Teaching the Young Bloods How It's Done

I might not love Pepsi Co., but there's no denying this is one helluva entertaining ad.

Today's Funny Friday stars NBA rookie of the year Kyrie Irving.

Have a great weekend!

(email subscribers, you've got to head over to the blog to watch)



[Hat tip to LIVESTRONG's Adam Bornstein]

Are Public Drinking Fountains Disappearing?

Am I losing my mind?

Maybe it's just my addled memory but I seem to recall public drinking fountains being everywhere when I was a kid. Every school, every park, every playground, every public building - everywhere had a drinking fountain.

Nowadays they seem to be in much scarcer supply.

So what happened? Why have they disappeared?  Was it the insane rise of the bottled water movement that simply drove down demand?  Was it fears of communicable disease?  Were they purposely removed so as to encourage concession and vending machine sales?

Or is it just all in my head?

I know I have readers from all over the world. Would love to hear if your public drinking fountains are going the way of the dodo too. Have you noticed their removal?

Are Chimichangas Part of Canada's National Heritage?

Sigh.

This past weekend we took our 3 little girls to Hog's Back park. It's all at once a lock station, water control dam, retaining dam and lookout point, and it's been part of Canada since the Rideau Canal was opened way back in 1832. It's beautiful and it's maintained by Parks Canada.

In that picture up above you can see my kids and wife looking down over the falls, but what's in that red circle that I've highlighted nestled among the trees?

Here's a close up:

Yup, it's a Lone Star cantina. Here's the menu:

Nary a healthy choice to be had.

But this post isn't really about Hog's Back, or Parks Canada, or Lone Star. It's about hypocrisy, duplication and inaction.

From my vantage point here in Canada, more specifically Ottawa, Ontario here's what I see:

(CANADA) February 27th, 2012 - The Federal Minister of Health Leona Aglukkaq launches the national Summit on Healthy Weights and concludes her remarks with,

"Let's work together to create environments that help make the healthier choice, the easier choice."

(OTTAWA) May 7th, 2012 - The City of Ottawa publishes their Healthy Eating, Active Living and Healthy Weights 2012" report that rightly notes,

"the settings in which we live, learn, work and play, which can influence the choices we make including the food we consume"

(ONTARIO) May 18th, 2012 - The Province of Ontario announces the establishment of their Healthy Kids Panel whose aims include,

"minimizing the factors that contribute to obesity during childhood"

Is it all just feel good blather? If our federal, provincial or municipal governments truly wanted to start improving our children's environments and setting a leadership example for change would chimichangas really be sold in one of Canada's National Heritage Sites? Similarly, if change were really on the menu, would our schools, hospitals, arenas and community centres still be selling no name junk food? Wouldn't we be seeing a much larger investment in water fountains, farm to table programs, cooking skills classes and caloric literacy?

So much talking!

I know I'm a broken record, but we don't need more talking. Back in 2006 the House's Standing Committee on Health, over the course of eight months, heard hours and hours worth of testimony (including mine) which in turned helped to shape their March 2007 report Healthy Weights Healthy Kids.

How much expert testimony and consideration did the Committee hear? By my count, over eight months they heard from 111 different experts representing 65 different public and private institutions whose reports the Committee then summarized in a formal 60 page report with 42 explicit recommendations.

Does anyone think that the science has change dramatically over the course of the past 5 years? Was 111 different experts too few? Why are we duplicating an extensive 2007 federal effort at not one, not two but rather three different levels of government and why are we paying for that effort's recurrent duplication?

Let's finally stop talking and start doing and at the very least someone please get the damn chimichangas out of our park!  And please don't talk to me about the importance of giving people "choices".  The world is full of them, that's not changing, people will have plenty of horrible choices to choose from - but when it comes to our publicly funded institutions, the only choice should be health.

Ontario's Expert Childhood Obesity Panel Conspicuously Lacking in Experts

Did you hear?  Ontario is planning on reducing childhood obesity by 20% in the next 5 years!

I first heard that target when I was contacted by Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews' office back in early February. They wanted to chat with me about my thoughts regarding childhood obesity. I told them that I thought it was a symptom of a broken environment and that unless they focus on the environment as their target for change, they're not going to get anywhere. That'd be like trying to deal with chronic flooding not by building a levee, but rather by focusing on swimming lessons. Furthermore I told her that if the campaign targets obesity itself as the problem, that it might well increase societal weight bias and stigma as it suggests a blame and shame based individualized cause of obesity.  I also told her that I thought their 20% reduction in 5 years target was miles beyond hopeful.

I'm guessing what I had to say wasn't what they wanted to hear as I was not invited to join her office's Healthy Kids Panel.

So who was invited to join?

