What is in a real treat? Hint: it's not junk food

Hurrah!! for eating close to the earth!

While the general level of understanding about food choices and the importance of healthy eating is certainly increasing, there is a hold-over from the Clean Your Plate Era that I believe just needs to die. 

Every time I hear someone tell me all about how they're improving their diet this, making healthy choices that, moving more, being conscious of this and that but...

...they like a treat now and then... 

My teeth meet and grind a little. Grrr.

How... how? 

How has the lowest-grade, nutrition-free simple salty-fatty-sugary flavour with artificial colours, flavours, emulsifiers and extenders and preservatives crap managed to get such a sweet, cute word? 

'Treat'... wheee. 

 It sounds light, delightful... Why is it attributed to such nasty grub?

A fresh, local, juicy and perfectly-ripe strawberry. That I could see is a 'treat'. 

A package of six different kinds of sugar, artificial colours made to look like drawings of surreal strawberries, and artificial flavours made to smell or taste like something else entirely, with bha and tri-sodium phosphate? That is supposed to be a treat? 

How?

Is it just the 'fun' packaging?

A couple of years ago, I got over pop. And candy. However much you might be attached to the wonderfulness of candy, I suggest you stop eating it for 3 weeks and then go back to your absolute favourite kind first.

Just try it.

What you'll taste when you try it again is chemicals. Candy is not sweet and delicious... it's just sweet.

A friend noticed that people are no longer satisfied with naturally sweet foods, but prefer sweetened foods. I thought it was an important insight. 

If your palate doesn't experience fresh, ripe raspberries as sweet without sugar (or those ersatz chemical engineering feats called 'sweeteners'), there is something wrong with the palate not the raspberry...and the palate needs to be re-trained.

 

So, once and for all... if it's not made out of nutritious food that nurtures and sustains a human body, could we just stop calling it a treat and call it what it really is:

Junk food.

What Do Grades Have to Do With It?

Ah, grades... 

Remember the lovely, tight horror of seeing an entire year's effort nailed to a piece of paper in one letter or two digits? 

Now, when it's been announced, when you suddenly realize there is nothing at all you can do about it, you realize too late there was more you needed to do...

Had a conversation not too long about about the 'reality' of the fact that people will be grading you 'in the real world' for 'the rest of your life.' 

Well, someone else had that conversation at me. 

Wow, does it ever not match my personal experience. 

Even in the military, a very large organization that thinks it is forced to rate and classify, much the same way the school system does, people don't get 'graded by everyone for the rest of life.'

From this conversation, I remembered one that I'd had years ago with a principal who actually said out loud 

'grades are objective standards.' 

We were in a group setting, and my only response was a snort of derision (because sometimes even I can be restrained).

First, a couple of facts about grades:

1. largely arbitrary, definitely judged by individuals, each according to their own scale or their own interpretation of the 'objective' scale,
2. like the winner of the Stanley Cup, no more a statement about this whole person and their whole knowledge of a subject than any single game is a determination of the 'best' team in the league -- even when the grade is compiled from more than a single exam,
3. determined from the grader's understanding of the material, which certainly may be based on dated information, and the grader may simply be less knowledgeable than the person being graded (this becomes a critical problem by post-secondary, when an instructor may be the person in the room with the least experience in the field in the real world),
4. related far more, it has been very clearly demonstrated with some very creative and devious research, to the grader's opinion of the victim than the victims' actual knowledge (everything from 'the better looking the student the better the grade' to the instructor's prior knowledge of the student-- ask any third child in the same family going to the same school about this),
5. related to the grader's preferred learning style-- expressions that match that style are marked more highly than expressions that conflict with it, even when they're both correct,
   
6. sexism is alive and well in education, and grades reflect that bias, too,
7. based on the unsupportable idea that what is known in 'this' context (whether that be 'right now during this test' or 'expressed in this assignment' or 'how extraverted the student is and whether or not said student participates enough in class'), which generally means that students with more stable lives have better grades overall, being the least likely to have something tremendously distracting demolish the score on even one assignment or exam,
8. based on the hiliariously impossible theory that in a random, small group of individuals it is not possible for all of them to be extremely capable.

