Childrens' health and nutrition is very important to me, and I'm happy to see that a Chicago school district is making efforts to protect their students from eating unhealthy homemade lunches while another in the District of Columbia has taken postive steps to protect children from bad milk.
These are both worthy endeavors to be sure, but they don't go far enough. I think every student should have G-Tube installed and then all nutrition can be measured out in the proper dosages, assuring complete and properly balanced nutrition without the epidemic of childhood obesity.
Speaking from experience... my BMI, blood pressure and cholesteral levels were never more perfect than they were during my G-Tube days. With the additional twenty pounds I've put on since then, I'm seriously thinking of going back.
We can do it for the children, too.
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7 comments:
About the only milk I ever drank in school was chocolate... about once a month.
Pretty sure I wasn't tubby because of that.
I really hate it when people try to reduce complex, multifactor phenomena to a single cause, but in terms of what schools can actually do about what may or may not be contributing to childhood obesity, I have only one word: recess.
I hear a lot of schools don't really do recess or PE anymore, and even if they do, it's highly organized and super-safe.
I can't imagine going though elementary school without the half-hour (or however long it was) we had every day to run our asses off, play on the monkey bars, play kickball, four square, basketball, etc. Both in terms of blowing off excess energy and getting much needed exercise. I was a pretty tubby kid up until my growth spurt anyway...I probably would have been a very tubby kid without that.
its more than that, B.
kids dont play outside when at home, either. they stay in and text.
and anytime you're sitting, you are also more likely to be eating.
Not safe as it use to be, and there isn't a parent at home (or a network of neighbors) to either allow lots of roaming or put the kids to work.
Part of it is creating a problem, though-- isn't it amazing that "adjusting" the BMI scale they were using suddenly found a ton of critically fat kids?
(I do have a bias against the BMI, since it does not work if you're active, an odd build, etc.)
When I was in high school. I ate two hamburgers, a protein drink, a milkshake and fries, in addition to my free lunch. I used to lift weights and walk five miles a day to work as a janitor. I was 5'1, 89 lbs and skinny like a rail with nothing but muscle. Only eating a healthy school lunch would've caused me to die of starvation.
Healthy school lunch? You obviously didn't look at the picture, Vas! :^)
I used to eat like you, too....then I hit 25....and I wish I'd packed my own lunch more often. It would have saved me a bunch of barfing experiences out on the track during track practice. (I ran 2 mile--"Real Italian Pizza" plus interval training is NOT a good combination)
Yeah, I realize kids are less active, generally, for a variety of reasons. I just mean if the school is going to be in the business of trying to head off obesity (which is a dubious premise, but bear with me here) it seems to me that taking charge of one meal a day would have a lot less impact than letting kids get out and play (or making them get out and play in a PE-type situation) every day.
Regular exercise makes you healthier, even if it doesn't make you thinner, anyway.
Bias against BMI is justified. I have a BMI of 28.5, which is nearly "obese". I'm definitely not thin, but I regularly lift weights and can run a 45-min 10K on a good day.
Public health researchers like BMI because you can just mine medical charts for the data (all you need is height and weight), rather than looking at body composition, which is time consuming and expensive to measure in large patient cohorts.
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