flipping through the section, it was difficult to tell the difference between the articles and the ads. Every article was framed with ads for clinics, diets, bariatric surgery, and weight loss supplements. The entire back page of the section is taken up by one ad. The most obvious thing a reader gets from this is that, if they want to lose weight, they need to spend lots of money on these things. The articles pretty much told us that we were doomed if we didn't lose weight.
There were actually a couple of fairly balanced articles. The very first one, Obesity: Lifestyle Chance or Lifestyle Choice, was one of them. Sorta. It espoused some of the usual myths, but pointed out that fat people don't "choose" to be fat. Later on, there's Obesity: Should we blame nature or nurture. That one finished with the simple answer of, it's both. Obesity and Eating Disorders, at least, starts off by saying that obesity is NOT an eating disorder, but it still goes on the assumption that if we just eat "right," our bodies will change to our "natural, healthy weight." Which is just doublespeak for "thin," since everything else about the section tells us that a larger body shape cannot be natural, nor healthy.
Many of the articles were little more than promotions for specific weight loss diets, clinics, surgeries, supplements, and so on. They were all filled with the usual assumptions. Fit and healthy = being thin. Eating right = reducing calories to lose weight - otherwise known as Dieting, even if they don't use that word to describe their regimen. Feeling happy about our bodies, or just in general, can only be achieved through weight loss. Weight gain, of course, is only ever caused by bad eating, even in those articles that acknowledged other causes of weight gain.
The irritating thing is the continual claims that being fat, all on its own, is the cause of a myriad of health problems. It's that whole correlation/causation issue, all over again.
Now, being fat is indeed associated with higher risks for things like heart disease, diabetes, etc. An associated higher risk, however, doesn't automatically mean that 1) a person will actually come down with whatever health problem is named and 2) that the increase of weight actually causes said health problem. It could just as easily be a warning symptom.
Let's take a look at the difference between the increased risk and the actual cause of a problem.
When I get behind the wheel of my van and drive away, my risk of getting into a motor vehicle accident increases substantially from just staying home.
The fact that my risk of getting into a motor vehicle accident has increased doesn't mean that I will get into one. It just means the chances are greater. Some people never get into an accident their entire driving lifetime. Others will get into many.
Now, let's say I do get into an accident. What are the possible causes?
Well, some of them could be completely outside my control, like an unknown mechanical failure in my vehicle, or weather. Another thing I have little to no control over is what other drivers do. Perhaps a driver is texting or drunk while driving. Or a driver might blow a red light because she decided to tie her shoelace (that is actually what a driver was doing when she ran a red and T-boned a friend of mine). Or an unobservant driver talking on a cell phone might make a left turn without checking to see if the lane was clear (which is what killed a friend of my husband's). For this sort of thing, the only thing I can do to reduce my risk is to make sure I am as observant and aware as possible; hopefully I will spot an impending accident and manage to avoid it.
Of course, I could be completely irresponsible as a driver. Maybe I'm the one not paying attention to the light, talking on the cell phone, driving erratically, etc. This sort of behavior would increase my risk of an accident even more. It still doesn't mean that I will get into one. Just that my risk has increased.
The thing is, if I get into a motor vehicle accident, the action that increased my risk (namely, getting into a vehicle and driving) isn't the actual cause of any accident I get into. Even if my own irresponsible behavior increased the risk factor and actually caused an accident, it would be a specific action, not just me getting behind the wheel, that caused the accident.
Telling people who are fat that they can decrease their risk of various health problems if they just lose the weight is like telling people they can reduce the risk of a motor vehicle accident by never leaving home, since even being a pedestrian means an increased risk of motor vehicle accident. After all, I could get hit by a truck while using a crosswalk, too.
We can reduce our health risks by doing some things. Just as we can practice defensive driving, we can improve our health in a variety of ways. That might involve dietary changes (as opposed to going on a weight loss diet). We can increase exercise as much as we're able to. We can make changes in our lives to reduce stress. If we have a family history of certain health problems, we can be aware of what signs to watch out for, in hopes of catching a problem before it becomes dangerous. These actions may or may not prevent certain health problems from happening. They may or may not result in weight loss. The numbers on our scales are not necessarily a reflection of our actual health, nor are we failures if the numbers refuse to go down, even while our health indices improve.
Being thin isn't a guarantee for good health. It just means a slightly reduced risk for some things. It's actually an increased risk for others. Despite the scary claims that being fat causes all sorts of problems, being thin doesn't magically remove that risk. We can still drop dead of a heart attack. We can still get cancer. We can still get depressed.
