Hey Kid, Wanna Buy a Cupcake?

Future headline:

"Sixth Grader Suspended for Possession of Cupcakes 
with Intent to Sell"

I just read in Bloomberg Business Week that a growing number of USA school districts are banning bake sales on school grounds, or restricting the distribution of home-made cookies and sugary treats in similar ways. Schools in Maryland, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Mississippi, New York City, and Texas are making bold or brash moves to show they are warriors in the battle against the rising tide of childhood obesity. But by banning bake sales, are they building levees to ward off the threats of obesity, or just making the flood-water look more appealing?

Or, is something else, something maybe more sinister and effective, poised to remove cupcakes from their sugary throne?

Personally, I think banning all bake sales during school hours will hurt more than it helps. These bake sales raise needed funds for extra-curricular school groups such as bands and athletic clubs. Plus, to decree that bake sales are leading the scourge of school-age obesity is to ignore the bigger picture: the world of everyday food in school.

Move over, Mrs. PTA Mom’s banana bread, while M&M Mars and Frito-Lay** have their day in school peddling unhealthy calories. It’s easy in most schools for a child to buy potato and other chips, candy bars, toaster tarts, salty hot dogs, and manufactured cookies.  This year, a Robert Wood Johnson study found that

“Federal law bans only a small subset of competitive foods, such as sodas and certain types of candy, from being sold in cafeterias during mealtime. But those products are available to kids in other venues at school, even during lunch.”

These items are likely to contain less fiber, more artery-clogging fats and mood-affective high-fructose corn syrup than their home-baked counterparts. Pile a severe lack of nutrition education on top of this kind of junk food availability, and you can see an environment conducive to eating too much of the wrong things… bake sale or not.

There’s a sensible way to do this!  With an emphasis on nutrition education and leading by example, it’s possible to limit rather than ban school bake sales. I agree, daily cupcake handouts would be counterproductive in this battle. Moderation is obviously the key, and schools can easily find ways to limit the frequency of bake sales. It’s also possible to distribute recipes for healthier baked goodies, and allow or insist on the sale of some non-food items during the bake sale. It’s even possible to use these events as an opportunity to send kids home with healthy eating coloring books or handouts, or handfuls of donated local produce. (Think outside the little white box wrapped in string!)

Please don’t demonize the cupcake! There’s a time and place for it in a healthy child’s diet.

**Frito-Lay does offer a page about sensible snacking that discusses portion size and salt. But doesn't discuss nutrients, vitamins, protein, building strong bones, or fiber.

Mom, Where does Dinner come from?

I was walking on a wooded path this morning and it occurred to me, when is the last time you, or I for that matter, made anything we use on a daily basis?  I mean made, as in, created or manufactured from the raw material? I didn’t make my coffee mug; I didn’t make my bath towels. I didn’t make my hot water heater, or my i-phone. I brewed the coffee, but I didn’t make the coffee maker, and I certainly didn’t pick the beans. I think they were picked in Guatemala or Dominica, and roasted in a U.S. factory. How the beans were shipped there is beyond me. By Ship? Cargo plane?  And who made those cute vacuum sealed cans?

Back in the 1700’s people like us made a lot of what we used. They wove linens, they sewed their clothes, they churned their own butter. they fed and groomed their transportation (horses), tooled their leather saddles, picked their own pumpkins, kneaded and baked their own bread. If one family didn’t, it wasn’t hard to find the person in town who did. So, people were much, much closer to the origin of the things they used every day. 

Today we suffer from a total disconnect from the origin of the stuff of our lives. And that emphatic detachment is mirrored in the way we eat. For the past 40 years we’ve been getting more and more isolated from our food sources. It’s hard to believe that most of our grandparents had at some point walked past the very chickens that laid their breakfast eggs. Never before were families disconnected from the sources of their food in anywhere near the way we are today. It’s like the Wizard of Oz makes all our ready-to-eat food behind a giant black curtain that 99 percent of us will never, ever see.

And we accept it, because that’s how we get everything, from our laptops and cars to our shirts and shampoo. They all magically appear in the store, neatly packaged and ready to consume. Quick, tell me the top 5 ingredients in your shampoo! You don’t know, right? But you trust that it will clean your hair, make it smell nice, not cause it to fall out, and not leave a sticky residue. Well, we have that same kind of blind trust about the factory farms and food processors that make our dinner. 

But then what happens? Along come ground beef recalls, the bagged spinach scare, eggs with salmonella, the GMO controversy, and the “pink slime” revelation*.  Along comes two whole generations of people who are more likely to be obese, to suffer from diabetes, from strokes, high blood pressure, and metabolic syndrome than in all their ancestor’s generations. Now everyone has a finger to point and a fad diet to promote, and yet as a nation we’re not getting thinner or healthier. Why why why?

I hate to say it’s simple, because the solution won’t be simple. But the root of the simple cause is, the vast majority of us don’t have any idea any more where our daily food comes from, where it’s grown… or created in a lab, how it was raised, what hormones or pesticides it was given, what it originally looked and smelled like, how it was shipped, or what was added to or subtracted from it. There’s the disconnect. And from a nutritional point of view, that is a disaster.

