Jimmu's blog

In 2007, the Big Fat companies (after the Big Tobacco) decided, after intense marketing sessions, to publicly limit their advertising to children. The move was so bold that New York Times reported on it. That same year, Ad Council, the Government and the Big Fat teamed up for an awareness campaign on obesity - their solution - Shrek. Now Which? comes out with their latest report on how the Big Fat is only playing with numbers, taking from one place and adding to another. Their marketing budgets are not decreasing, far from it. They are just being re-allocated to new mediums, more modern and as deadly as TV. 

The seriousness of all this makes me laugh. I keep picturing their meetings when they talk about how to keep selling and at the same time appeal to the public’s concern. If you want to have an idea of how it must be, check DirecTV’s new line up of commercial. 

On Ad Council’s obesity awareness campaign website, there is a page listing all the partners. Among them are Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Kellogs, Kraft, McDonald, Del Monte, General Mills, Hershey, and Cartoon Network - who survives only because of those companies. Children for them are Billions and Billions in revenue. They will not only do everything to look like they are listening and care for children, but they will also do everything to make sure they maintain and expand that market. They will not lower their marketing budget, only re-allocate it. And increase it.

The first sign of a problem is denial. Deny there is a problem. Am I fat? Of course not, look around. I look like everyone else. Stores sell XXXL shirts because it is normal. Restaurants serve portions that big because it is normal. Fast Food stands are everywhere because they are so convenient and so tasty. I don’t have a problem. The rest of the world wants me to have a problem, but I don’t! 

This is pretty much the level of conversation I have when talking about our food and health system. 

In 1999, BBC wrote about people’s denial. Then Forbes wrote about it in 2006. This month, the Chicago Tribune talks about the perceptions of obesity are changing.

With larger people everywhere, individuals who are slightly overweight may now think of themselves as average and those who are heavier may think of themselves as having only a minor weight problem, the study’s authors suggest.

This year, we started to talk about Airlines charging by weight. People went nuts, saying that it was inhuman. I say we should do it. Or at least put a surcharge.

We keep talking about obesity and overweight with white gloves, making sure to crop out the faces of people on those fat images. I say put them on. Lets start to face what we have become. How much more disconnected from our body, from our health can we be?  

I grew up going to summer camp every year. Most of my best memories as a child are from those camps: a two week canoe trip, a week on the isle verte , and countless others. An idea, have your children spend some time on a farm, a sustainable farm. Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, USA (WWOOF - USA) is part of a world-wide effort to link volunteers with organic farmers, promote an educational exchange, and build a global community conscious of ecological farming practices. Our organization produces a quarterly directory of more than 500 organic farmers in the United States who would like to host volunteers on their farm.

LOCAVORE is the 2007 Word of the Year for the Oxford American Dictionary!

For more information or for a great reading, check out The 100 Mile Diet or Plenty, written by Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon.

About the book:

Like many great adventures, the 100-mile diet began with a memorable feast. Stranded in their off-the-grid summer cottage in the Canadian wilderness, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon turned to the land around them. They caught a trout, picked mushrooms in the forest, and mulled apples from an abandoned orchard with rose hips in wine. The meal was truly satisfying; every ingredient had a story, a direct line they could trace from the soil to their forks. The experience raised a question: Was it possible to eat this way in their everyday lives?

Back in the city, they began to research the origins of the items that stocked the shelves of their local super market. They were shocked to discover that a typical ingredient in a North American meal travels roughly the distance between Boulder, Colorado, and New York City before it reaches the plate. Like so many people, Smith and MacKinnon were trying to live more lightly on the planet; meanwhile, their “SUV diet? was producing greenhouse gases and smog at an unparalleled rate. So they decided on an experiment. For one year they would eat only food produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home.

It wouldn’t be easy. Stepping outside the industrial food system, Smith and MacKinnon found themselves relying on World War II-era cookbooks and maverick farmers who refuse to play by the rules of a global economy. They bargained for sacred squash at a suburban Buddhist temple, discovered the true sweetness of honey, and learned the lost history of dozens of varieties of local wheat. What began as a struggle slowly transformed into one of the deepest pleasures of their lives. For the first time they felt connected to the people and the places that sustain them.
For Smith and MacKinnon the 100-mile diet became a journey whose destination was, simply, home. From the satisfaction of pulling their own crop of garlic out of the earth to pitched battles over canning tomatoes, Plenty is about eating locally and thinking globally.