Perhaps most important, being thin doesn't guarantee us happiness, nor does it define our worth as human beings. The purveyors of weight loss solutions would have us believe otherwise, so that we'll spend lots and lots of money on their products or services. As an added bonus, when they don't work (which is 95% of the time), it's never their fault. It's always ours, for not trying hard enough. Or giving them enough money.
I pretty much never buy newspapers anymore, but thanks to a charity fundraiser, we did get a subscription to the National Post. Normally, I find the NP pretty reliable. Like most papers, they tend to lean one way more than the other politically, but they tend to be informative about both sides of an issue.
Today (or should I say, yesterday, since I'm writing this past midnight), they weren't.
The section, Media Planet, was focused on obesity. Titled, "The Heavy Truth; Your guide to what obesity is, how one gets there, and the way to get out," made it pretty clear which side they weighed in on (no pun intended), but in case there was any doubt, the full page graphic cleared up any doubts. A light coloured profile of a fat body, made up of a mosaic of cookies, is surrounded by the browns of chocolate bon bons. Because, of course, we all know that us fatties are fat because we stuff our faces with sweets all the time.
Actually, when my daughter first held the section out to me, my first thought was that I was looking at a full page weight loss ad, as this graphic seemed to be part of the weight loss clinic blurb across the bottom of the page. In fact, in flipping through the section, it was difficult to tell the difference between the articles and the ads. Every article was framed with ads for clinics, diets, bariatric surgery, and weight loss supplements. The entire back page of the section is taken up by one ad. The most obvious thing a reader gets from this is that, if they want to lose weight, they need to spend lots of money on these things. The articles pretty much told us that we were doomed if we didn't lose weight.
There were actually a couple of fairly balanced articles. The very first one, Obesity: Lifestyle Chance or Lifestyle Choice, was one of them. Sorta. It espoused some of the usual myths, but pointed out that fat people don't "choose" to be fat. Later on, there's Obesity: Should we blame nature or nurture. That one finished with the simple answer of, it's both. Obesity and Eating Disorders, at least, starts off by saying that obesity is NOT an eating disorder, but it still goes on the assumption that if we just eat "right," our bodies will change to our "natural, healthy weight." Which is just doublespeak for "thin," since everything else about the section tells us that a larger body shape cannot be natural, nor healthy.
Many of the articles were little more than promotions for specific weight loss diets, clinics, surgeries, supplements, and so on. They were all filled with the usual assumptions. Fit and healthy = being thin. Eating right = reducing calories to lose weight - otherwise known as Dieting, even if they don't use that word to describe their regimen. Feeling happy about our bodies, or just in general, can only be achieved through weight loss. Weight gain, of course, is only ever caused by bad eating, even in those articles that acknowledged other causes of weight gain.
The irritating thing is the continual claims that being fat, all on its own, is the cause of a myriad of health problems. It's that whole correlation/causation issue, all over again.
Now, being fat is indeed associated with higher risks for things like heart disease, diabetes, etc. An associated higher risk, however, doesn't automatically mean that 1) a person will actually come down with whatever health problem is named and 2) that the increase of weight actually causes said health problem. It could just as easily be a warning symptom.
Let's take a look at the difference between the increased risk and the actual cause of a problem.
When I get behind the wheel of my van and drive away, my risk of getting into a motor vehicle accident increases substantially from just staying home.
The fact that my risk of getting into a motor vehicle accident has increased doesn't mean that I will get into one. It just means the chances are greater. Some people never get into an accident their entire driving lifetime. Others will get into many.
Now, let's say I do get into an accident. What are the possible causes?
Well, some of them could be completely outside my control, like an unknown mechanical failure in my vehicle, or weather. Another thing I have little to no control over is what other drivers do. Perhaps a driver is texting or drunk while driving. Or a driver might blow a red light because she decided to tie her shoelace (that is actually what a driver was doing when she ran a red and T-boned a friend of mine). Or an unobservant driver talking on a cell phone might make a left turn without checking to see if the lane was clear (which is what killed a friend of my husband's). For this sort of thing, the only thing I can do to reduce my risk is to make sure I am as observant and aware as possible; hopefully I will spot an impending accident and manage to avoid it.
Of course, I could be completely irresponsible as a driver. Maybe I'm the one not paying attention to the light, talking on the cell phone, driving erratically, etc. This sort of behavior would increase my risk of an accident even more. It still doesn't mean that I will get into one. Just that my risk has increased.
