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.

Calcium Supplement Busters

Just when you think you're doing something good for your health, along comes a new study that demands some thought and some changes.

A recently published study in the British Medical Journal found that taking calcium supplements increases the risk of heart attack by about 30%. The researchers also found that the supplements weren't all that great at preventing bone loss either. (Articles about the study are at BBC, CTV, and ABC.)

I was floored by this study - I've been taking calcium supplements for several years, since I developed quite a sensitivity to dairy products and was diagnosed with osteopenia (a couple of years ago). Dammit, I need my calcium!

Turns out, though, that perhaps the study is more positive than I first thought. I'm fairly savvy, or like to think I am!, about nutrition; it's been an interest for years. But I fell into the trap of thinking that no dairy automatically means calcium supplements.

Wrong!!!!

I've been digging out the books on nutrition and looking up calcium retention and absorption and tables on how much calcium is present in various foods. With some adjustments, meeting my calcium requirements will be relatively easy. It will take more planning, though.

In retrospect, I wonder if I just didn't let register all the information I've read before. It really is much simpler to pop a pill two or three times a day than it is to plan for amounts and combinations of food necessary to achieve the optimum amount - true of all nutrition, really.

Most likely, getting enough calcium - and everything else - through the diet is the healthiest, if possible.

My immediately available resources are two good books: Becoming Vegetarian, by Melina, Davis, and Harrison (has a wealth of information about vitamins and minerals, and other dietary requirements; and Strong Women, Strong Bones (a veritable bible on bone health), by Miriam Nelson.

It will be an adjustment, no question, but well worth the trouble.

When Good Food Goes Bad

All that glitters is not gold.  It's potatoes - one of the most important imports that Columbus brought to Europe from his travels. Potatoes, although not as glamourous as gold, became the subsistence crop for Ireland and for much of central and eastern Europe. They are the world's fourth largest food crop, after rice, wheat, and maize, and are still a main staple in the diet and favourite in the recipes of several cultures.

Potatoes seem so down to earth and homey, the backdrop for turkey gravy, a side dish to most everything, but they provide a nutritional wallop of fibre, vitamins, carbohydrate, even protein. The nutritional data below is from the site for The International Year of the Potato-2008. (Who knew?)

So how does a good potato go bad? (And I don't mean by spoiling.) Human intervention is one way; Mother Nature's intervention is the other. Both have caused and continue to cause human suffering.

Perhaps the most famous and horrible of Mother Nature's interventions into the goodness of the potato happened at various times in Ireland, most notably in the Great Famine of 1845-1852 when the potato blight infected the crop. Mother Nature was also responsible for a famine in Ireland in 1740-1741, sending cold and rain that ruined the harvests.

The disease in the potato crop brought cultural, social, political, governmental, religious, racial, and economic problems the Irish experienced at the hands of the British to a tragic head that cost the lives of more than one million people. At least one million more emigrated. During the same period, the potato blight also infected crops throughout Europe, causing much hardship.

So it is a little surprising that we go to such lengths to take such a good food that can sustain us, indeed can form the bulk of our diet, and mess it up almost beyond recognition. Baked, boiled, steamed mashed, the naked potato is a healthful food, in spite of what some diet gurus may tell us.

What we do to it tastes so awfully good, but make of the potato something that is actually not very good for us. We break down its molecules and reconstitute them; we deep fry them, often adding trans fat, always adding many calories; we load them up with additions that drown their goodness.

There are hundreds of recipes for potatoes that are healthful or can easily be made so. We should value the lowly potato and treat it, and ourselves, with more respect.

There has been so much suffering from Mother Nature's intervention that we don't need to add the self-inflicted suffering of the diseases caused by good foods gone bad.