That last one really annoys me. 

I've been in groups of more than 30 people who were all, judging by their conversation and behaviour, true idiots. But if they were all in a classroom together, some of them would receive B's on their work anyhow. Potentially, some might even win an A. 

Conversely, I've been in a classroom with 17 geniuses who all understood the material at a very high level, and some of them actually got C's. 


This is the 'statistically unlikely' idiocy that makes people who don't understand statistics attempt to force 'averages' onto very small populations. 

The fact is, if there are 10 people in a group, the chances of them scoring on a bell curve in any metric is ludicrously unlikely. 

It is much more likely that there will be clumps of identical scores. Teachers, who often know more than is good for them but less than they need to, are uncomfortable with this reality and will not give out 5 A's in a small class, even if there are no differences between those 5 students' knowledge or skills. 

Of course, this also reflects the insanity of the system that would certainly flag that many A's in one class as 'probable cheating.'

Now, having mostly been in the 'smart class' throughout school, that statistical unlikelihood became a subject of some controversy -- because the grades on the transcripts are the same. Why would a smart person (it was argued) take a 'smart' class and risk getting a B or even a C, by doing much more rigorous work, when the same student could take a 'regular' class and be virtually guaranteed all A's? 

If it's all GPA then, seriously, taking the 'dumb' class is the way to a university scholarship.

Don't you just love it when the carrot and stick methods reward completely the wrong things?

And here is my point from the beginning, in that initial conversation:

Grades are irrelevant to 'real life'.

They are also almost entirely self-referential. That is, they are made to use within the school system, and refer to things entirely within that system...

And yet grades (and GPAs) are considered by everyone in, and everyone supporting, the system as 'valuable', even when no one can articulate exactly how grades are valuable.

The troublesome logic is thus:

I know that grades are meaningless, really, but there has to be some way to rate and judge people we don't really know because there are too many of them to know... 

...and we have to communicate those ratings and judgments to the people we don't know who need to know how everyone 'scored' so they can use those ratings and judgments to ... further rate and judge these people ...instead of getting to know them.

Or, such:

Obviously grades are a poor way of rating someone's knowledge, being so easy to:

• cheat  

• fake

• hire 

• or otherwise bluster to a higher-than-justifiable mark 

...so we certainly don't know what any individual's most-accurate grade really is. 

Because we don't know how many are cheating or how many are having others do the work for them and we don't know how many (upwards or downwards) are based on instructor bias or school standing... 

...but we need some way to convey what we know about this student to others, even if we all know it's inaccurate, even if they know it's inaccurate, even if everyone knows it's inaccurate. 

We need a metric everyone already understands, so we use this deeply flawed one.

Well, now, that makes sense...

Tell me what breastmilk really is, please

I frequently field questions like:

• when do I start feeding my baby real food?
• she isn't eating very much real food, what should I do?
• how much real food should my baby be getting?

My policy has long been to answer every question with a question... What I'd like to ask is:

What on earth have you been feeding the baby so far? Spackle?

I am familiar with the popular cultural idea that babies aren't really people, so I suppose it makes some deranged sense that the food made specifically for them (by a human body) probably can't be real either. 

I mean, truly, babyhood is just a transition period from non-existent to potential humanness (which happens on a sliding scale, generally just a bit older than the child currently is), so obviously anything that happens in that period is, by definition, not really happening. 

 At least not to a real person. 

They won't remember it anyhow, which is somehow justification for behaving as if their feelings or experiences aren't real. Hmm... back to that real thing, already.

Breastmilk (and all the commercial products made to look or ...um, no, just look... vaguely like it when viewed from a great distance in a dim light) probably, by natural extension of the thought-process involved, would automatically not really be real or worth anything either.