The thing is, if I get into a motor vehicle accident, the action that increased my risk (namely, getting into a vehicle and driving) isn't the actual cause of any accident I get into. Even if my own irresponsible behavior increased the risk factor and actually caused an accident, it would be a specific action, not just me getting behind the wheel, that caused the accident.
Telling people who are fat that they can decrease their risk of various health problems if they just lose the weight is like telling people they can reduce the risk of a motor vehicle accident by never leaving home, since even being a pedestrian means an increased risk of motor vehicle accident. After all, I could get hit by a truck while using a crosswalk, too.
We can reduce our health risks by doing some things. Just as we can practice defensive driving, we can improve our health in a variety of ways. That might involve dietary changes (as opposed to going on a weight loss diet). We can increase exercise as much as we're able to. We can make changes in our lives to reduce stress. If we have a family history of certain health problems, we can be aware of what signs to watch out for, in hopes of catching a problem before it becomes dangerous. These actions may or may not prevent certain health problems from happening. They may or may not result in weight loss. The numbers on our scales are not necessarily a reflection of our actual health, nor are we failures if the numbers refuse to go down, even while our health indices improve.
Being thin isn't a guarantee for good health. It just means a slightly reduced risk for some things. It's actually an increased risk for others. Despite the scary claims that being fat causes all sorts of problems, being thin doesn't magically remove that risk. We can still drop dead of a heart attack. We can still get cancer. We can still get depressed.
Perhaps most important, being thin doesn't guarantee us happiness, nor does it define our worth as human beings. The purveyors of weight loss solutions would have us believe otherwise, so that we'll spend lots and lots of money on their products or services. As an added bonus, when they don't work (which is 95% of the time), it's never their fault. It's always ours, for not trying hard enough. Or giving them enough money.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
YOU are killing your kids!
You know, I was thinking of going to be early tonight. Instead, I took the 20+ minutes to watch the Jamie Oliver TED Prize wish speech. Now, I know I won't be able to sleep until I get all the thoughts swirling around in my head written down.
No, I'm not going to link to it here. Go do a search on it on youtube, if you really want to see it. Assuming you want to waste 20 minutes of your life watching that condescending little git. Man, I used to like this guy! Sheesh!
First off, I want to talk about the good stuff. There is some there, and it's a shame it was ruined by the crap.
Oliver talks about food education, which I think is a grand idea. Knowing how to pull together healthy, tasty meals is a good thing. Knowing how to do it using fresh, quality ingredients is also a good thing. Being able to feed a family healthy meals economically is a good thing. I've encountered far too many people who not only don't know how to use basic ingredients, but are thoroughly intimidated by them. They're under the impression that cooking is complex or difficult, and don't feel confident that they can learn. I think this is part of the larger problem of our education system teaching us to defer to experts in areas that used to be the realm of family and community, like how to parent, feed, raise and educate our kids. Spend 12 or more years being told you're incompetent, and there's a tendency to believe it.
Oliver also discusses the excessive additives in many modern foods, and he has a very good point there. He somewhat looses the theme by focusing primarily on sugar, rather that some of the other strange things added to our food. Just try, for example, to find foods that can be eaten by people who can't do gluten, milk proteins or soy. Any one of them is hard enough, but all three is amazingly difficult. They show up in places you'd never expect, like milk proteins in sherbet or deli meats. Soy and wheat are almost ubiquitous.
Unfortunately, that's about it for the good parts.
Oliver actually starts his talk with one of the biggest pieces of BS, claiming that in the next 18 minutes of his speech, 4 Americans will die because of what they eat.
Really? And how was that determined? Did they all eat poison? Or would that be based on the already falsified, junk science claim that obesity kills 300,000 + people in the US every year? He infers that obesity - which I don't think he ever defined in the talk, so I'll assume he is referring to the BMI definition - is killing these people, and says so directly many times throughout his talk. This, of course, runs counter to the repeated studies that show people in the overweight category have the best outcomes and longest lives, while those in the normal and obese categories have equal numbers except in the most extreme examples of obesity, at which point the numbers match what's really the most dangerous category to be in, underweight.
At least he admits he's not a doctor, not that that really improves anything.
He then chastises Americans for being the most unhealthy people in the world, and repeats the recent BS claim that our kids will live shorter lifespans than their parents. He emphasizes this by pointing to someone in the audience and saying "YOUR child will live a life 10 years younger than you, because of the landscape of food that we've build around them."
