Of course, many children know what the right thing is too and we can take our lead from them. Companies like McDonalds and Coke work hard to get into the schools. It is not just that they offer cash strapped schools a deal on dispensers but they sponsor a lot of activities.
The schools are very vulnerable to this pressure. But if the kids push back....
Here is the post from Dr Freedhoff's site about this today. Full quote:
"A little while back I received an email from a blog reading grandparent. He wanted to let me know about his 9 year old granddaughter's response to learning that her school dance was to be funded by Coca-Cola,
"Dear Dr Freedhoff, Thought you would like to know that my granddaughter Frances (9) has refused to participate in a Cola-Cola dance which her school has arranged as part of some sports sponsorship thing, this without any prompting from me. She must have been reading your blog. She wants to wear a t shirt with "water " written on it."
I reached out to him and asked if his granddaughter might want to write a short comment regarding her decision as well as send along a photo of her protest shirt.
She obliged!
"I did not want to be in the coca cola dance, because little children shouldn't be dancing in the favor of a soda company. Also my sports teacher shouldn't be encouraging small children to drink it. You need to stick to healthy foods like fruit,vegetables,meat,and occasionally oils and sweets. -Frances-"
And for those public health folks who think partnerships of their organizations with the food industry are a-ok now you know that even some 9 year old kids perceive them as problematic conflicts on interest.
Granddad - I imagine you're darn proud of your granddaughter. Good on her! "
Our children's health is in our hands as parents. It's tough to hear this. But it's the truth.
"We are raising our children in a world that is vastly different than it was 40 or 50 years ago," says Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity doctor and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa. "Childhood obesity is a disease of the environment. It's a natural consequence of normal kids with normal genes being raised in unhealthy, abnormal environments."
Here is the summary of a great article on this in Scientific American. The full article is here.
"This is a lot more complicated than ‘eat less, exercise more,'" Freedhoff says. "If weight management or childhood obesity prevention and treatment were intuitive, we'd have a lot of skinny kids running around." Freedhoff himself is developing a program for families that focuses on "redrafting" kids' and families' environments, starting with more home cooking.
"Every parent would die for their child, but most won't cook for their children on a consistent basis with whole ingredients," he says.
"What I'm amazed by is the constant use of fast food to pacify children and reward children—there is no event too small for candy or fast food."
There are many places communities could start: making school lunches healthier, ditching vending machines and access to fast food inside schools, not celebrating sports wins at fast food joints, and ending the use of candy or fast food as rewards, such as "pizza days" and other unhealthy food-themed school events, to name a few.
"People don't appreciate that parents are around children a minority of their days," he says, so it really will take a village to turn back the clock in terms of kids' environments. "If we had a time machine, it would be the world's best weight-loss program," Freedhoff says. "It's the world that has changed, not people."
I may be able to help you a bit. My new book "You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy" is a comprehensive manual for what what is really going on and what each of can do to take charge of our heralth - AND of our children's.
My new book - You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy is now available on Amazon for Kindle. - You can get it here.
70% of chronic illness is driven by how we live: by what we eat, by how we use our bodies and by our social world. In writing this book I have gone to all the experts in all of these fields and I have synthesised their knowledge into one practical manual for living.
We are designed to live out a healthy, active and participatory life. Provided we live close to our own design. In the book I show you why this statement is true.
The book is a personal manual for taking practical charge. You can go as far as you wish but there are simple steps that any of us can start with. I, an old fart, have managed to go a long way and I am sure you can too.
I wanted to show you more though than a diet or an activity plan. I have done my best to bring all the factors for our health into view so that you can see how they all help each other. I have also gone deeply into the science here, so that you can see why this book is not just another self help book.
I wanted to help you take control at a time when medicine has not been successful at preventing you from becoming ill and at a time when the safety net is being reduced as we all age.
I wanted to help us all reduce the immense direct and indirect costs of being ill. In Canada, the average man is disabled by chronic illness by 65 and lives another 10 years. Think of what this means to you as his family? In America health care costs are beyond the reach of any family and a bad diagnosis is often a step to bankruptcy.