But, people: what is milk, if it isn't food? 

What is the baby growing on, thriving on... surviving on, if it's not food? What possible other category could it go into? Here is a selection of options:

• transportation methods
• building materials
• ideas
• furniture
• pets
• genre fiction
• sport

Life is filled with all kinds of spectacular mental gymnastics. The maneuver that puts breastmilk (or its artificial substitutes) into a category with wishful thinking and the tooth fairy is very odd to see in action.

So, to clarify: breastmilk is the ideal human food. In a healthy mother, there are no nutritional deficits (no nutrient required by a human body that is not supplied by milk) and the only reason we move on to a wider variety of food is... okay, there're 2 reasons:

1. eventually mom would have to eat more than her bodyweight in food to satisfy the children's caloric needs, and;
2. it would become a closed system with energy used up and not supplied from anywhere else which, until people can do photosynthesis, can't succeed.

It's food. 

It's real. 

Clear?

Co-Sleeping 'Dangers'...and the bias of media and doctors

An article has been circulated around the Canadian media, lambasting the perpetrators of the horror known as co-sleeping.

Now, there is a lot wrong with this media release, and the spin within... and not surprisingly. 

The author of the piece, Dr. Lauwers, who is also chairman of the Paediatric Death Review Committee and Deaths Under Five Committee, has taken a number of things for granted with no justification at all. 

The very first unjustifiable thing being taken for granted is the idea that it is intrinsically safe to sleep in a crib. Just for fun, I googled 'crib recall' just to see how 'safe' these baby cages are...

Over 1 million Simplicity cribs recalled after the deaths of 2 babies... oops, no, three deaths...

About 20,000 Simmons Kids Crib mattresses recalled for failing to meet the tight fit requirement...

Munire recalls 24,000 cribs because the mattress cannot be moved to the lowest position, enabling children to climb over the railing and fall out...

With many duplicates of the same news stories (about these three)... that was just the first 10 hits.

Over at Health Canada a quick search for crib recalls pops up a list of more than a dozen on the first page, dating way back to January 2002. Which, of course, means that all the hand-me-down and second-hand cribs that have already been recalled because of their lethal danger to babies are not on the front page of that search.

Of course that brings up the question: how to compare the statistics for 'co-sleeping'- attributed deaths with those associated with cribs? Well, here's the quote from Canada's Consumer Product Safety folks:

In recent years, CPSC has received reports of about 30 deaths of infants and toddlers each year from crib-related incidents.* While these deaths have declined considerably from the yearly toll of 150 to 200 in the early 1970s, the number of deaths associated with cribs remains higher than with any other nursery product.

For the diligent reader, the * refers to this footnote:

Products marketed as portable crib/play yard combinations were included only if the product was used primarily as a crib. Deaths involving Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) were excluded.

Well... that's nice. This survey of crib-related deaths actually removes SIDS statistics... meaning a great many more deaths are on the list to compare to the co-sleeping ones, because those were not separated out for SIDS. Is that bias? Or just bad stats?

While it is obviously unsafe for someone who is obese to fall asleep in a drunken stupor on a couch with a baby on his chest (one of the deaths included in a study of the 'risks' of co-sleeping)... it is difficult to see how this is even considered co-sleeping. 

Not the least because the adult in question isn't sleeping, he's unconscious. 

Another of the deaths, upon searching for the facts in the case, was found to be a baby, alone on a bed, who was trapped between the mattress and the headboard.


So, let's clarify the spin a bit: 30 babies die each year in Canada in cribs not including SIDS. 

Between 2006 and 2007 (that's two years) 41 babies died in Canada outside of cribs, including SIDS (who knows how many of the 219 SIDS deaths from the same time frame are in that number?) 

For some reason this 'study' included one child who died on the floor, which just makes this whole thing confusing. 


