Food Fight
For any readers left dismayed at having done parenting wrong, at least according to yesterday’s blog post: take heart. It is this blog’s contention that you can actually try again. Just discard the earlier (set of) offspring and obtain some new ones to practice better parenting on.
Before we try the big reset, however, it might be worth considering at least one alternative explanation: Could it be that the problem is not solely due to lack of play? Just because two observed phenomena appear to coincide does not mean that one causes the other. Sometimes both can arise from different causes. Sometimes there are independent trends in a similar direction, fooling us into drawing erroneous conclusions.
Now, the case in favor of undirected, autonomous play among children is certainly appealing. But at least one other trend coincides, especially if you happen to be a diet crank freak aficionado. Because over the last half century, following federal guidelines, dietary fats have been reduced in public school lunches in favor of increased portions of carbohydrates, often in the form of sugar, which are deemed healthier than saturated fat. The dietary recommendations for healthy eating endorsed by the U.S. federal government, based on little evidence, say that saturated fats should be eliminated from the diet, and the processed food industry has gladly expanded its range of sugary foods that comply with the standards.
Christopher Palmer mentions that the high-carb, low-fat diet has become common over the same period that childhood and early adult depression and other forms of mental illness have been on the rise. His 2022 book Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health--and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More strongly suggests that the same diet plays a significant role, too, at least by implication. If the cells of our body, and particularly of our brains, are deprived of the fuel they prefer, they fail to function properly. This malfunctioning makes itself felt in a variety of ways, with a diverse set of symptoms.
Low-fat, high-carb eating results in a lot of glucose getting dumped into the bloodstream that the body has to clean up. Anything more than a teaspoon (approximately) in the blood is extremely damaging and dangerous to the organs. The body tries several methods to remove the glucose, one of which is by releasing insulin to push it into muscle cells, where it can be burned for fuel. So at the same time that kids digest this raw energy, the school curriculum limits their play time during which they could expend it. When that fails, the body uses its other option of converting the glucose to body fat, where it is stored for later use.
None of this is to claim there is anything wrong in the analysis from Peter Gray and Jonathan Haidt presented yesterday. It is just to point out that there may be other factors with results pointing in a similar direction. The relative lack of free play alone may explain the rise in youth mental health problems by itself. Or perhaps the starchy and sugary diet also contributes.
Yesterday I offered thoughts on finger-pointing between generations. Today I came across this article looking at the topic in depth. For whatever reasons, we seem to have a need to label people and assign them to groups. This includes generations, races, genders, religions, and others. I believe the result is many more problems than benefits. So why don’t we stop? Is this just human nature that we’ll never be able to stop? https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-millennial-boomer-gen-x-why-generations-feud-2023-7
Headline of the day:
40 Norwegian Reindeer Accused of $4M in Damage to Russia