Letters to the Editor
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Yet Another Food Fad
Every five minutes, self-described experts announce that some food or another is going to give the people who eat it some kind of edge over the lumpenproletariat.
What did our parents eat? Chicken a la king, mac n' cheese, bourbon n' ginger ale, franks 'n beans. We turned out OK. The big differences in how kids do has to do with parental income, opportunities and how much time the parents spend enriching their kids' lives. It has nothing to do with one single component in their diets.
I think all the nice upper middle class people gnawing their fingernails about their prenatal diets have to realize that their kids are going to come out just fine (barring some outlying situation like chromosome damage, hypoxia, or a genetic predisposition to Asperger's). Its poor women, women who smoke, women who drink too much, and women who don't get prenatal care who we need to worry about.
Making pregnant women worry with the latest "scientific report" (usually funded by some lobby) makes me crazy.
The fish fad makes me crazy because it is just that, another fad. We are in the middle of a global crisis with overfishing, diseases spread by fish farming, and habitat loss destroying fish breeding grounds.