Aside from the guilt inducing accusation, this is, of course, an extrapolation, similar to those that claim X% of adults will be obese in the near future - a model that, if it were to believed, means that obesity rates will eventually be 100%. Like so many other predictions, these are mathematical constructs that have little to do with reality. Life spans and overall health have more to do with things like poverty, sanitation, and reliable, accessible health care, and while obesity may indeed be connected with various health problems, increased adiposity, in and of itself, has never killed anyone.
His next fallacy is shown in a graph of causes of death. Of these, he blames heart disease, all cancers, stroke and diabetes on diet and obesity. Which is absolute BS. The primary predictors for heart disease and diabetes - especially T2 diabetes - is heredity. Among the list of risk factors for heart disease, obesity is the last one listed. (As a side note, a recent study found that the majority of first time heart attack victims had normal cholesteral levels. Of course, the pharmaceutical company, and manufacturer of statins, that paid for this study declared that this meant that we should change what is considered normal cholesterol levels, and doctors should put more people on statins.) All cancers? There are so many different types of cancers, to blame them all on eating habits and body fat is ludicrous. As for stroke, a quick look at a medical reference site, and there's nary a mention of diet or obesity. As for diabetes, it's caused by the pancreas's inability to produce insulin, ranging from an absolute lack of insulin, to defective insulin (which is rare). Risk factors are a different issue altogether, and again, genetics plays a strong role. This is particularly notable when looking at diabetes rates in different ethnic groups. Blaming diet and obesity is far too simplistic - but does a great job of blaming the victim.
What Oliver also neglects to mention is that research has found obese people who have never dieted do not exhibit increased risk factors for heart disease, diabetes or stroke (I can't say for cancer, again because there are so many different types). It is only obese people with a history of weight loss dieting that exhibit increased risk factors. Dieting to loose weight is more dangerous to our health that being fat in the first place.
Ultimately, the single greatest increase in risk factor for all of these isn't diet or body fat, but age. The older we get, the more likely we are to die of any of these. Well, at least until the age of 50, at which point there's no difference anymore. In other words, the higher death rates in these categories are the consequence of our increased life spans.
Oliver then moves on to some of his more disgusting behavior. He introduces us to "my friend Brittany," a 16 yr old, complete with unflattering photo. Brittany, he declares, will be dead in 6 years. Because she's eating herself to death.
If this is how he humiliates his friends, it's a wonder he has any at all.
Just how does Oliver know she'll be dead in 6 years? He's already admitted earlier that he's no doctor. He doesn't tell us, other than some vague reference to her eating her liver to death.
I'm not sure how he came to that conclusion, but it reminds me of a French study that was ongoing when I read about it, and I really wish I could find out more about it. Inspired by the movie, Supersize Me, a French university professor with some extra money in his budget decided to do a clinical study to replicate what Spurlock did to himself in the movie and see if he got the same result. In this study, volunteers - all healthy, young, male medical students - agreed to eat a minimum of 6000 calories of fast food a day and get as little exercise as possible, for the entire school year. The only exceptions to fast food were breakfast, which they could eat at home, so long as it was lots of bacon and eggs and the like, or, if they failed to reach 6000 calories by the end of the day, a high calorie shake they would mix up enough of to put them over 6000 calories was to be drunk before bed. The participants were closely monitored, with particular attention to liver function, because Spurlock had apparently developed liver problems.
The results of the first group to take part in this study were; an initial weight gain in the first month to month and a half, which was lost shortly after; some minor changes to liver function in the same time period, then back to normal. By the end of the study, none of the volunteers displayed any health problems, though they all complained about the difficulty of eating 6000 calories a day, and were chafing at the lack of activity.
On to Oliver's talk.
He then shows a "normal family," and gives various other examples of all these fat people. None of which is normal, of course, but extreme examples. Then there's the diatribe against fast food, corporations, and the usual myths about diet. Again, he ignores the actual research, which has shown time and again that there is no statistical difference in diet and exercise between fat kids and thin ones. Whatever is causing these kids (and adults) to be unusually large, it isn't as simple as what they eat. He then makes all sorts of assumptions: that fat = unhealthy, fat people are fat because they pig out all the time, don't know how to cook, don't eat fresh food, etc. This implies, of course, that thin people are all healthy, never overeat, always cook their own healthy, wholesome meals, and eat fresh foods. Which is bullshit. Again, complex issues reduced to simplicity.
