Robert Paterson's Weblog

Real Food for Real Kids - Set healthy habits early = Health

Home About Us Our Mission

Our mission is to...

Change the way children eat and understand food.

Provide children with delicious, healthy, all-natural meals and snacks.

Reconnect children and families to real food.

Inspire future generations to make healthier choices, every day.

Support local farmers and producers who are as committed to responsible and sustainable business practices as we are.

via rfrk.com

In the face of an obesity epidemic, officials tell us to eat better. But busy families feel that they don't have the time or the budget. A tsunami of ad dollars influence our kids to reach for the crap. Our schools are full of it. Jamie Oliver found out how hard it is to change these habits and to stand up to these powerful forces.

But there is hope. In Toronto a few pioneers got together in 2005 and had a crazy idea. Why not source good local food, cook it from scratch every day, educate daycares and parents about it and deliver it to day cares and kindergartens.

5 years later, RFRK is the largest buyer of local food in Toronto and supplies nearly 10,000 young children every week day.

What they are doing of course is changing the palate and eating habits of thousands of families. What they are doing is driving a wedge into Big Food at the right time in life - EARLY.

What was David and Lulu Farnell and their first employee, Hope my daughter's mad idea where they did everything - is now a major enterprise.

What gives me hope is that this no longer seems like a way out idea.

Like UFIT - this is an idea that addresses part of the core of our modern health problems at source.

Additionally, not only does it offer the kids a great start in life - but also may do for the locavore people what Ray Kroc did for Coke and the French fry guys - offer a massive market pull. What an irony!

Additionally as we have seen in Wisconsin schools where a similar program has been working for years - we see a revolution in learning and in behaviour too.
http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2009/10/the-the-whole-truth-revisited.html

Isn't this an approach that all schools should take?

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

We would rather die than change - Why UFIT works

We all know that we should eat better and take more exercise. I don't need to be told this anymore - nor do I need more evidence. So why is eating better and taking more exercise a simple act of doing the right thing?

We all buy exercise machines, join health clubs, go on diets, join Weight Watchers - but most of us give up and fail to do what we know we should do. Why?

Even threats of death do not work - 98% of heart patients after a while fail to follow their doctors' orders. Why

For years politicians, health leaders, school officials have stressed the importance of eating better and taking more exercise - but we don't do it. Why?

The answer is that how we eat and live is part of our identity. As is smoking. To change something this fundamental requires for most of us more than an act of will or even the threat of death.

As my friend Alan Deutschmann tells it we would rather Die than Change our identity. Knowing what to do - being told what to do - will not work in most cases.

We need a process that is specifically designed to get us through this barrier. We do know what this is.

To make this kind of change usually requires that we start the change in a safe place surrounded by like minded people that we know will not judge us. It requires that we are able to start with baby steps at our own pace. It requires that we then move from this beginner phase to a place where we too see that others look to us. Where we can actually make a difference to others. In short we we stop being helpess and start to see that we can help others.

Sounds a tall order. Sounds Utopian. No this is what UFIT has done. Who and what is UFIT?

Here is a series of links that may answer that question. In the interim - here is a recent news item on the CBC that will tell you a lot in just over 3 minutes.

The UFIT story is I think more than a good local story about a couple who have done well.

I think that this is a story about the future of health care and education.

Most of what ails us today are "social diseases" such as diabetes, heart disease. Even many cancers will have social factors. When we feel helpless and isolated, this drives a huge stress load that eats away at our immune system.

The healthcare system can help with the symptoms but not the causes. UFIT offers a model that shows how we can help with the causes.

• Very low barriers to entry - it costs very little ($5) and it takes place at your local school not a swanky gym.
• Very low emotional barriers to entry - lots of people there who are just like you - lots of support
• Very low technical barriers - all start at their own pace - its a group but you are also you
• Very fast positive feed back - you start feeling better right away both physically and emotionally
• Very fast move from outsider to insider and then to leader and status
• A whole world of social support that extends beyond the classes to doing stuff with each other that helps others

I think that such a model can be applied to a wide range of health issues.

I think that most of our modern disease is derived from social separation and that designs that help us find our way home to being part of something good will make a huge difference.

More on this later but in closing today - if you have any doubts about how powerful this process can be please watch this. I defy you not to be startled.

Disclosure - I am a long term friend and advisor to Eireann and Gord

What is the best investment your government can make? Kids!

So where should government invest? Here is Daniel Trefler at the Globe and Mai's response: (Thanks Jane)

Back in May, I was approached by a group of investors who needed some return-on-investment (ROI) numbers for several projects. The returns were spectacular. Even after netting out inflation and the cost of capital, I was getting ROIs of 5.3 per cent, 6.7 per cent and 9.0 per cent. These are stunning returns. Some of you will rightly be thinking that the investor group will soon be in jail, perpetrators of another Madoff-like Ponzi scheme.

But here's the rub. This group of investors is not the usual set of schemers. They're Canada's Council for Early Child Development, and their business is kids.

