Monday Blog Meat

// posted January 15, 2007 by Lou Schuler

If it’s Monday, that means there’s a one-in-four chance that the kids are off school for some reason. Today it’s Martin Luther King day. Next month it’ll be Presidents’ Day. We get a break in March, but then double up in April with the spring break/Passover/Easter juggernaut.

I’m not complaining about the observance of any of those holidays in particular. I just wish the MLK/PD holidays could be combined into a single holiday. Call it Great Americans Day. We could have that holiday in early February, when the kids really need a break, as opposed to mid-January, when a holiday is a burden on parents still trying to recover from the kids’ Christmas vacation.

I don’t say that to disrespect Dr. King, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln. It’s just that in this age of historical illiteracy, it makes more sense to me to have a holiday celebrating all the great Americans and all their great achievements.

Then, in November, we use that holiday for a National Day of Voting. Call it Democracy Day, perhaps. In even-numbered years, the adults vote for congressmen, governors, and the occasional president. In odd-numbered years, the children vote in non-binding polls on the things they’d like their country to do. The point is that everyone celebrates the great individuals of our country’s history on a single day in February, and then in November everyone practices what those great Americans gave us: democracy.

Anyway, my point is that the kids are home from school today, I’m on deadline, and I have to travel later this week. So today’s blog is a link dump, without a unifying theme.

Downward-facing devil

When Rannoch Donald sent along the link to this story, his only comment was, “I’m not sure what to make of it.”

A school program to fight childhood obesity that includes yoga is drawing complaints from some Christian parents in the Quesnel area in B.C.’s Cariboo region. They say yoga is a religion, and shouldn’t be taught in public schools.

Chelsea Brears, who has two children in the school system, said her son was asked to do different poses and “to put his hands together.” Brears, a Christian, said she doesn’t want her children exposed to another religion during class time.

“It’s not fair to take prayer out, and yet they’re allowing yoga, which is religion, in our schools.”

Local rancher Audrey Cummings doesn’t believe Christian children should be doing yoga at all. “There’s God and there’s the devil, and the devil’s not a gentleman. If you give him any kind of an opening, he will take that.”

This is a new one on me. I guess there’s a line of thought in contemporary fundamentalist Christianity that insists every idea not mentioned in the Bible is a competing belief system. Evolution isn’t discussed in the Bible, so it must be a competing religion. Jesus and the Apostles didn’t practice yoga, so it must be a competing religion.

It reminds me of the Harry Potter flap, with Christians arguing the books are an endorsement of paganism and witchcraft … which of course are competing belief systems.

Personally, I think the Potter books are profoundly moral. There’s good and there’s evil. Harry, at various points, is tempted with worldly riches and social position, but shows no interest in either. He spends most of his time either being a kid or saving the world.

Granted, there’s no God in Harry’s world, even though they celebrate Christmas. The magic is controlled by mortal beings. In that sense, it’s like Star Wars. There’s The Force, and some are better at using it than others. But there’s no God or gods who can save the mortals from their own dilemmas.

What all that has to do with yoga, though, is beyond me.

Eat a steak, save your brain

According to this, low levels of LDL — the “bad” cholesterol — are linked to Parkinson’s, a secondary symptom of which is dementia. That’s right: Low levels of cholesterol are linked to a debilitating disease.

Another way to prevent dementia — learn a foreign language:

Researchers in Canada, where the official languages are English and French, examined 132 patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s disease. Those who spoke two languages experienced the onset of dementia 4.1 years later than those who didn’t, the researchers wrote in a study published in the February issue of the journal Neuropsychologia. The patients spoke a total of 25 different languages, including Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian.

Previous studies have shown that lifestyle factors such as physical activity, social involvement and education may improve overall brain health. Bilingualism may help the brain build what is called a cognitive reserve, which may provide protection against the onset of dementia, the Canadian researchers said.

“There are no pharmacological interventions that are this dramatic,” Morris Freedman, director of the Memory Clinic at Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain in Toronto, said in a statement today.

