ARS on Twitter
RSS
Fruits and Veggies Will Save The World
Posted by Raven on June 24th, 2008
Uh oh…it’s summer. The kids are going to get fatter. The Nannies are hyperventilating.
Camp food is just one of the summertime nutrition challenges for parents these days. While childhood health advocates often blame schools for poor nutrition and a lack of physical activity, the problem often gets worse in the summer. Last year, The American Journal of Public Health published a provocative study showing that schools may be taking too much of the blame for the childhood obesity epidemic.
Camp food? School food? The culprits to modern day child obesity, right? Wait, I thought it was the school’s fault. Oh, maybe that was only the low class inner city school’s faults; and the parents too! Who can’t afford healthy food. Ahh…it’s the commercials. Those Fruit Loops are the most evil food to hit the market. EVAH!
NOT.
First of all, the so called OBESITY problem isn’t as BIG as the Nannies want us to believe. The standards of what is obese and what is not have changed over the years: What used to be considered a normal healthy weight is now labeled as overweight. This change didn’t occur because of scientific data that showed a real and present link to weight and health problems. The weight charts were “updated” to provide the Nannies with some guidelines they could cite for their studies. No one cared that these guidelines were wrong, not representative of the vast majority of medically healthy kids. Suddenly, people were being told their children were fat and at risk for major diseases.
“During the year, television viewing habits are more limited because of school and homework, but in summer, all bets are off,” said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital Boston. “They are lying around all day long with little supervision, watching TV and playing video games. The mythical childhood of summer at the beach is becoming increasingly rare, certainly for children in the inner city.”
It’s always the inner city kids…the poor kids…the disadvantaged kids..is it about class?
Hyperbole. It’s government gone wild once again. The Nannies exist to keep existing. They do these studies which are designed to find failure in every program or effort…they do this in order to get more federal money to continue with…more studies. The result is excuse after excuse; alarming head line after alarming head line, blame shifting from schools to parents to TV commercials to camps…who knows who or what will be blamed next.
Across the pond, the Nannies have taken yet another extreme measure.
BUSINESSES will be encouraged to monitor the weight of their employees as part of a £56m Government plan to tackle Scotland’s obesity epidemic. Workers will type in their weight every morning – using Government-provided software – allowing occupational health staff to spot significant weight gain and offer early help, under the scheme unveiled by ministers. The Government also plans to appoint a full-time official charged with liaising with Scottish food firms and encouraging them to make products healthier.
Bull fucking shit. It’ll be a cold day on the Globally heated earth that I weigh myself at work, for this purpose. Of all the nanny ideas gone WILD…will the peasants will quietly oblige their master government?
Additional measures include spending £19m of the total programme on vouchers for fruit and vegetables for women of childbearing age, pregnant women, and children under five in disadvantaged areas, and a review of commercial sponsorship rules to crack down on advertising and promotion of junk food.
Ministers will order a retraining programme for midwives and health visitors to ensure that they can give the most up-to-date advice to pregnant women and mothers. In addition, the SNP will launch a “cooking bus”, which will tour Scotland giving advice on healthy eating.
Fruits and veggies will save the world, right? And the cooking bus will traverse the gorgeous countryside of Scotland, to teach the citizenry how to cook properly. Sounds misty eyed and noble. But read what this is really all about.
There are some truths we all know.
We all know smoking is bad for our health. Yet millions and millions of people choose to smoke.
We all know drinking and driving is dangerous. Yet millions of people do it every day.
We all know having unprotected sex is dangerous. Yet millions of people do so ever day.
We all know crossing the road can come with a risk. But we do it anyway.
We all know dragging a horse to a water hole doesn’t guarantee it will drink.
And, most people who are overweight KNOW it.
Including kids.
They don’t need a nanny to tell them.
They don’t need a government to meddle with their eating habits and choices.
Even when said government is paying the health care tab…as proven time after time lifestyle choices have little to do with disease development. When will the nannies go away? Who hired these people? Who decided the nannies should intervene on a level so invasive it’s like living a Twilight Zone show?