Then he goes on to humiliate that "normal" family again. A week's worth of food, which we are supposed to believe is what this family eats every week, is piled onto the table in a big, disgusting mess, as well as on the counters and shelves around them. The camera spends a lot of time showing the crappy pizzas, corn dogs, hot dogs, and who knows what else is buried in there. He then tells the mom that she's killing her children, YOU are killing your kids, he tells her, then asks, "how does that make you feel?" I don't know about that woman, but it would make me feel like ordering the biggest, greasiest burger I can find, just to spite his smarmy ass. He reduces her to tears and into admitting she's killing her kids (which makes me wonder just what else he said and did leading up to this clip), then says, "but we can stop that."
Yeah. Right. Tell me, Jamie. Did you find out what this family's medical stats where? Do they have high blood pressure? Abnormal cholesterol levels? Heart problems? Do you know? We sure aren't being told. We're just supposed to assume that, because this family is fat, they're going to DIEDIEDIE! Well, not the mom. Just the kids, because she's just such a disgusting, pathetic excuse of a human being that's KILLING HER KIDS!!!!! Of course, he did mention that this is a "third generation" family. I think he meant to say that they were third generation fat.
What was that thing about heredity and genetics? Or, right... body size is anywhere from 80-98% (depending on your source) genetically determined.
He ends that particular section by repeating the word, "normal."
Riiiggghhttt....
Then he moves on to the schools. He spends some time slagging school lunches and blaming it mostly on accounting, which again, is simplistic. He doesn't mention what a failure his school lunch program has been, nor the reasons.
Then there's a really bizarre clip of a "normal" elementary school. Looking at the kids, I'd say kindergarten to grade one. He proceeds to hold out various fruits and vegetables, none of which the kids can name, or name properly. Cue ominous music. He hold up tomatoes, and is told they are potatoes.
Now, I find I have to comment on this one. I realy don't think that the kid was too stupid to know the difference between a potato and a tomato. I think it's just as likely he got the words backwards. I've known adults who constantly get tomato/potato mixed up. Heck, I've done it myself.
Oliver, however, doesn't correct the child. Later on, however, he holds a potato out to another child. When asked what it is, the child has no answer. Hmmm... let's see... he can't say it's a potato, because some other kid called another completely different food a potato and wasn't corrected. So if that's a potato, than this other thing being held up couldn't possibly also be a potato, could it? Looking back at my own thinking at that age, I would have been suspicious of any food held up at that point. After all, if I know what a food is, but suddenly it isn't, I would have been second guessing myself, no matter how sure I might have been only minutes before. And besides, if a tomato is suddenly a potato, than surely a cauliflower can be a broccoli, or a beet can be a celery?
I can also say, in all honesty, that I would not have recognized an eggplant (or should I say, aubergine) or a leek at that age. These are foods that, like many other foods, I simply wasn't exposed to until much later in life. There were also foods that I knew what they were, but didn't know what they were called. At least in English. I might have seen cauliflower in the grocery store, but we never bought them (with a garden as large as ours, we pretty much never bought vegetables, which greatly limited my exposure to different types) and I had no idea what they were called for a long time. I've met kids who didn't know the word broccoli. To them, they were "trees."
While it's possible that Oliver somehow managed to find an entire classroom of kids who'd never been exposed to these vegetables before, not even in coloring or story books, I find it highly unlikely. Especially with all those "healthy eating" programs that are in so many schools right now. I find the entire segment very suspicious. Especially when he keeps insisting that this is "normal." We're at a point when, thanks to "educational" programs and cultural indoctrination, we have 6 yr olds being hospitalized for anorexia, 4 yr olds putting themselves on diets and refusing to eat, and toddlers who can barely talk saying they think they're fat!
Normal? He keeps using that word. I don't not think it means what he thinks it means...
Next he talks about milk and sugar, and uses a wheelbarrow to demonstrate all the sugar kids are drinking in their milk. I happen to agree that adding that much sugar to milk is pretty disgusting, but he goes overboard in claiming child abuse. As has become usual in this talk, Oliver is making false assumptions, this time on sugar. In reality, there is no connection between sugar and obesity in children.
So what are his solutions? Food ambassadors in supermarkets to show us how to shop. (Because we're all so stupid.) Get the government to wean us off salt, fat and sugar (all of which are dietary requirements) in fast food. (Because we really want the government telling us what we should eat, and how much.) Food cooked fresh on site at schools. (Because it's the schools' job to feed our kids, efficiency, health and safety standards be damned - another one of his failed projects.) Having every child graduate knowing how to cook "10 recipes that will save their life." (No explanation as to what those would be.)