Rule of thumb for eaters: If it doesn’t rot, it’s not real food. And it won’t work right, nutritionally, in your body. And a diet of unreal food may, over time, push you onto the wrong side of those public health statistics. Even walnuts will rot. So eat stuff that spoils (before it does!) and make something from scratch. Please… Reconnect. Find your inner sword forger.

“Pink Slime” in the news: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/75882--is-pink-slime-in-your-burger-you-may-not-know-until-it-s-in-your-mouth-or-ever

Bountiful Bite: Sugarcoating Obesity

The recent firestorm over Strong 4 Life's anti-obesity ads blew the lid off a smoldering brew of outlooks on how to discuss childhood obesity. On the one side are doctors and educators who feel it's time to "stop sugarcoating it" and startle parents and local governments into action to help obese children, and on the opposing side are some parents and others who council or care for children, who think the extra attention of shock ads will only make obese children more vulnerable to teasing and disfavor.

They do have a legitimate concern. Schoolyard bullying happens, and now social media has allowed the verbal attacks to multiply.  Adults spewing a bitter lack of understanding or kindness have raised their anonymous voices online.

 I've been trolling through reader comments lately on food blogs that touch on legislation or the politics of obesity. There's a lot of venomous ranting out there, including comments like "4 words - don't eat so much." Aside from being hateful, which it is, that's also a comment coming from ignorance. If it were that easy to lose weight even lazy people would probably succeed. I mean, show me someone who likes being morbidly obese and I'll show you pigs flying.

Obese people experience hunger in a different way than "fit" people, often more frequently and with more discomfort. Researchers are studying various hormones and body chemistry and finding some meaningful correlations between weight, hormones, "peptides" and diets. Dieters who cut calories to below 1,000 per day or those who cut out carbs risk struggling with fatigue, dizziness, gallstones, gout, ketosis and even migraine headaches*.  In short, just trying to eat less is both difficult for obese people and not an effective way of trying to keep weight off.

No doubt, obesity is a preventable condition for most people. We live in the climate of what's been dubbed "SAD" eating, the Standard American Diet. It consist of exactly the high-calorie, saturated-fat heavy, low nutrient foods that lead to storing body fat, craving food, and gaining weight. The trouble is, once we have trained our young bodies to be overweight, they learn to try to maintain that weight.

So we need to shut down the angry, accusatory ranting about "fat people" being lazy. This is a dangerous lying stereotype which doesn't help get at the truth or solve a problem.

I feel that Strong4Life, in running these ads and billboards, has yanked the lid off an epidemic of obesity that's boiling over anyway. We have to face it, and we should make sure that as we do, we take the "victims" of obesity and turn them into "fighters" and winners. We need to change the rhetoric the way we did with breast cancer victims. There was a time when it was all hush-hush, don't shame the woman by revealing her surgery. Today we treat breast-cancer patients like the fighters they are. We need to approach obesity the same way.

sources:
 * http://www.livestrong.com/article/518807-negative-side-effects-of-eating-less-than-1-200-calories-a-day/

Top 8 Reasons to Eat a More Nutritious Diet

Oh sure, we'd all like to eat a healthier diet.  If only it came in donut and french-fry form. If only our children pleaded with us for V-8 juice, right? If only we weren't lactose intolerant. And of course, if only it were cheaper, better, faster, and easier! Guess what, it can be cheaper, better, faster, and easier than you fear it to be...  but first, you have to be mo-tee-vated, sister.

Chew on these for a minute? My Top 8 Reasons to Eat a More Nutritious Diet are:

1. To get off the yo-yo diet train. By most recent study estimates, 80 to 95% of people who lose weight on a diet gain half or all of it back in one to three years. Forming the habit of putting nutrition first in your food choices helps your goal of "keeping it off" immensely.


2. To finish that run-walk for your favorite charity. If you're carrying a lot of extra weight around the middle, or have to worry about your blood glucose the whole time, it's going to be a lot harder.


3. To show your children how to "grow up big and strong" with strong bones and teeth and a body fit for the school soccer field. They need a parental example... guess what, you're IT.


4. To be ready when the boss sends you on a high-pressure business trip.  Eating a well-balanced diet helps elevate those anti-stress hormones in your brain.


5. You plan to have a baby, and you want to avoid some common complications of pregnancy.  Or you're going to be a baby daddy, and you're going to have to be present for him/her right through graduation day.


6. To still have health and stamina when your parent(s) get old and need you either to care for them, or at least to manage their care, from medications and transportation to finances and moving to assisted living.


7. To look in the mirror and know that because you take care of and manage yourself, you can care about and manage other things that matter to you, whether it's working to stop pollution, being a rock star, or beating your buddy at tennis.


8. And last, since these are perhaps the most obvious, but not stressed enough. Please think before you randomly eat in front of the TV; consistently eating a more nutritious diet will help stave off obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, pancreatic cancer, diabetes related conditions like poor eyesight, and diseases of malnutrition.

2012 is coming and you know what they say, feel the fear and do it anyway.
Best wishes! See you in '012.