Our health is truly in our own hands. When we can accept this, then we change the world that we live in today. This is the greatest step for true freedom that any of us can take today. This is how each of us become the core of any resilient community.
I hope you enjoy the book and I hope that it will help you.
In 1840, as the new industrial cities grew from populations of 50,000 to millions, the result was high death rates. All these people crowded in cities with no water systems and no idea about why bad water made you ill, set up the conditions for Choera and Typhoid. In London, at the time, life expectancy dropped to 22! But once we understood the mechanism for this kind of infection, great public works conquered cholera and made it possible to live in big cities. By 1900, 8 million people lived in London and few if any got cholera.
We are confronted by the same kind of problem today but this time the villain is chronic illness.
Once again, a new part of our culture, industrial food and our work culture, has inadvertently put millions of us at risk. Not from a quick death but from a lingering one.
With chronic illness the issue is not death but long term disability. This is what this looks like today: (source NPR)
Nearly all of these problems are caused by lifestyle.
14 million American are on this chart. In some parts of America, 40% of the adult population are included. In Canada, the average man is disabled by 65 and lives another 10 years. The average woman is disabled by 70 and then also lives another 10 years.
These people cannot work. Many have to be looked after by their adult children. Most have to be looked after by the state. The direct cost is $240 billion. Who can know what the indirect cost may be? (More here from NPR)
Because all of this is caused by lifestyle, medicine cannot help. In most cases medicine makes this all worse. For medicine can only treat the symptoms not the root causes.
For instance, Type 2 Diabetes is caused by our diet. Unless diet is dealt with, there can be no improvement. But your doctor deals with T2D by putting you on insulin. In time, your insulin resistance will break through and you will get even sicker.
On PEI, adults in 2006 with diabetes had to be hospitalized much more often than those without it. 16 times more often for lower limb amputations. 6 times more often with kidney disease. They had 5 times more heart attacks. 4 times more heart failure. 3 times more strokes. They stayed 3 times longer in hospital. Had 2 times more visits to physicians and 2 times more to specialists.
Most diabetics don’t just take one medication, but several. A typical regimen for an adult diabetic after a couple of years of treat- ment and following the dietary advice of the American Diabetes Association includes Metformin, Januvia, and Actos, a triple-drug treatment that costs around $420 per month. Two forms of insulin (slow- and fast-acting), along with two or three oral medications, is not at all uncommon.
None of this medical intervention works to stop the disability! None of this addresses the root cause. Your Doctor is not paid to help you change your life. He is paid to give you a pill or to amputate your leg. Nearly every item on the chart is lifestyle related.
Back Pain is a result of stress caused by lack of control. A pain reliever or back surgery can make no difference. Heart disease is caused by diet and lifestyle. Depression is caused by diet and by mental habits. Anti depressants cannot help over time. Even many cancers have their cause rooted in lifestyle.
What often makes things worse is that, once we take medication for one thing, this drives side effects that open up another pathway of chronic illness. What makes it even worse still is the nature of chronic illness itself. All of them are rooted in one cause, inflammation. So if you have one expression of it, then more will emerge as you get weaker.
The disease spreads and the costs grow exponentially.
Some states already have 40% of adults now disabled. What will happen when this is a national figure? We expect that Type 2 diabetes will be at 30% soon.
And what about you and me? It is one thing to think about this as something that will happen to other people. But it won't. It will be the fate of most people who live the modern life. How will YOU cope when you go down this path? Who will look after you? Will this be your daughter's inheritance? Do you really want to condemn her to this? How will you afford to live like this for a decade or more? Do you have a lot of savings? Most Americans have almost none.
This is why I have written my new book - You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy. I hope to publish it in early April. I am in the proof reading phase right now.
It is a practical manual that will help you find the root causes of chronic illness and help you take control so that you can either avoid it or if you have it get better. For there is no pill or treatment for diet, for lack of sleep, for lack of control, for lack of activity. Only we can change these parts of our lives.
We are entering the age of Personal Health. Like media, we will shift the focus away from the institutions to ourselves. Here is Larry Smarr who is on the leading edge of this movement.