He makes a few really odd statements.
"If you can cook, recession money doesn't matter. If you can cook, time doesn't matter." What does that even mean??
Then he refers to a woman earlier who's fat dad died in her arms (he was fat, so he just up and dropped dead on her, apparently), and declares she'd be happy "... if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly." Since when was it our employers job to feed us? Our body shapes and sizes are no business of theirs, any more than they are Oliver's.
I think he's absolutely right that it's good for people to learn how to cook, though his "pay it forward" concept was a complete failure. The plug he throws out to Mrs. Obama is, I find, rather disgusting, considering how she used and humiliated her own daughters.
There are so many things about him that bothers me. Arrogance. Ignorance. Condescension. I'm going to have to stop, though, as this is already quite long.
At the end, he puts out his wish.
"I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity."
How can someone turn such a potentially good idea into something so filled with ignorance and idiocy?
No, I'm not going to link to it here. Go do a search on it on youtube, if you really want to see it. Assuming you want to waste 20 minutes of your life watching that condescending little git. Man, I used to like this guy! Sheesh!
First off, I want to talk about the good stuff. There is some there, and it's a shame it was ruined by the crap.
Oliver talks about food education, which I think is a grand idea. Knowing how to pull together healthy, tasty meals is a good thing. Knowing how to do it using fresh, quality ingredients is also a good thing. Being able to feed a family healthy meals economically is a good thing. I've encountered far too many people who not only don't know how to use basic ingredients, but are thoroughly intimidated by them. They're under the impression that cooking is complex or difficult, and don't feel confident that they can learn. I think this is part of the larger problem of our education system teaching us to defer to experts in areas that used to be the realm of family and community, like how to parent, feed, raise and educate our kids. Spend 12 or more years being told you're incompetent, and there's a tendency to believe it.
Oliver also discusses the excessive additives in many modern foods, and he has a very good point there. He somewhat looses the theme by focusing primarily on sugar, rather that some of the other strange things added to our food. Just try, for example, to find foods that can be eaten by people who can't do gluten, milk proteins or soy. Any one of them is hard enough, but all three is amazingly difficult. They show up in places you'd never expect, like milk proteins in sherbet or deli meats. Soy and wheat are almost ubiquitous.
Unfortunately, that's about it for the good parts.
Oliver actually starts his talk with one of the biggest pieces of BS, claiming that in the next 18 minutes of his speech, 4 Americans will die because of what they eat.
Really? And how was that determined? Did they all eat poison? Or would that be based on the already falsified, junk science claim that obesity kills 300,000 + people in the US every year? He infers that obesity - which I don't think he ever defined in the talk, so I'll assume he is referring to the BMI definition - is killing these people, and says so directly many times throughout his talk. This, of course, runs counter to the repeated studies that show people in the overweight category have the best outcomes and longest lives, while those in the normal and obese categories have equal numbers except in the most extreme examples of obesity, at which point the numbers match what's really the most dangerous category to be in, underweight.
At least he admits he's not a doctor, not that that really improves anything.
He then chastises Americans for being the most unhealthy people in the world, and repeats the recent BS claim that our kids will live shorter lifespans than their parents. He emphasizes this by pointing to someone in the audience and saying "YOUR child will live a life 10 years younger than you, because of the landscape of food that we've build around them."
Aside from the guilt inducing accusation, this is, of course, an extrapolation, similar to those that claim X% of adults will be obese in the near future - a model that, if it were to believed, means that obesity rates will eventually be 100%. Like so many other predictions, these are mathematical constructs that have little to do with reality. Life spans and overall health have more to do with things like poverty, sanitation, and reliable, accessible health care, and while obesity may indeed be connected with various health problems, increased adiposity, in and of itself, has never killed anyone.