Many of you will not fully appreciate just how rich the returns to investments in kids are, but check out the accompanying chart. The City of Chicago has been running child-parent centres for the better part of 20 years. To their credit, the centre designers wondered whether the program was worth the extravagant costs. So they did a clinical trial, randomly letting in some kids and randomly turning away others. They then examined outcome differences between the two groups over the next 20 years of the children's lives. The ROIs were 9.0 per cent. For those with some business experience, you'll know that an ROI above 0 per cent triggers a strategic decision by management to invest.

For those of you with less business experience but lots of good sense, I can translate ROIs into something that looks like a Canada Savings Bond by adding in inflation and taking out the cost of capital. This generates a long-term annual return of 12.2 per cent. By way of comparison, the accompanying chart plots the performance of 10-year Government of Canada bonds. These have been well below 12.2 per cent over the past decade. For good measure, the chart also plots cumulative annual returns on the TSX since January of 2000. Kids have been outperforming bonds and equities for the past decade.

Unfortunately, the Canadian government fails to understand this. It simply doesn't appreciate the value of investing in children. Canada currently spends 0.2 per cent of its GDP on early childhood initiatives. In contrast, the Swedes spend more than nine times that amount. Fraser Mustard - guru to our underaged - argues that comparable care to that offered in Sweden would cost Canadian governments $15-billion a year more than the paltry $3-billion we currently spend. At first glance, this is a staggering amount and completely unaffordable. But let's look at this as a business proposition.

The rationale follows here

Our Nannie

Being Close

Protecting our kids from dangers on the web - Street Proof them

Euan Semple was called into be on a show on TV in the UK to talk about how best to protect kids from online predators and porn.  Here is the interview.

The UK government was planning to set up all sorts of Controls, Safety Settings, Education Programs and Standards. Euan advocated common sense. Can the government really save us all? Do they understand the net anyway.

On the face of it "Banning Pedophiles" is good rabble rousing politics - but can a simple solutions work - might they even make the situation worse.

Todd Mundt and I talked about this and I went further. My own experience with my now grown up kids is that no matter what you do - they will find a way to get online and try everything.

Euan and the other guest and I are all agreed - The best protection is not a barrier but your own attention and engagement. It's our relationship with our children that is their best defence.

Kindergarten & Kids - Get the organizational conflict off the table

The rumour is that the government will announce a school based Kindergarten on or around April 4.

The current owners of private kindergartens and those that staff them, Early Childhood Educators, are naturally worried about losing out to schools and Teachers.

Again I appeal to government to think more broadly than merely react to each week's new crisis focused on our children.

All the fuss about kids has been about who wins or loses in the operational sphere. In the Child Care Facilities Act, it was the interests of the in group of the owners. Now with Kindergarten, the owners and ECD's will be pitted against the schools and the teachers. Guess who is not being talked about?

Yes we are not putting the kids first.

I don't mean that we should not give those involved attention. They have legitimate issues that have to be considered.

But if we only see the issue as staffing and ownership then we have a on/off binary problem that cannot be solved.

The only way to solve a complex problem - one that has more than 2 sides - is to go higher in context.

Please please be careful. It's not rocket science to look at complex problems. If you continue to simply react, the mess will only get worse.

Kindergarten on PEI - Will this be announced this week?

The rumor is that the government will announce the establishment of kindergarten in schools.

What will be the issues if this is to be done well?

What is the risk of by reacting, that they are making more trouble for themselves?

It feels like a plane where the pilot is reacting too much and is risking losing control. Is this what is happening on the 5th floor?

What we really need is a comprehensive strategy

CHANCES - What we do

When many think of CHANCES, they have images of kids in daycare, parents in classes.

This is all true but it is only the surface. This short slide/video show looks beyond the obvious to what is really at stake.

Our children's future is largely settled before they go to school.

The loss of all the young - how deep can a wound be?

For all my readers beyond Atlantic Canada - this weekend, 7 boys and the coach's wife were killed on an icy road just as they were about to get home after a basketball match.

My heart goes out to all their families and their friends.

Sometimes you can never really get over this kind of loss. I know that I haven't. My room mate at school Jamie Borwick went out with his brother Freddie at this time of year for a spin in Freddie's new car. It was a present from their parents to Freddie on his 21st birthday. They spun out on an icy bit of road and were killed. They were the only children of the Borwicks. Jamie was 18.

They were the first of my friends to die. I just could never come to terms with Jamie being gone. For decades I would dream of him being alive. I would always in this dream congratulate myself that I had been right - he was not dead. But of course, then I would awake and he would be gone.

"Our boys were a team," Cleland said. "We figured it's the only just thing we can do is to have one last gathering as a team.

"We're all of the belief that our boys are happy that they're still together, they're probably still playing someplace."

I was in Africa at the time but when I got back, it was in time to return to our school for a commemoration for the boys. Their parents were shattered. Having been through all the work of raising two boys all the way to adulthood - and now emptiness.

We can never really walk in another's shoes - but I could never be comforted and I suspect that the families and the friends of these boys will always have an ache no matter how much time goes by. Some wounds can never be healed. It has been 40 years and I weep again tonight.