The panel is made up of a random hodge podge of folks. It's being co- chaired by a very nice former local politician turned newly minted hospital CEO and the dynamic head of a national encourage kids to exercise program. Having spoken with both in the past, I've no doubt they'll be able to "build consensus" (that's what the Ontario Healthy Kids Panel's webpage suggests they're there to do) among the members, but will the consensus be useful?  That would depend on the members.  So who is on their expert panel which according to the Healthy Kids Panel webpage, "possess(es) a broad understanding of childhood obesity"?:

• 2 physicians, neither of who list obesity even as an interest on their own official bio pages.
• A PhD researcher who while interested in obesity, is interested in the impact of the baby's in womb environment on obesity - fascinating, but far from prime time when it comes to interventions.
• A Registered Nurse without any special interest in obesity mentioned in her Ontario Healthy Kids Panel bio.
• A "young First Nations mother" (that's how she's billed by her official bio) who refers to herself as a "Senior Communications Specialist" on her LinkedIn page. 
• An "award winning journalist and mother of 3". Despite trying, I couldn't find any mention of her having a special interest or expertise in obesity.
• The Senior Vice President of Health and Wellness for Loblaw Companies Limited - a massive Canadian grocery store chain.
• The President of YMCA Ontario.
• A healthy living cookbook author and caterer.
• The Executive Director of the Propel Centre for Population Health Impact whose biography doesn't list obesity as an interest or background.
• The CEO of the Health Strategy Innovation Cell at Massey College and author of XXL: Obesity and the Limits of Shame. He has a true interest and expertise in obesity and while I may not share all of his views, I'm glad at least there's one person on the panel where obesity is a major part of their life's work.
• The Vice-President, Food Policy Scientific and Regulatory Affairs with Food and Consumer Products of Canada - a food industry advocacy organization
• A marketing and advertising expert with no reported special interest in obesity.
• The head of the Canadian national office of Right to Play - a wonderful organization that aims to improve the lives of children through play. His biography lists no special interest or background in obesity.
• The MPP for Scarborough-Agincourt and Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services. According to Google, the word "obesity" doesn't appear once on her official campaign webpage.

I don't doubt the panel's sincerity for a moment, but caring about children or childhood obesity is not the same thing as having expertise, and while there are one or two panel members who truly do have expertise in childhood obesity, shouldn't there be more?  Moreover, do you really think the panel chairs are going to be able to build any consensus that would impact negatively on the food industry given their representation at the table?

As a highly complex and multi-factorial problem perhaps the silver-ish lining is that there is no shortage of initiatives we could undertake to tackle childhood obesity. Here's hoping that when I blog about this panel's actual recommendations down the road I'll be referring back to this post as prematurely negative and will speak glowingly of the panel's plans.

So here's my plea to the panel - please make me look bad.  Put out something more useful than just the same old, eat less move more drek we've all come to know and loathe.  Actually tackle issues like predatory food industry marketing and front-of-package deceptions, nutrition facts panel reforms, actually useful school food policies including the removal of sweetened milk from sale, childhood advertising bans, the return of home economics, zoning laws for fast food around schools, innovative incentive or disincentive taxation, an explicit recommendation that juice be limited to a maximum half a cup a day and that it's basically just flat soda with a smattering of vitamins and certainly not a fruit equivalent, a true discussion of energy balance that explicitly hammers home the fact that exercise is insufficient by itself to make any dent in weight, a campaign designed to combat caloric illiteracy, mandatory calorie labeling in restaurants, a fight against the ugly prevalence of weight bias, a massive campaign designed to increase home cooking by specifically recommending we eat out less frequently in restaurants and purchase fewer boxed meals - just to name a few.

There's nothing I'd love more than to have to eat a huge serving of crow.

Have You Ever Experienced a Post Race Day Bonk?

(Not that kind of bonk!)

It's certainly happened to me. I've trained for months to run a triathlon or a plain road race, kicked my own butt on race day, only to find the next bunch of weeks (and at least once or twice - months) I take it far easier than someone committed to healthy living ought to.

I'm betting it'll happen to a few folks in my office too as this past Saturday just shy of 40 clients from my office ran in the now 6th annual Dr. Freedhoff Try-a-Tri Challenge (thanks Somersault!). For many, it was the their first triathlon. For some it was their first ever race.

I'd be willing to wager that at least one person from the race is going to see me in my office in the next few weeks inexplicably struggling with their healthy living behaviours - not just with fitness, but with food too - and all consequent to a post-race bonk.

Healthy living? It's a marathon. An ultra-marathon. A never-ending ultra-marathon.

Sure it's alright, in fact it's downright human, to relax here and there, perhaps especially after a major job well done.

But if you really want to finish this race remember consistency is key,and quickly getting back to your pre-race day lives is something you might want to strive for.

If you're really stuck?

You can always sign up for another race.

Congratulations to everyone for a really wonderful day!