His next fallacy is shown in a graph of causes of death. Of these, he blames heart disease, all cancers, stroke and diabetes on diet and obesity. Which is absolute BS. The primary predictors for heart disease and diabetes - especially T2 diabetes - is heredity. Among the list of risk factors for heart disease, obesity is the last one listed. (As a side note, a recent study found that the majority of first time heart attack victims had normal cholesteral levels. Of course, the pharmaceutical company, and manufacturer of statins, that paid for this study declared that this meant that we should change what is considered normal cholesterol levels, and doctors should put more people on statins.) All cancers? There are so many different types of cancers, to blame them all on eating habits and body fat is ludicrous. As for stroke, a quick look at a medical reference site, and there's nary a mention of diet or obesity. As for diabetes, it's caused by the pancreas's inability to produce insulin, ranging from an absolute lack of insulin, to defective insulin (which is rare). Risk factors are a different issue altogether, and again, genetics plays a strong role. This is particularly notable when looking at diabetes rates in different ethnic groups. Blaming diet and obesity is far too simplistic - but does a great job of blaming the victim.
What Oliver also neglects to mention is that research has found obese people who have never dieted do not exhibit increased risk factors for heart disease, diabetes or stroke (I can't say for cancer, again because there are so many different types). It is only obese people with a history of weight loss dieting that exhibit increased risk factors. Dieting to loose weight is more dangerous to our health that being fat in the first place.
Ultimately, the single greatest increase in risk factor for all of these isn't diet or body fat, but age. The older we get, the more likely we are to die of any of these. Well, at least until the age of 50, at which point there's no difference anymore. In other words, the higher death rates in these categories are the consequence of our increased life spans.
Oliver then moves on to some of his more disgusting behavior. He introduces us to "my friend Brittany," a 16 yr old, complete with unflattering photo. Brittany, he declares, will be dead in 6 years. Because she's eating herself to death.
If this is how he humiliates his friends, it's a wonder he has any at all.
Just how does Oliver know she'll be dead in 6 years? He's already admitted earlier that he's no doctor. He doesn't tell us, other than some vague reference to her eating her liver to death.
I'm not sure how he came to that conclusion, but it reminds me of a French study that was ongoing when I read about it, and I really wish I could find out more about it. Inspired by the movie, Supersize Me, a French university professor with some extra money in his budget decided to do a clinical study to replicate what Spurlock did to himself in the movie and see if he got the same result. In this study, volunteers - all healthy, young, male medical students - agreed to eat a minimum of 6000 calories of fast food a day and get as little exercise as possible, for the entire school year. The only exceptions to fast food were breakfast, which they could eat at home, so long as it was lots of bacon and eggs and the like, or, if they failed to reach 6000 calories by the end of the day, a high calorie shake they would mix up enough of to put them over 6000 calories was to be drunk before bed. The participants were closely monitored, with particular attention to liver function, because Spurlock had apparently developed liver problems.
The results of the first group to take part in this study were; an initial weight gain in the first month to month and a half, which was lost shortly after; some minor changes to liver function in the same time period, then back to normal. By the end of the study, none of the volunteers displayed any health problems, though they all complained about the difficulty of eating 6000 calories a day, and were chafing at the lack of activity.
On to Oliver's talk.
He then shows a "normal family," and gives various other examples of all these fat people. None of which is normal, of course, but extreme examples. Then there's the diatribe against fast food, corporations, and the usual myths about diet. Again, he ignores the actual research, which has shown time and again that there is no statistical difference in diet and exercise between fat kids and thin ones. Whatever is causing these kids (and adults) to be unusually large, it isn't as simple as what they eat. He then makes all sorts of assumptions: that fat = unhealthy, fat people are fat because they pig out all the time, don't know how to cook, don't eat fresh food, etc. This implies, of course, that thin people are all healthy, never overeat, always cook their own healthy, wholesome meals, and eat fresh foods. Which is bullshit. Again, complex issues reduced to simplicity.
Then he goes on to humiliate that "normal" family again. A week's worth of food, which we are supposed to believe is what this family eats every week, is piled onto the table in a big, disgusting mess, as well as on the counters and shelves around them. The camera spends a lot of time showing the crappy pizzas, corn dogs, hot dogs, and who knows what else is buried in there. He then tells the mom that she's killing her children, YOU are killing your kids, he tells her, then asks, "how does that make you feel?" I don't know about that woman, but it would make me feel like ordering the biggest, greasiest burger I can find, just to spite his smarmy ass. He reduces her to tears and into admitting she's killing her kids (which makes me wonder just what else he said and did leading up to this clip), then says, "but we can stop that."
Yeah. Right. Tell me, Jamie. Did you find out what this family's medical stats where? Do they have high blood pressure? Abnormal cholesterol levels? Heart problems? Do you know? We sure aren't being told. We're just supposed to assume that, because this family is fat, they're going to DIEDIEDIE! Well, not the mom. Just the kids, because she's just such a disgusting, pathetic excuse of a human being that's KILLING HER KIDS!!!!! Of course, he did mention that this is a "third generation" family. I think he meant to say that they were third generation fat.