Those 'co-sleeping' situations include babies who die in any kind of non-crib sleeping arrangement, whether that is a temporary or how that family actually chooses to sleep. That means that babies who die entrapped in couches and alone in a parent's or sibling's bed are (because they aren't in cribs) 'co-sleeping'. 


Even if it is known that they actually died of SIDS.

Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous.

The Prodigy Problem: why talented people fail to learn

There is a pervasive undercurrent in Western society -- at least the bits of it I get to see. I think a Sylvan Learning Centre ad put it the most succinctly:

A little girl, probably ten, going flaming red at the front of the classroom as she stutters over reading the word 'island.' Oh, the shame. Then she goes to Sylvan and can read quickly and easily out loud in class.

Oh, my yes... the Sylvan way: learning things and then doing them; instead of the more commonly expected way, which is: know everything because you're talented, without ever having to learn it at all...

The undercurrent about learning is that talented people know things without having to learn them. That actually creates the prodigy problem. Let me describe:

Shirley Temple was an amazing dancer. 

For a three-year-old. 

She was a remarkable dancer for an eight-year-old. 

She was quite an ordinary dancer for a thirteen-year-old. 


As an adult, she was bright enough to do something other than trying to dance. 

You see, being naturally talented at something is a bit of a problem... it stops people from knowing that they need to learn how to get better at things (if that's what they want to do.)

When I was spending a lot of time at the dance studio, as my children were taking classes, the prodigy problem was visible. The children who were good dancers before they were 10 (some of them had been great dancers at 4 or 6) were appalled by how fast my kids learned to dance as well as they could. When they noticed, and it was impossible not to, they either got angry and left dance entirely or got extremely competitive at my kids.

The thing is, having up to that point relied on 'I don't have any idea how I learn this stuff,' when they get to the age with everyone else who's got 12 or 13 years of 'I have figured out how to learn things' they are surpassed and they have no resources for how to deal with that. If they've thought of themselves as 'naturally talented' (which they probably are), they have no idea how to bring 'intentional learning' to the task.

And herein lies a problem that is dealt with in some detail by Carol Dweck in Mindset: the new psychology of success: the fixed mindset. If someone (or the entire culture they find themselves in) feels that 'this is it' in terms of talent or ability, they will approach any problem or opportunity facing them with a simple response: I can or cannot do this, and there is nothing I can do about that.

The alternative is the 'learning mindset' -- the one that says 'everything people do, they learn to do first, so I can (if I want to, and apply myself, and do what it takes) learn anything people can do.'

Guess which one makes for a happier, more effective, high-self-esteem life?

Sleep: babies and teens and changing needs

My strange, noticing brain noticed something again. 

Parents spend a great deal of time and effort researching and experimenting and seeking advice about how to stop their babies from waking up in the night. Or, more accurately, how to stop babies from waking parents in the night.

Fast-forward 13 or 14 years. Now parents spend a great deal of time and effort researching, experimenting and seeking advice on how to stop their children sleeping so much.

First we teach children how to do things (follow orders, make choices, sleep on command, etc.) and then, in just a few years when the children really get a handle on that, we ask that they stop. Don't take orders, think for yourself. Don't make choices, do what I say. Stop sleeping all the time and get something done.

More cynical parts of my brain make comments that are uncharitable, like: parents really don't seem to like children very much, and; this seems to be about what is expedient for the parent in this moment, not what is best for the child or society. I don't know that I'd go a long way to contradict either of those sentences, but I will create a little more compassion than that:

I understand:

• there are a squillion pressures, messages and 'experts' about childrearing, most of whom have no more idea what they're doing than the parents who are listening


• parents never (not once) ever get up in the morning thinking 'how can I screw up my kid today?' (and children never go to bed at night thinking 'how can I piss mom off tonight?')