Have you ever had a post race day bonk? How long did yours last?

Saturday Stories: Superweeds, Poetry and More HBO

Marion Nestle on the perils of genetically modified crops (hint, eating them won't hurt you, but planting them might).

Snarky, weight lifting, columnist and personal trainer James Fell writes what he calls, "the worst weight loss poem ever written".

Michele Simon, via Grist, on her thoughts after watching Weight of the Nation (assuming I get a chance to watch it this weekend, my thoughts may be in next week sometime)

The All New F*&% You Pizza From Pizza Hut

Did you happen to see the insane pizzas that Pizza Hut's making these days (like this one with the cheeseburger crust)?

Well today's Funny Friday is their all new F*&* You Pizza.

Fair warning! They use the word F*$@ a lot.

Have a great weekend!

(email subscribers, to see the video, you'll have to visit the blog)

An Actually Healthy Restaurant?

Maybe it is possible.

This one's in Tokyo and it was designed by the Tanita scale corporation.

According to this tiny news item,

"Each table is fitted with a weighing scale to ensure healthy portions can be measured out, while a timer tells the diner when the optimum duration of 20 minutes for completing their lunch is over. Professional dieticians are also on hand to provide free advice on eating regimes in a special counselling room."

Sounds fabulous to me (other than that weird timer thing).

The Truth? Healthy Living Requires Effort.

(I want to preface this post by explicitly stating it isn't about weight. Healthy living isn't determined by your weight and this post applies to everyone regardless of their weight - being skinny is no more automatically synonymous with living a healthy life than being fat is with living an unhealthy one)

I need to expand a bit on my last few posts.

The unfair truth is that living a healthy life requires effort. It requires making time to include regular exercise. It requires making time to cook real food. For most, those two things will require reorganizing schedules, taking long hard looks at after school and work obligations, and for many it will require developing new skill sets involving both fitness and cooking.

It wasn't always this way.

Once upon a time many jobs were physically demanding. Once upon a time eating out and processed meals simply weren't an option. Once upon a time calories weren't cheap. Once upon a time we had more time.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting life was idyllic 60 years ago. Human nature being what it is I'm sure many still didn't prioritize exercise, and that many more, while cooking, certainly weren't cooking healthful meals.

That said, if someone wanted to improve their health 60 years ago, cooking wouldn't be a foreign concept, and their after work and weekend time for things like fitness would likely not have been taken up with after school chauffeuring or the electronic tethers to which we've all grown accustomed and dependent.

What you need to do to improve your health may not be in and of itself complicated, but finding the time and skill to do so in this current environment undoubtedly is.

But it's only a hardship if you make it one. Attitude's crucial to winning a healthy living fight. Exercise isn't about day to day suffering, it's about living a longer, better, more functionally independent, literally less painful life. Cooking's not about being a time consuming chore, it's about improving the health of your family and perhaps becoming less reliant on medications.

And one thing's for certain. It does require effort, and if anyone (including yourself) ever tells you differently they're either ignorant or they're liars.

Like anything valuable in life - education, marriage, parenthood, work - you get out what you put in, there are no shortcuts.

So what do you need to do? First I'd recommend you ignore the minutia and remember that there's no perfect diet (for health or for weight management) and no one way to go - and please ignore whatever the latest study they're trumpeting in the news. And then?

• Cook more frequently from whole ingredients (eating out less frequently and eating fewer processed meals).
• Move more and intentionally include as much exercise as you can enjoy into your life (your toothbrush level of exercise).
• Live the life you want your children to live and include them in all of your health living endeavors (teaching them the joy and value of cooking and exercise)
• Be a quitter if you need to.
• Never ever forget that the best you can do varies day by day and that your personal best is always great.

Is it fair?

Never.

Is it easy?

Definitely not at the beginning, and certainly not always after that.

Is it doable?

Absolutely.

It's about priorities and choices. That doesn't mean you're a bad person or parent if you don't choose to live with a healthy lifestyle - we're all entitled to choose the way in which we live our lives - but if your desire is a healthy lifestyle and you simply think it isn't doable then I think you're shortchanging yourself.

Health is incredibly valuable.  It requires effort.  There's just no way around that.

A Single "Food Product" That Encapsulates the Entirety of the Problem.

"Fast Franks".

Fast?

Because cooking a hot dog and putting it in a bun is "slow"?

But this Frankenfood speaks volumes.

As a society we value convenience and speed over nearly everything else. Consequently there's a demand for products like "Fast Franks", or more commonly for health washed products that people feel give them the same benefits as from scratch but quickly and conveniently.

Is there anything in life that's valuable that requires little or no effort?

Cooking, and perhaps slightly more specifically, prioritizing and finding the time to cook healthful meals - at this point, there's no way around it.

[Hat tip to Twitter's @teacherace for sending me the photo]