The difference in dementia onset remained even after the researchers factored in the possible influence of culture, immigration, formal education, employment and gender on the results, the study said.

Since I only speak one language, I sure hope those cholesterol-raising steaks are enough to protect me.

The height of fashion

I’ve been reading more and more about height the past few years — and blogging about it from time to time — so it’s no surprise the L.A. Times would devote a major health feature to the topic, including this:

Take the common perception that employers discriminate against short men in hiring and income. That isn’t exactly what happens. It turns out the much-touted income advantage of height is more closely linked to high school experiences than to hiring practices in the adult workplace. And when brothers are studied, one tall and one short, the two have exactly the same employment opportunities and income, regardless of height.

“There’s still a widespread perception that male success is measured in stature,” says Dalton C. Conley, chairman of the sociology department at New York University. “But in terms of total income, earnings and occupational outcomes, the male height issue is really a red herring.”

Other widely held notions about short people do hold up. Based on history, there can be no doubt that Americans like their presidents tall. And on the dating scene, women go for taller men. When it comes to romance, height is often a deal-breaker.

What I didn’t know is that some parents are giving normal, healthy kids drugs to make them taller:

Treatment with growth hormone helps some, but not all, children grow taller. Medical tests cannot predict in advance which children will respond. In general, growth hormone works best when started younger, given in higher doses and administered for longer periods of time. On average, treatment helps children grow a little taller — but not much. An analysis of studies published in 2002 in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that children with idiopathic short stature who were given growth hormone for an average of 5.3 years had an average gain of 1.6 to 2.4 inches in height over what had been predicted when they began the drug.

The added height comes at a cost of $52,634 per gained inch, according to a study in the March 2006 issue of the same journal. About 410,000 U.S. children qualify under the FDA guidelines. If they were all treated with growth hormone, the total healthcare cost would be more than $8 billion a year, wrote Dr. Leona Cuttler, pediatric endocrinologist at Rainbow Babies and Childrens Hospital in Cleveland, in a February 2004 editorial in the journal.

I look at that as a parent who gives one of his children powerful stimulant medication to help him function normally. Nobody who saw our son in school before he started taking the meds doubted that he needed them. We waited as long as we could before starting the treatment. It’s helped him in profound ways, but we still struggle with issues the drugs can’t treat. That’s fine; it’s the deal you accept when you decide to become parents.

But to take those kind of risks with children just because they’re short? And to spend that kind of money to make it happen? Holy cow.

That said, I do understand that it’s kind of disappointing to realize your kids aren’t going to be tall. My wife and I are dead-solid-average for American adults — I’m 5-10, she’s 5-4. I’m two inches shorter than my dad, and she’s about the same height as her mother.* Both of us have taller siblings, which gave us hope that our kids would be taller than us. Our son may end up being taller than me — he’s about average for his age right now, but started out above average and may end up there again — but both of our daughters remain stubbornly short for their ages.

Our siblings’ children are mostly taller than them, so in that sense we wonder what the hell we did wrong. Two of our kids figure to be smarter than us, and the third is stronger and faster and more athletic than either of us even dreamed of being when we were that age. So why did they get the short end of the stick?

I have no idea how to answer my own question, but it would never in a million years occur to us to try to change that genetic roll of the dice with powerful and potentially dangerous drugs. I hate to judge other parents’ decisions, but this is a tough one to understand.

* Actually, she’s the same height as her 65-year-old mother now. Her mother was actually 5-6 for most of her adult life, two inches taller than my wife. So each of us is two inches shorter than our same-sex parent, which is bad enough. But now our daughters may end up even shorter than my wife. Where’s regression to the mean when you really need it?

UPDATE: Water, water everywhere, but don’t let any of it out unless you want to lose the contest

Craig Ballantyne wondered how I could possibly miss this story about a 28-year-old woman who died after a water-drinking contest she’d entered for the chance to win a video-game system for her three kids.

I didn’t actually miss the story; I just found it too damned depressing to write about on a Monday morning.

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Tags: Tags: obesity

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