What was that thing about heredity and genetics? Or, right... body size is anywhere from 80-98% (depending on your source) genetically determined.
He ends that particular section by repeating the word, "normal."
Riiiggghhttt....
Then he moves on to the schools. He spends some time slagging school lunches and blaming it mostly on accounting, which again, is simplistic. He doesn't mention what a failure his school lunch program has been, nor the reasons.
Then there's a really bizarre clip of a "normal" elementary school. Looking at the kids, I'd say kindergarten to grade one. He proceeds to hold out various fruits and vegetables, none of which the kids can name, or name properly. Cue ominous music. He hold up tomatoes, and is told they are potatoes.
Now, I find I have to comment on this one. I realy don't think that the kid was too stupid to know the difference between a potato and a tomato. I think it's just as likely he got the words backwards. I've known adults who constantly get tomato/potato mixed up. Heck, I've done it myself.
Oliver, however, doesn't correct the child. Later on, however, he holds a potato out to another child. When asked what it is, the child has no answer. Hmmm... let's see... he can't say it's a potato, because some other kid called another completely different food a potato and wasn't corrected. So if that's a potato, than this other thing being held up couldn't possibly also be a potato, could it? Looking back at my own thinking at that age, I would have been suspicious of any food held up at that point. After all, if I know what a food is, but suddenly it isn't, I would have been second guessing myself, no matter how sure I might have been only minutes before. And besides, if a tomato is suddenly a potato, than surely a cauliflower can be a broccoli, or a beet can be a celery?
I can also say, in all honesty, that I would not have recognized an eggplant (or should I say, aubergine) or a leek at that age. These are foods that, like many other foods, I simply wasn't exposed to until much later in life. There were also foods that I knew what they were, but didn't know what they were called. At least in English. I might have seen cauliflower in the grocery store, but we never bought them (with a garden as large as ours, we pretty much never bought vegetables, which greatly limited my exposure to different types) and I had no idea what they were called for a long time. I've met kids who didn't know the word broccoli. To them, they were "trees."
While it's possible that Oliver somehow managed to find an entire classroom of kids who'd never been exposed to these vegetables before, not even in coloring or story books, I find it highly unlikely. Especially with all those "healthy eating" programs that are in so many schools right now. I find the entire segment very suspicious. Especially when he keeps insisting that this is "normal." We're at a point when, thanks to "educational" programs and cultural indoctrination, we have 6 yr olds being hospitalized for anorexia, 4 yr olds putting themselves on diets and refusing to eat, and toddlers who can barely talk saying they think they're fat!
Normal? He keeps using that word. I don't not think it means what he thinks it means...
Next he talks about milk and sugar, and uses a wheelbarrow to demonstrate all the sugar kids are drinking in their milk. I happen to agree that adding that much sugar to milk is pretty disgusting, but he goes overboard in claiming child abuse. As has become usual in this talk, Oliver is making false assumptions, this time on sugar. In reality, there is no connection between sugar and obesity in children.
So what are his solutions? Food ambassadors in supermarkets to show us how to shop. (Because we're all so stupid.) Get the government to wean us off salt, fat and sugar (all of which are dietary requirements) in fast food. (Because we really want the government telling us what we should eat, and how much.) Food cooked fresh on site at schools. (Because it's the schools' job to feed our kids, efficiency, health and safety standards be damned - another one of his failed projects.) Having every child graduate knowing how to cook "10 recipes that will save their life." (No explanation as to what those would be.)
He makes a few really odd statements.
"If you can cook, recession money doesn't matter. If you can cook, time doesn't matter." What does that even mean??
Then he refers to a woman earlier who's fat dad died in her arms (he was fat, so he just up and dropped dead on her, apparently), and declares she'd be happy "... if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly." Since when was it our employers job to feed us? Our body shapes and sizes are no business of theirs, any more than they are Oliver's.
I think he's absolutely right that it's good for people to learn how to cook, though his "pay it forward" concept was a complete failure. The plug he throws out to Mrs. Obama is, I find, rather disgusting, considering how she used and humiliated her own daughters.
There are so many things about him that bothers me. Arrogance. Ignorance. Condescension. I'm going to have to stop, though, as this is already quite long.
At the end, he puts out his wish.
"I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity."
How can someone turn such a potentially good idea into something so filled with ignorance and idiocy?
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