The price of freedom, and the lifestyle choices it allows, is far more valuable than any Nanny endeavor. Freedom is the cause of society’s good points- and it’s bad ones as well. Slowly, freedoms are being taken away in the name of health (or whatever politically correct “problem” happens to be popular for the day). People, peons, peasants, low class, high class, rich, poor, famous and unknown, are under siege. We need to stand up and fire the nannies.
June 24th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
[...] I was just minding my own business, loking for news items to post on the world’s MOST politicvally Incorrect blog tonight when I happened to stumble upon This blog! Where I found this nugget! [...]
June 24th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Good point about the change in the weight charts. That fact is rarely brought out.
June 26th, 2008 at 1:15 am
I read a great book, “The Obesity Myth” by Paul Campos – it really gets into the farce that is this supposed obesity epidemic in America. It’s a great ploy by the diet industry to make millions.If we are all skinny, no more money for the diet industry. It’s disgusting – and even more disgusting that governments are jumping in and trying to tell people how to eat and what they should weigh. I tell you what – the government’s overreaching on this one. Just wait America – it’s probably going to happen here too.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:04 am
I have to disagree with this one. I teach at a high school, and, while some of the students are of a normal weight, a significant portion (perhaps 30%) are definitely obese.
What do I mean by obese? So heavy, they strain the desk/chair combos. So heavy, they have Type II diabetes, high blood pressure, and back and knee troubles – all typically not seen in otherwise healthy kids.
I’m talking girls wearing not just large sizes, but 1X, 2X, and 3X women’s sizes. I’m talking boys weighing over 300 pounds – and NOT being “all muscle” – just “all flab”. Those boys have moobs – man-boobs.
The overweight are mostly minority and poor white kids. They can barely waddle from class to class. They wheeze when they need to exert the slightest effort – getting out of their seat, walking, bending over.
They don’t think of themselves as fat – they are:
big-boned
healthy
athletic
beautiful just as they are
a hunk of woman/man
BBG – big, beautiful girl
Their parents attack like rabid pit bulls if you suggest that their child could drop a few pounds – “my child is Beautiful! – just as she/he is!”
June 26th, 2008 at 11:42 am
I know there are obese kids. What I’m saying here is it is not the schools’ fault. So school means, camp meals, ect should not be regulated. It’s their lifestyle and yes, their parents who hold blame. It is not the governments job to police this. The advisory role it is taking on is a start down a road I don’t think we should be going down.
And, the proportion of obese isn’t as high as we want to think. In cities, yes. In average American towns, no. Parents do see their kids are perfect as they are- and they should. Because a society that dwells on weight sees an ounce of fat as ugly.
June 26th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Excellent book – I have it as well. Part of this bullshit is from the government too- the liberal minded who work for the universities and colleges. They take in billions to do study after study- which always come to the same conclusions but we never read those. We only read the bad stuff the media presents to us.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:40 am
Eh, I stopped putting much stock in the schools’ fat charts since I was classed obese just before I got out of C.A.P., though I’m sure I’ve mentioned that before. I could outrun the school’s track team at the time, and outdistance but not outspeed them under load.
I knew plenty of people like Linda talks about, but even I strained the desks when I was at my peak. That happens when you’re using desks designed for someone a foot shorter than the average hight of the class using them. The only person I personally knew who didn’t have a problem with them was a longtime friend, and that dude looks like a human preying mantis (in high school he was 5’11″ and weighed 95lbs) and was about as flexible as a yoga master. They also actually had probes into obesity because people were sitting sideways on the busses. It couldn’t have been because the seats were configured where a normal person over middle school ages’ upper legs were longer than the length of the seatback to seatback, plus having to pack a backpack that, on average, weighed 20-30lbs for all the homework texts.
The problem is it’s becomming a catchall excuse for meddling, which is taking a lot away from a whole cornicopia of legitimate concerns (including the obesity issue itself).