• like most other egrigious mistakes, this is about a lack of knowledge and understanding, not foul motives or vile feelings ... even when the mistakes look like they have selfish motives, or the feelings that arise are vile

There seems to be a war going on: parents sleep on one side, what children need in the night on the other. Parents want to meet the child's needs 'now and forever' for the whole night before the child goes to bed. Which is a little like trying to eat 'once and for all'.

A child can't be made 'full for the night' or even 'sleepy for the night' by any means before bedtime. They cannot be made to feel secure for the night, the right temperature for the night, comfortable for the night, or adequately unlonely (what is the opposite of lonely?) for the night.

Those needs can only be met as they arise.

If the child is lonely in the night, there is nothing for it except to assure them, with a parent's presence, that she is not alone. If the child is hungry in the night, nothing will stop the hunger until he is fed. If the child is uncomfortably warm, cold, wet or sticky, leaving it until after the sun comes up will only let the child know which is more important: his needs or the location of the sun.

And, in 13 years, there is nothing except sufficient sleep that will make a rapidly-growing adolescent be well-rested. And, what outside 'expert' is going to know for this child, based on how fast she's growing, how much exercise she got and what kinds of stresses there were today, how much sleep that takes?

Just meet the needs as they present themselves...

Drug Education for Kids

There is a lot around these days... anti-smoking propaganda, 'Just Say No' campaigns, websites that may be excellent resources or condescending tripe aimed at kids, their parents or, let's be honest, other people who already agree with the position of those writing them. 

Recently, we received a web survey asking what the teenager in the house thought of some written materials aimed at teens. Oh, man. Where to start.

The overall tone of the material was, not surprisingly, "You are stupid, we know more than you and you will never understand this well enough to make sensible choices. Just do what we tell you to do, then you too can be 'cool.'"

Do you remember being a teenager and being faced with one of those adults? You know, the desperate ones who want to be seen to be cool by the teens? Arg! I swear, this material was written by them. You can smell the desperation, the need to be looked up to, right alongside the utter certainty that the adult is right and the teen is a zombie.

My kids, without any difficulty at all, have found out everything they want to know about drugs -- to the point that they can tell me all kinds of interesting things about words I'd never heard of, like ketamine. They found web sources and books and experts they believed in without having to resort to watching a 20 second commercial telling them what to think.

Have you seen the anti-smoking garbage as of late? My goodness, there are so many people dying of the effects of cigarette smoke -- people who haven't been in regular contact with it, or been smokers themselves, sometimes for decades are somehow crammed into the statistics of 'deaths from smoking' and 'deaths from second hand smoke' -- it's almost the #1 worldwide killer, probably above the most basic 'all people will die of something' cause. Sometimes the deranged side of my mind suspects that everyone who isn't shot or run over by a car, who is old enough to have ever been in a restaurant when smoking was allowed, dies of 'smoking-related illness.' It's a simple leap for a propaganda writer, after all... It goes kind of like this:

1. Tobacco, when burned, released 4000 chemicals (we'll talk about that piece of b.s. in a moment)


2. Several (between 6 and 200, depending on who you're listening to) are carcinogenic


3. THEREFORE anyone who has contracted cancer who was ever anywhere near tobacco burning has suffered from the effects of tobacco smoke AND


4. Heart disease and lung disease are both known to be correlated to smoking and second hand smoke


5. THEREFORE anyone with lung or heart disease who has ever been around burning tobacco is suffering from the effects of tobacco smoke


6. ERGO, anyone who dies after having contracted any of those (cancer, heart or lung diseases) can justifiably be said to have 'died from' the effects of tobacco smoke.

Ha ha ha ha. Oh sure.

Back to that '4000 chemicals' bit. I like this part, it's the funny part. 

Just for comparison's sake: anyone have any idea how many chemicals are released into the air when spicy battered fries are fried? Just for comparison, I mean...

No?

