Since stopping eating meat, and even more so since having a son who we’ve agreed will follow a similar diet, I’ve been studying up on nutrition. And a good thing too, because if I’d relied upon some of the ‘experts’, I’d have been taking the advice of the clinic and force-feeding Dorje margarine in an effort to fatten him up (for the pot?), and wringing a chicken’s neck dripping raw meat juice down his throat (a slight exaggeration, but not too far from the truth).
On Saturday, Dorje went to a children’s party. There was nothing healthy on offer at all, just Cokes, chips (complete with tartrazine and MSG), fizzers etc. In the most recent issue of Biophile, a new local magazine I’m glad to see in existence, there’s an article on sugar, based upon the 1957 book, Sugar Blues, by William Duffy. Refined sugar is defined as a poison, since it contains no nutritional value, and leaches the body of nutrients. This research has been (excuse the pun) refined more recently, but there’s still no doubt that one should not feed a child sugar (nor an adult, but we seem to willingly poison ourselves for all sorts of other reasons, so let’s leave that one for now, hand me my Magnum please). As one of the adults responsible for Dorje, I can’t justify feeding him sugar. It’s up to me to do the best I can until he makes his own choices later (and that’s not at 21, when I let him go his first date, and stay out after 8pm).
However, I don’t live in a bubble, and have to deal with other people’s ignorance/differing points of view. I’m sure the person who unwrapped his lollypop meant well. So too do people feeding their children margarine (advised by the clinic, but containing highly harmful hydrogenated fats), meat before their child turns nine months, choosing to bottle feed when they can breast feed, etc.
Some advice is fairly conventional, such as no sugar, margarine, and it’s mainly ignorance/inconvenience that the advice is not followed. Other advice however is consciously put forward by companies with vested interests, such as that bottle feeding is as good as breast feeding (it’s not, and in 1981 the World Health Organisation adopted a code to get governments and formula companies to prohibit saying so, although Danone and Nestle have been guilty of flouting the code), the prescription of antibiotics at the drop of a hat (still pushed by doctors pushing yesterday’s orthodox knowledge, and supported by pharmaceutical companies), Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder (which has a strong correlation to nutritional problems, as well as use of antibiotics and other nutritional causes, and again pushed as a pharmaceutical moneyspinner).
It’s hard not to get frustrated, even angry, at others who are doing it wrong. On the postive side this impulse encourages change and progress (usually for the better, I believe in the notion of progress), but this same impulse is responsible for religious intolerance and wars. But perhaps its time to risk a mini war or two to shake things up.