Join the health revolution of our time - take back your power and your financial future.
Big food - such as Coke - tell us that the health and obesity crisis is complex and hard to understand. It isn't. It is simple. Here is the best film I have seen yet that shows you how simple this is. All the bullshit and all the lies stripped away.
I was talking to an American friend about his health insurance. It now costs $1,700 a month. This includea a $7,000 deductible. This is up from $1,000 5 years ago. This is a house payment. I asked him when he thought it would reach $2,500 a month and what would happen then. "At this rate in maybe 2 years and I just won't be able to afford it"
If you think this is bad, and you live in Canada, don't be too smug. In less than 3 years Canada's smallest province, PEI will have total health care costs that exceed its tax receipts. In 7 years time, health care costs will be double the tax receipts. This trend will apply to all provinces in time.
By 2030, Alzheimers alone will cost Medicare the entire budget. The Health Care system that we know - get a pill for each ill when you are ill is going to crash and burn. It has already in places like Greece that does not have the funds to pay anymore. Source NPR
"There have been changes in the health sector across Europe. For example, raising copayments for medicine and doctors' visits are now more common. But the cutbacks in Greece have been the most drastic so far.
The effects of these cuts are obvious at the Hellenikon Metropolitan Social Clinic outside Athens, located near an abandoned U.S. Air Force base.
Olga Baklatzi is one of the many volunteers at what they call the underground clinic, created 13 months ago to serve those no longer covered by health insurance. She describes the kind of people who come to the clinic.
"Middle-class, simple people, working people, they just lost their jobs, builders, people who worked in shops, they are well-dressed, not scruffy or dirty," Baklatzi says.
Medicines are donated by families of patients who don't need them any more and by pharmacies.
In just over a year, 4,500 patients have visited this clinic, which provides everything from dental to cancer care.
A well-dressed, 56-year-old woman waits in line at the reception desk. She prefers not to give her name for privacy reasons. She has come for free medicines for her breast cancer. She hasn't had health coverage since 2008, when her family recording company went bankrupt.
She is angry. Her three grown children have university degrees, speak several languages and have all lost their jobs. She holds back tears. Her bitterness, she says, is the cause of her cancer.
One of the founders of the underground clinic is cardiologist Giorgios Vichas. With three years of austerity cuts, he says, life expectancy is dropping, while infant mortality has grown by 4 percent — shocking statistics in peacetime in the Western world.
The clinic, Vichas says, offers more than doctors and medicines.
"We also give them back the hope and dignity that has been taken away from them," he says."
I don't think we can count on this system anymore. And with all this cost, what do we all get? Are we as a society getting more healthy or less? You know the answer.
So the nest question is, What are you going to do?
One of the things you can do is to read my new book - out in March - You Don't Need Medicine to Get Healthy. Should be ready in March.
There is a real reveolution in health taking place where how to live to be healthy and to get healthy is becoming more and more clear. This book will offer you a guide to diet, your body and your social world. It is both personal and also rooted in the new science.
Why has modern medicine failed to stop the chronic illness epidemic? My quick answer is this. Modern Medicine has been captured by a simple linear idea of how the world works. It can only deal with local and simple problems. It cannot comprehend complex problems. It keeps trying to use simple tools, a pill based on one pathway that are based in the simple idea of cause and effect.
This all came from early success.
Joseph Lister created a breakthrough in medicine in the 1860's when he discovered that you could prevent infection in major operations by washing your hands and spraying the site with carbolic acid. Of course it took more than 10 years to be accepted but by the 1890's surgery did not mean a high chance of dying from infection.
Lister solved a problem that was simple and local. Keep the wound clean. Keep all that touch the wound clean. Keep the room where you treat the wound clean. Jenner did the same with small pox. Vaccinate with a close relative and you create immunity.
That is progress. But it is also the problem. Ever since then medicine wants the simple answer. It's early success in treating the simple has trained it to see only local cause and effect.