Hmm... perhaps 4000 chemicals released is a lot. Perhaps it is not. Who would know, with nothing at all to compare that isolated fact to? But 'chemicals' is a term that comprises... well, everything. Any compound (like gold-silver alloy) is a chemical. So are all vitamins, all minerals that aren't in their pure elemental form. Oh, and all elements. 

Some folks have managed to pollute the word 'chemicals' and really mean 'dangerous

compounds' but, since the 'list' of 'chemicals' released when tobacco burns includes both carbon and oxygen, the whole thing is just silly.

And that, unfortunately, is where almost all anti-drug stuff goes. In an atmosphere of fear, and lacking any trust in the people receiving the information, the anti-drug folks (including the anti-tobacco crowd) are provoked to propaganda.

What is the difference between propaganda and, say, marketing? Well, for one thing, anti-drug campaigns don't have to meet any standards for 'truth in advertising.' They can tell people that marijuana is a 'gateway' drug without having to restrict that statement to any part of reality or define the term. 

The research is clear: the vast majority of people who use marijuana (like tobacco and alcohol) do not ever progress into 'heavier' drugs, not even for experimentation. 

Gateway to nowhere, perhaps? Why is that term used? 

To invoke fear and to maintain ignorance.

Propaganda also has a level of invective that borders on the evangelical. It's not unhealthy to try pot -- it's immoral. It's not illegal for minors to use alcohol, it's an indication of someone's lack of character. Strong, upstanding people don't do these things, weak and amoral people do. And today, with the No Stank You and The Truth ads, people who smoke are ugly, stupid, socially-unacceptable and smell worse than decomposing flesh, apparently.

Propaganda is most obvious, though, when the lack of trust in the truth really shines through. The message is 'don't just tell them the truth -- amplify and adorn the truth with hyperbole and speculation, dire warnings of doom and death.' And lots of exclamation points!! 

Drugs kill. !!!!   

Tobacco kills everyone who ever uses it, and most of the people who are ever near it.    !!!!

When parents are attempting to influence their children's choices, particularly into their 20s, when they are truly 'free' of the supervision we rely on for the first 2 decades, what can they do that will actually work?

What can parents do that will actually work?
The truth. 

In fact, the truth is quite bad enough. 

Meth is highly addictive (true) and causes unsightly skin problems (true), is illegal (true), may be tampered with to make it even more addictive (also true) and distracts users from things that are important to them, like loved ones and feeling like a capable, responsible adult (all true). 

Does everyone who ever tries meth get hooked on it? No. 
Does everyone who gets hooked on it die or contract infectious diseases? Also no. 

Is it possible to have a clean source that is easy to get and won't risk the more revolting side effects? Well, yes, maybe, for a while if no one gets caught and the people involved don't have any difficulty getting the ingredients, and have no nefarious agenda in addition to supplying someone with drugs... That's an awful lot of conditions required to make a happy life hooked to something. Not impossible, but who has time or energy to spend that much time making sure tomorrow's lunch is that safe, much less something illicit that makes 'finding out' even harder?

Another 'fact' about drug use that the anti-campaigners like to gloss over is the self-esteem connection.

People who have high self-esteem may, certainly, try out drugs that are readily available to them (caffeine, alcohol and tobacco being way at the top of the list), but the people who are 'hooked instantly' like the drugs specifically for their ability to stop them from feeling the way they always do (or give them access to feelings they walled off long ago in a desperate attempt to stop feeling all the pain). 

Self-esteem is not about being high on oneself, narcissistic or boastful. High self-esteem is based on feeling capable of accomplishing many of the things necessary in life, and on feeling lovable and loved.

Parents can help with all of those things: 

• directing children toward doing things with their strengths
• making sure they know that their weaknesses don't need to be 'fixed' 
• weaknesses are no sign of being 'broken,' just an indication of where they're always (probably) going to need other people's assistance -- as is appropriate in a cooperative society.

Make sure children know they are loved... that alone goes a long way to ensuring they do not turn to drugs as a way to live with themselves...when they don't care much if they die.