The authors’ food-focused experiment questions globalization, monoculture, the oil economy, environmental collapse, and the tattering threads of community. Thought-provoking and inspiring, Plenty offers more than a way of eating. In the end, it’s a new way of looking at the world

In my mailbox today is the newsletter from the My Wonderful World, an initiative from National Geographic. The campaign—backed by a coalition of national business and non-profit organizations— wants to expand geographic learning in school, at home, and in communities. “We want to give kids the power of global knowledge”.

Although focused on Geography, the theme of this month’s newsletter is Food.

Prepare for your backyard barbecue with geography. From eating local foods to beating rising gas prices to learning more about how and what Americans eat, My Wonderful World is out to give you geo-news you can use. Have a great summer—all 75,000 of you! Christopher Shearer, Director, My Wonderful World

The following are excerpts from the newsletter.

The Time Is Ripe

Nothing says “summer” more than sunshine, lazy days at the pool (or beach), and barbecue. Sweet corn on the cob, juicy watermelon, and hearty burgers are staples of the season. But this year more than ever, people are thinking critically about the choices they make when it comes to buying groceries. Attitudes are changing in response to increased fuel prices, recent natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and environmental concerns. These factors contributed to the thriving local-food movement, with farmers’ markets popping up across the country, organic-grocery chains like Whole Foods Market offering local fare, and even the most haute-cuisine restaurants committing themselves to local sourcing. This month, MWW challenges you to learn about the food system and consider the impacts of your family’s purchasing decisions. Start by visiting Local Harvest, a resource for finding local-minded businesses and farmers’ markets near you.

Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) offers unique, hands-on immersion experiences at organic farms around the world. Volunteers help farmers in their daily duties, learn about organic growing methods, and receive their stay and meals free of charge. Opportunities range from fruit orchards in England to olive groves in Argentina.

Foodie Dictionary

Feeling lost in the lingo of food issues? Here are a few key definitions to help demystify foodie jargon:

Slow Food—A countermovement to fast food, created in 1989 and that seeks to raise awareness of where our food is grown and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.

100-mile Diet—Challenges participants to eat only foods grown within a 100-mile radius of where they live. That’s right—if the salt and pepper in those shakers came from outside that distance, they aren’t going on your food.

Locavore—Someone who commits himself or herself to buying and eating locally, often using the 100-mile-diet guidelines. Locavores believe that less processing and shipping leads to more nutritious, eco-friendly, and tasty food. 

This Wednesday, July 16, the “Today” show is scheduled to air a special segment on family nature clubs with an in-studio appearance by Richard Louv, live from New York. The segment also features a filmed interview with Chip Donahue and his family-oriented nature club, “Kids in the Valley, Adventuring!” (KIVA). Started in Roanoke, Va., in January 2008, KIVA has already grown to include more than 170 families.

As you all know, I love my meat, but I love it lean and clean. Much debate has been going since who knows when. Humanization of animals have left us living in a society where farms rescuing amputated farm animals are seen as heros and giving prozac to your dog or cat is the norm. Don’t get me started, the whole issue is beyond ridiculous. The latest article in the New York Times magazine almost made me threw up. Anyhow, for the ones that understand nature and understand the equilibrium of the food chain, a wonderful book The Compassionate Carnivore by Catherine Friend

“At last, the perfect book for people who would like to eat meat but have moral, ethical, or health concerns about doing so. Catherine Friend loves animals but eats meat and gives a thoughtful, personal, clear-eyed perspective on how to do both, humanely and sustainably.” —Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York, University, author of What to Eat.

As for the NYTimes Magazine article, at least the moral of it was well written:

“Dodman’s theory, essentially, is that the causes of mood disorders and obsessions in humans and our pets aren’t so different — faulty genetics, dreary environments. Whether cubicle- or cage-bound, we get too little exercise; we don’t hunt, run or play enough to produce naturally mood-elevating neurochemicals. Strangely enough, I had already heard this theory — from a pharmaceutical company executive who, for obvious business reasons, didn’t want to be named. “All of the behavioral issues that we have created in ourselves, we are now creating in our pets because they live in the same unhealthy environments that we do,” he said. “That’s why there is a market for these drugs.”

Too Fat and Pregnant

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

The offices of Dr. Mark Chames, an obstetrician at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor, are outfitted with some special equipment. The blood-pressure cuffs used on patients’ arms are actually thigh cuffs, originally designed to strap around a leg. Standard scales, which measure up to 350 pounds, have been supplemented by ones that accommodate 880 pounds. Before the new scales arrived, some patients were weighed at the hospital loading dock.