This is why it has failed and can only fail in treating chronic illness. For Chronic Illness is a complex problem brought on by interactions between your ancestry, the food you eat, what you do with your body, how much time you spend outdoors, your social status and how much sleep you have. There is no local cause. There is no one cause. There is only many variables interacting over long periods of time that result in emergence of disease that in turn result in the emergence of more disease.
You become obese, then you might develop Type 2 Diabetes, then heart disease, then eye problems and so on. Or you might get depressed and then get an auto immune disease such as IBS or worse.
Modern medicine treats each new disease as a stand alone. Much of the treatment drives further disease.
Our failure to see the difference between what can be seen as simple and local and what is complex is what is at the root of our failure. Now chronic illness is an epidemic. Every decade in the 20th century it has got worse. Since 1980, the epidemic has accelerated exponentially. Billions of dollars has been spent in "research". The entire medical world has been looking for answers. And they have failed. Why?
I had a flash this weekend as I was doing a final edit for the first book of my series You Don't need a ..." Modern Medicine, like all of our industrial institutions, has a machine design. All are based in a core process that ends in the sale of a product or a procedure.
Modern medicine is a linear world where the pay off is in the sale of a drug, a test, or a procedure such as an operation or a Botox shot. No one gets paid to work with complexity. So no one does.
All of Modern Medicine is focused on finding direct cause and effect pathways that end in a transaction that is based also on a mass market model. So in this world, depression can be "cured" by one pill.
If I am correct - what do you think pile in please - then we cannot expect any results from medicine. Medicine is captured by the fallacy that all linear institutions share of the world being linear and so reducing all interaction to a single payoff - a classroom with a teacher - a newspaper with a journalist - a pill with a doctor.
All the money you raise to go to this research is wasted. All the money we spend in this model is wasted. Investing more in the study of epicycles is not going to make the Ptolemaic system work any better.
So what to do?
Dave Snowden's Cynefin model says it all for me. Modern Medicine lives in the right hand quadrant but our chronic illness lives in the left hand side.
I don't think that the profession of medicine will welcome this insight. After all they all make their money and gain their status by their investment in the fallacy.
But we can help ourselves. For the systemic causes of chronic illness are all rooted in our lifestyle and in our ancestry. While complex they have only 4 quadrants.
Diet - Eat real food - give up all processed food - give up all grains and sugars - don't eat any food that has a chemical in it that you cannot read aloud
Be Active - Don't sit for more than 3 hours a day - Do physical work - be outside for at least an hour a day - get a dog - garden - get a standing desk
Get a Tribe - You will thrive when you have a real place and status in a social group - we are primates - we have to groom and be groomed
Sleep More - Sleep is not just a mechanical time out - it is a vital part of keeping us renewed and well - we need 8 hours a day - have a dark room - light is the enemy - don't watch TV in bed - don't read in bed - don't get stimulated before bed
There is then one variable about how all of this interacts and that is our ancestry. The closer you are to beig a Hunter Gatherer, the worse the outcomes of breaching the evolutionary norms for these quadrants. That is why First Nations People, Polynesians and Scots and Irish do do badly in the chronic illness spectrum.
There are no doctors in this picture are there? There will be a new research world though. A Big Data Crowd Sourced world. Where millions of us will share data about who we are - the ancestry variable and what we are doing and then we will start to see the emergent truth of what works best for you and for me.
Emergence is the new research frontier. But the powers that be will hate that because there is no transactional payoff. There will be no pill. There will be no procedure. There will be only the knowledge that what you and I are eating or doing is working or not for us as individuals.
We will have to find a new way of setting up this kind of research.
Trillions of dollars of cost will go away. There will be a true revolution in health and in human society.
Much more later this fall when I will release "You Don't Need a Doctor" I am still on track to release "You Don't Need a Job" and "You Don't need a Banker" at the end of June.
For some two million years of our evolution our brains became larger. John Hawks, anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, says there has been a dramatic reversal. Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball.
This is major downsizing in an evolutionary eye blink. Hawks claims that If our brain keeps dwindling at that rate over the next 20,000 years, it will start to approach the size of that found in Homo erectus, a relative that lived half a million years ago and had a brain volume of only 1,100 cc. (Link to more)
So here it is. The brain is shrinking. We are going back.
