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Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Kristof's prescription for national health
Posted by Jill | 2:59 PM

Since I started to ride this particular donkey last weekend, let's follow through with the latest installment of Nick Kristof's series on improving American health, shall we?

Nothing much to get hot under the collar about today:

First, a quiz: What "vegetable" do American infants and toddlers eat most?

Weep, for it's the French fry. A major study conducted by Gerber found that up to one-third of young children don't eat any vegetable daily, but that the French fry is the single most common one they do consume. And among children age 19 months to 24 months, 20 percent eat French fries at least once a day.


This is truly appalling. First of all, it's appalling that there are parents in this country who think that french fries qualify as a vegetable. It's also appalling that so few kids will actually eat vegetables. I'd be interested in hearing from parents who have dealt with this particular adventure, because I have no first-hand experience. I do have a theory, though, based on the experiences of a co-worker.

It seems to me that most children get their first taste of vegetables via some variation of Gerber strained baby food. I'm skeptical as to how much this stuff tastes like the real thing, and I wonder if when the kids DO see the real thing after being fed this slop, they respond in the standard kid fashion to things unfamiliar.

The aforementioned co-worker makes her own strained vegetables by cooking real vegetables and then pureeing them in a food processor. This is no supermom; she works a 32-hour week with an hour drive each way. But her kids have absolutely no qualms about eating real vegetables, because they're used to how they taste.

Back to Kristof:

Ban soda, potato chips and other unhealthy snacks from American schools, and discourage them in the workplace. It's unforgivable that our schools help to send children on the road to diabetes. Obesity kills far more Americans than heroin does.


I still think Kristof is painting "obesity' with too broad a brush, but his point is well-taken anyway. Schools should not be purveying the kind of crap they do as food. The film Super Size Me had an excellent segment on school lunches and what's offered, and showed that children who went to a school in which lunches were prepared on-site and were well-balanced, without unnecessary fat and sugar and white flour, had less behavior problems than their pizza-and-Ding-Dong-eating peers.

Sell cigarettes only in pharmacies and raise cigarette taxes. Smoking still kills 440,000 Americans a year, including 50,000 nonsmokers. One study found that raising the federal excise tax on cigarettes by 75 cents a pack would generate $13.1 billion in additional revenue per year and cut youth smoking by 13 percent and adult smoking by 3 percent, saving 1.2 million lives. Let's do it.


I'm there, dude.

Tax junk foods. Some 19 states already impose taxes on particular junk foods, like soda, and a nickel-a-can tax on soft drinks would generate $7 billion in revenues. In particular, we should tax high-fructose corn syrup, which is used as a sweetener in a vast array of products and is a major culprit in the fattening of America.


Alas, this is where some well-meaning but misguided people on my side of the political fence are likely to scream bloody murder, branding this a regressive tax on the poor, who have better access to junk food than they do to healthier choices. I would prefer to see some serious restrictions on the use of high-fructose corn syrup, which is metabolized differently from sucrose and has been linked to high levels of triglycerides. However, high-fructose corn syrup is cheap, so the big Frankenfood companies prefer to use it instead of sugar. I wouldn't look for a Republican government to demand that the food industry use a more expensive sweetener.

Promote jogging and biking. Since we pay for all the consequences of inactivity (like those heart bypasses), we should encourage exercise. We should build more bicycle paths and turn more streets over to bikers, skaters and pedestrians — starting with Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.

Encourage exercise breaks. Governor Huckabee gives state employees a 30-minute daily "exercise break" that is modeled on the smoking breaks that smokers take. It's a good idea.


I love the idea of more bike paths. I work 9 miles from my home. In theory, I could ride a bike to work in the nice weather, if a) showers were available where I work; and b) I wouldn't be taking my life in my hands bicycling on the main roads I drive on to get to work.

As for exercise breaks and in-company gyms and such -- I wouldn't use them. I used to work for a company that had a very elaborate in-house gym, with fluffy towels and showers and toiletries and gym shorts and T-shirts provided, and a trainer to work up a program for you. And I never went, because I was working 12-14 hours a day in this place, and it was pretty obviously designed for the already fit and fabulous. I work out at home by myself and I'm much happier that way.

Distribute fruits and veggies to certain low-income people, as Maine does in FarmShare, a potent antipoverty program.


Fabulous idea.

Expand P.E. It's ridiculous that schools have been cutting back on P.E. when students need more of it. Likewise, kids should be encouraged to walk to school. When my eldest son attended a Japanese elementary school in Tokyo, the school required him to walk or bike to school beginning in the first grade.


As someone who hated P.E. in school, I don't know how I feel about this. The problem with school physical education classes is that they force kids to do things they hate, and expose them to ridicule for things they can't do. When I was in school, I was ridiculed for my inability to do pull-ups or climb a rope. I was ridiculed for my fear of gymnastics equipment. I was ridiculed for my lack of ability to hit a ball. I hated, hated, hated gym class. Now if I'd been able to do something like lap swimming at the Y, or go ice skating, or something else to fill the phys. ed requirement so that I didn't have to feel "Can't win....don't try" -- perhaps I would have adopted a fitness regimen much earlier on.

As for walking to school, I'm all for that. In my neighborhood, I see parents driving down one block and up the next one to take their kids to school. Put the baby in a stroller, put a leash on the dog, and everyone could get a walk in when your kids go to school.

I understand that parents fear their kids being snatched by predators right off the street, and that's why the kids are chauffeured the 1/4 mile to school. Much of this fear is fed by television, and it doesn't explain why a 16-year-old high school kid still needs a ride or a bus when he lives four blocks from the school.

Most of Kristof's suggestions are good ones, but they don't address some fundamental problems in our culture. One of those problems is that people, especially parents, are just stretched too thin. I covered this in my earlier blog on this issue. At a time when jobs that pay enough to support a family are becoming more scarce, and workers are afraid to take sick days or vacation days for fear of being deemed expendable, and more people are cobbling together an income working multiple jobs, something's got to give -- and nutrition and exercise are often what's deemed jettisonable.
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