Letters to the Editor

• The letters here demonstrate the problem...

  [Read the article: Junk food education]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  As a culture, we are completely at sea about what constitutes a healthy diet, so much of what we say when we try to talk about this is absolute nonsense.

  For example: Healthy Skeptic claims to eat a Mediterranean diet...but eschews BREAD (cuz it's a poison and it's like cake and it causes diabetes), but what Mediterranean culture doesn't have a rich tradition of baking wonderful breads? They are eating all that fish, spices, olives and so forth with BREAD. What he is really exposing is (yet another) American-style DIET, the intent of which is to make you, or get you, THIN, and has very little to do with optimal nutrition.

  For that matter, NO FOOD CAUSES DIABETES, not sugar, not cake, not junk food, not corn syrup, not soda pop. Type II Diabetes is a disease, and you have to be genetically predisposed to it in order to develop it, and while being significantly overweight can accelerate your slide into diabetes, it cannot cause diabetes in someone who is not destined to get it anyways. To speak this way about diabetes (which is a tragic illness causing much pain and suffering) is like saying that "homosexuality causes AIDS". It's blaming the victim for his illness, something we don't do with any other disease.

  I am firmly in favor of healthful eating, nutrition, fresh food, vegetables & I eat this way myself. But that's because (raised by a very traditional mom, and immigrant grandmothers), I CAN COOK. Even more so, I DO COOK, almost every night. Even when I was a young single woman, or lonely middle aged divorcee, I cooked from scratch for the majority of my meals. My observation of my peers, and younger people (Gen X and Y) is that very, very few of them actually cook on a daily basis....by this, I mean simple ordinary meals, not the once-in-a-great-while party food cooked on your six-burner Viking range. When people see that I actually cook food from scratch daily, they are often astonished, because they eat the majority of their meals out in some manner, grabbed on the go, ordered from takeout....even those who buy food at the supermarket usually get prepared, or partly prepared foods. In many ways, cooking magazines and foodies to the contrary, the art of basic family cooking is mostly dead.

  So, this has been a long round about way of getting to the kids, the subject of the article. What do you expect kids to eat when they have been raised on takeout, fast food, canned food, etc.? How many meals do your kids gobble down in the car while you drive around frantically doing errands? It isn't really possible to eat many healthy foods, or to cook, on the lifestyle schedules that most American families live, lifestyles where both parents work (or there is a single working parent) and NOBODY COOKS ANYTHING, except a few things like Kraft Mac and Cheese (which should technically not count as "cooking" anything).

  Parents who were used to a VERY long adolecsence themselves, where they could order takeout and eat pizza whenever they felt like it literally don't have the time to do the shopping and cooking required to give their kids good food....nor do they have much desire to do so. And the lack of time their busy schedules allot for families, young parents are especially terrified of having those precious few hours degenerate into nasty battles of "sit there until you eat all the broccoli on your plate, buddy"....they want peace and fun, and a kid who adores you. There is no better way to make a kid adore you than giving them candy, soda, chips and pizza.

  If you are about my age (50), you probably remember cafeterias that produced mainstream food, but it was TERRIBLE, mushy, gray slime. One of the reasons that schools caved in on this issue was the apalling amount of WASTE...they discoverd that children were taking the official school lunch, and dumping most of it into the garbage. But these are two genuinely horrible extremes: I refuse to believe there is no healthy middle ground that could be achieved here.

  Lastly, I want to once again refer posters to the wonderful, thoughful and intelligent book "Rethinking Thin" by NYTimes writer Gina Kolata. Among many other insightful subjects, she writes about a huge, $20 million study which was instituted in poor schools across the country, designed to both give at-risk (heavy or obese) children optimally nutrious meals, eliminate sodas and snacks, and provide several-times-a-day exercise. It also did nutritional education for the kids, and parents, and cooing classes, menus, and so on. It incorporated every idea mentioned here and then some. The children's participation was close to 100%.

  The results? Nothing. Virtually no children lost any weight at all (or maintained weight while growing taller), because nobody changed behavior AFTER SCHOOL AT HOME and in the larger society. Because tired, poor, working parents were unwilling (or unable) to cook healthy food from scratch, and continued to provide junk, grease, fast food and so on to their kids.

  What I have concluded from this is that change has to start at HOME, not in the schools (though this does not mean I don't want to see healthy foods and good habits sustained at school!). The number-one cause of unhealthful eating at home is ADULTS WHO WILL NOT SHOP FOR HEALTHY FOOD and will NOT COOK FROM SCRATCH. Until we change this, nothing will change for children.

  (Postscript: while writing this, I was eating a small container of organic low-fat yogurt purchased from the sainted food store, Whole Foods. To my dismay, it contained SEVENTEEN GRAMS of sugar! Compare this to a 20 ounce bottle of soda with only 16 grams of sugar. This is what is so maddening and frustrating...even if you are basically a sensible and healthy eating individual, it is almost impossible to make truly good choices anymore without being sabotaged by the Indusrial Food Complex.)

  Permalink Friday, July 6, 2007 06:41 AM