Things I?ve been wondering about lately?

1.  Environmentally conscious, health conscious, and all around conscious people are always pointing out that, back in the day, the folks never had the sorts of diseases that seem plague us today.  They seem to pinpoint the culprit as the recent decline in individual good nutrition and exercise habits, as well as corporate and industrial ignorance.   While I can’t disagree for a second about the need of our society today to pick up on healthy lifestyle habits, I can’t help but also wonder – people back then might have had lower illness rates, but they also had lower life expectancies than we have today. So what gives?

2.  Should children be brought up vegan, vegetarian, or on an otherwise restrictive diet? As an alternative to cookies and chips that my counterparts bring for snacktime, I brought strawberries and cucumbers to the classroom today, thinking I was doing pretty well, and was promptly informed by one mother that her daughter could not eat strawberries.  One, she compromised.

“Allergies?” I asked her.

“No, I just have her on a low-sugar diet.”

I think the girl is maybe three.

I think it’s one thing for us adults to put ourselves on these kinds of dietary plans, however well they might work out to be for us on an individual basis, but it’s a whole new thing to put this on our kids.

First of all, a child’s physiology and nutritional needs are vastly different than ours.  How could we starve a developing and maturing brain from the healthy fats, carbohydrates, and proteins that it so desperately needs?  Secondly, the social dynamic is completely different: you might choose not to eat wheat because you know that gluten is a protein found in wheat that isn’t well-tolerated by your digestive system, but forbidding your child from eating a Ritz cracker with their classmates – even though they are well capable of tolerating wheat and gluten – is another story.  Without a proper understanding of the reasons why they are being made to follow a particularly restrictive diet – for reasons other than if it is for a legitimate allergy or physiologically negative response – we run the risk of all our coercing backfiring on us when the child grows older and is able to make their own decisions.  Trust me, teenage rebellion is ruthless.

As I passed out the strawberries to the rest of the class, the girl came up to me and said: “Mommy says that when I’m not sick anymore, I can eat these too.”

After a moment, I realized: No, Sarah**. It’s not you who’s sick.  It’s your Mom. She’s the one who’s truly sick.

Now, I know it’s good to be healthy.  I know it’s good to feed our children good things.  But I think there comes a point when the unrelenting desire to be health-conscious – a trait, I have noticed, that is particularly expressed by young, working women -  is driven to a point that is no longer healthy.

In our teenage years, we looked at it in disdain and called it an eating disorder.  In our young adult years, we’re wiser now, and we call it “being health-conscious”.

Pretty disgusting, if you ask me.