After decades in which the obesity epidemic spread to every demographic group in the nation, it has also ended up here: the maternity ward. One in five women who give birth in the U.S. is obese, according to Susan Chu, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And doctors are seeing more pregnant women who are morbidly obese, weighing 400, 500, even 600 pounds. Excess weight makes pregnancy riskier: obese women are more likely to develop hypertension and diabetes, and to deliver prematurely. The need to manage their conditions, and to meet their logistical needs, is giving rise to a new medical subspecialty, what some are calling “bariatric obstetrics.” Chames, who already sees at least a dozen morbidly obese pregnant women each month, will direct his hospital’s new Center for Bariatric Obstetric Care when it opens later this summer.

The challenges of caring for these patients begin early. “We perform an anatomical survey of the fetus, but in an extremely obese woman, the ultrasound signal often can’t penetrate through all the tissue,” Chames says. He must use a vaginal probe instead. A thorough examination is especially important in obese women, Chames said, because they are at greater risk of having babies with neural-tube defects and other malformations.

Birth brings more difficulties. The fetuses of obese women are often too large to fit through the birth canal; their mothers are about twice as likely as normal-weight women to need a Caesarean section. Longer surgical instruments are required, as are extra-wide operating-room tables, reinforced to support hundreds of additional pounds.

To head off such problems, patients at the bariatric obstetric clinic at St. Louis University in Missouri are counseled not to put on any pounds at all during pregnancy, and are even encouraged to lose weight. Dr. Raul Artal, the chairman of the ob-gyn department and the clinic’s director, acknowledges that the notion of weight loss during pregnancy can be startling. “It goes against everything we were taught in medical school, everything we’ve always told our patients,” he says. Some scientists warn that we still know little about the potential dangers of this approach. Emerging evidence, however, suggests that obese women who maintain or lose weight during pregnancy experience significantly fewer complications and deliver healthier babies.

In light of these findings, Artal and other obstetricians say the official recommendations on weight gain during pregnancy — which currently advise obese women to put on at least 15 pounds — need to change. The guidelines were issued by the Institute of Medicine in 1990, a time when low-birth-weight babies, not obesity, seemed the more pressing concern. In fact, a panel of experts has begun meeting to review the recommendations, not only for the obese but for all women. Their scrutiny comes at a time when studies show that many American women put on pounds in excess of the current guidelines and keep them on after they deliver. “Pregnancy,” Artal says, “is itself a major contributor to the obesity epidemic.”

It may contribute in still another way. New research suggests that the intrauterine environment provided by an obese woman makes it more likely that the fetus will grow up to be overweight later in life. A study of 1,044 mother-child pairs published last year in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, for example, found that greater weight gain during pregnancy was associated with heavier children at age 3. Experiments with animals, in which variables can be strictly controlled, indicate that the mother’s body composition during pregnancy plays a role independent of genetic endowment or postbirth diet in predisposing offspring to obesity. The precise mechanism has yet to be established, but scientists theorize that the mother’s dietary intake, weight or circulating levels of nutrients and hormones sends a signal to the fetus, influencing its appetite control, metabolism and the way its genes are expressed.

If these theories are confirmed, we may come to view pregnancy not as a nine-month wait for the big event but as the crucible of a major health problem, obesity’s ground zero. “The reason this is so important is that the effects of excess weight during pregnancy reach into the next generation,” Susan Chu says. The maternity ward, in other words, is not just where obesity has ended up; it may be where it begins.

Annie Murphy Paul is writing a book on the effects of prenatal experience.

A couple of days ago, I sent an email to the Association of Children’s Museums asking them what they were doing to make sure that the Museums dedicated to children where acting on the food issue, making sure that healthy food was being promoted at the same level as Fast Food and Soda vending machine. As i reported some days ago, most of the museums and public institutions are selling chicken nuggets and french fries for kids menu and filling their shelves with sodas, gatorades, and sugar saturated products. Pushing healthy solutions to a often useless corner. The explanation - french fries are cheaper to produce, easier to sell, kids love it, the equation is easy. 

The Children Museum Association emailed me back saying that an initiative was already in place. Good to Grow has for mission:

Good to Grow! is the children’s museums field’s response to the growing prevalence of childhood overweight and rise in related health issues. Building on a history of leadership on social issues affecting children, children’s museums have acted to counter this crisis by taking leadership in their communities to improve the health and wellness of families through programs, exhibits, partnerships and advocacy. The Good to Grow! initiative is managed by the Association of Children’s Museums on behalf of its members.

Through Good to Grow!, children and families engage online and at children’s museums with these key concepts for healthful living:

• Eating good foods;
• Getting plenty of exercise;
• Tracking screen time (computer and TV); and
• Connecting with the outdoors.

This is great news. Now we just need to pressure all public institutions and museums, and theme parks to follow and apply those much needed guidelines and understand their own responsibility in the equation.