Gendered Calories

Researchers at American University, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago recently conducted a study in which childhood obesity is linked to working mothers.

According to the study, a child's weight increases by about one pound for each 5.3 months the mother works. Researchers aren't sure why. According to canada.com on Feb.7, 2011:

The researchers were unable to clearly explain the findings but theorized that because working mothers have little time to shop for healthy food and prepare meals, they and their children eat more fast- and packaged foods, which tend to be high in fat and calories.

Perhaps one reason why the researchers cannot clearly explain the findings is that they have incorporated a huge bias into the very foundation of their study - gender. They looked for a correlation between absent mothers and fat children and found it, thereby focussing the problem on women exclusively.

(A disclaimer here - I can find only the media reports of the study, which are often skewed. Also, I would really like to know who funded this study.)

Reuters (June 2010) reported on an earlier study done in the UK and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in which researchers looked at working mothers as one contributing factor amongst several which affect childhood obesity:

So the trend in mothers' employment over the past few decades may be one of the variables contributing to a general erosion in children's diets; the explosion in sugary junk foods on the market, food advertising aimed at kids, and the increasing availability of high- fat, high-sugar fare in schools are among the other factors that have been blamed.

The researchers also considered socioeconomic factors.

I am not disputing the accuracy of the American study, nor am I making a comment on the possible advantages or disadvantages of working mothers.

The point is that a child's weight is influenced by several things, and the composition, quantity, and quality of a child's food, together with level of exercise, is not gendered.

Put another way - it's not the absence of the mother that makes a child fat; it's the absence of proper diet and exercise that makes a child fat. And while mothers traditionally provide those things, it is not only mothers who can do so.

North American kids have a weight problem. And there are many aspects to the problem: availability of junk food, advertising of junk food, lack of education about nutrition, absent parents, irresponsible parents, obese parents, tax subsidies to certain food producers, coercive advertising, not enough exercise...

Sure, working mothers have an effect, but how much easier it is to blame them than to fix the problem and possibly cut into somebody's profit margin, or spend the money really trying to educate people, or putting pressure on governments and companies to ensure the availability of good food, or trying to eradicate poverty.

The Matter of My Blog

Millions of blogs exist that add nothing to the greater human conversation - no knowledge, nothing interesting, nothing helpful. Most often, one does not have to read very much of a post in order to know that the blogger is completely self-involved and self- indulgent - a "me" blogger.

Lately, I have been uninterested in blogging, yet getting to that bored stage of recovery - well enough to feel like doing things, but not quite well enough to do much about it. Blogging should be perfect for this stage; it keeps the mind busy but doesn't overtax the body.

The problem is self-involvement. At four weeks post-op, I am still quite self-involved - did I take the blood thinner? do I need ibuprofen? a nap? more fibre? more/less walking? Not what blog readers, no matter how loyal, want to hear much, if anything, about - and not what I want to record here.

Montaigne, however, could do it. He was a genius who wrote essays that were about himself, yet have attracted and delighted readers for more than 400 years.

Montaigne's essays discuss much about his life, told often as highly personal anecdotes - revealing and quite intimate. How does he manage to write about himself and his feelings, yet remain interesting and pertinent?

So many bloggers fail to take the step that Montaigne always takes. They fail to relate what they reveal about themselves to something meaningful to everyone else.

Montaigne's topics, no matter that he presented them from a highly personal perspective, deal with intellectual and philosophical issues that matter deeply to humanity. He did say, "I am myself the matter of my book," but that self is always a human being amongst and representative of all human beings.

Humanity is the matter of Montaigne's book. Too bad that can't be said for the millions of bloggers who use their blog as a mirror they can, like Narcissus, gaze at, endlessly longing for even more of themselves.