What might have happened? I suspect two factors. After agriculture, most of us became domesticated. We literally became like sheep: animals who relied on our masters to shape our lives. We depend more and more on systems we don't control or understand to live. So we don't have to think. We stop being aware. We don't need as much brain. We were like wolves, then German Shepherds and now we are Pekineses.
Then - The embodiment of wild and wisdom - Now the embodiment of the opposite
Two utterly different representatives of leadership!
And secondly we eat a very poor diet. At the advent of agriculture we lost 6 inches of height from poor nutrition.
Since 1980, we now eat an industrial diet.
By 2050 nearly 100% of Americans will be obese. We eat an Idiocracy Diet now like this one.
It took a million years for us to lose our gut as a primate. The key to the new large brain was nutrition. When we learned how to use fire, we could eat more meat.
As we ate more nutritional dense food, our brain grew larger and our gut smaller. We became more smart and so better hunters and ate more meat and so on.
We don't gain more gut - we just get fat. This is what most people will look like soon.
Human Evolution is in reverse now. So what to do?
If you live like a sheep, you will become one. Become a "hunter gatherer" again. Work to control your own world and depend less and less on "THEM". Become "Wild" again. Largely support your self. Progressively disconnect from the system.
Easier to do, eat more brain food - dense nutrition - eat more meat. eat real food. Cut back on the grains. We are not chimps or Gorillas. We have been designed for millions of years to eat food that is dense with nutrition.
Doug Currie and any health minister will have to introduce cuts to the health care system because the costs are beyond what we can pay. We will just have to suck this up. For there is no alternative.
BUT he must also ensure that he sets in motion work that gets at what is driving the costs.
And it is Type 2 Diabetes that is the villain here. What Doug can control is the advice given by Health PEI and the nature of the programs that we have for wellness.
At the moment, these programs are set up to fail. They use the wrong dietary advice and then go right to drugs. The system is captured by this and so is inadvertently driving up our costs and expanding the epidemic.
And it's no longer the old but the young who are at risk.
And some 17 percent of American children from age 2 to 19 are now considered obese, roughly half the rate of obesity among adults.
And how do we respond to this on PEI? The same way as they do in the US. Weoffer adivice on diet that is Wrong. And so revert to drugs. That don't work either. And of course, the epidemic gets worse.
The new study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, tested three ways to attain durable control of blood sugar in youngsters between the ages of 10 and 17. None worked very well. Almost half of the 699 youngsters had to add daily shots of insulin within a few years to lower their blood sugar. Metformin, the standard drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes in children, failed to control blood sugar in more than half of the children.
I have spoken to Health PEI's Diabetes counsellors. They advise eating according to the Canada Food guide.
This puts the emphasis on grains - grains are sugar and are at the core of the problem. When I challenged this, I was told that this is how people want to eat. This is what is driving the epidemic. This then dives the failed drug response. This then drives the costs. (Source Health PEI!)
When you get Type 2 diabetes you will be hospitalized 16 times more often for lower limb amputations than non T2D sufferers. 6 times more often with kidney disease. You will have 5 times more heart attacks. 4 times more heart failure. 3 times more strokes. You will stay 3 times longer in hospital. Have 2 times more visits to physicians and 2 times more to specialists.
It gets worse. Most diabetics don’t just take one medication, but several. A typical regimen for an adult diabetic after a couple of years of treatment and following the dietary advice of the American Diabetes Association (eat more healthy grains!) includes Metformin, Januvia, and Actos, a triple-drug treatment that costs around $420 per month. Two forms of insulin (slow- and fast-acting), along with two or three oral medications, is not at all uncommon.
Now this is new information for many - especially in the health care system itself. The situation is made worse by the Diabetes Association that has been advising eat more grains and so cannot pull back without looking stupid.
But we the citizens pay the bills. We take the cuts. It is time to do the right thing. Time to set up a diabetes strategy that is based on what we know is the truth about metabolic syndrome. Time to look at our food system broadly - as we did with tobacco.
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