Two news stories today relating to students’ intake of various substances, and the people who want to control them:
First, an essay in the New York Times about misguided anti-obesity measures in the public schools. It’s got the requisite list of dodgy medical statistics, and some shots at the BMI as a measure of “obesity.”
At a higher educational level, there’s an Inside Higher Ed piece about debates over the definition of “binge drinking.” Some people think that the current definition of 4-5 drinks in a two-hour period is too restrictive, and that efforts ought to be focussed on people who go way beyond that threshold.
The main point of this post is just to throw those links out there, but I’ll include some miscellaneous commentary below the fold.
Both of these pieces really play into my pre-existing biases. The definition of “binge drinking” that started being pushed around the time I started college has always struck me as ridiculously alarmist, and my recent weight loss has thus far failed to turn me into a big diet partisan.
Honestly, I go back and forth on the whole “obesity epidemic” issue. On the one hand, I think that the use of the badly flawed BMI as the standard for determining “obesity” leads to an overestimate of the problem. When I look around campus, I see a large number of 18-21 year olds, very few of whom appear to be signficantly overweight.
Then again, this is an elite group of students, and probably not really representative. And on those occasions when I travel elsewhere (say, my recent trips to Knoxville and Las Vegas), it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we’re a nation of enormous fat asses (who can’t understand simple goddamn rules about how to behave in airports, but that’s a side issue…). I suspect that the truth is somewhere in between– we’re collectively pretty fat, but not nearly as fat as the weiught loss industry would have you believe.
As for the question of school policies to limit calorie intake by middle-schoolers, it continues to amaze me how consistently stupid school administrators can be. But it’s probably only a matter of time before some genius decides to sue a school claiming that the vending machines led directly to his Type II diabetes. Probably the only thing stopping it is that the schools don’t have enough money to be worth suing.
On the drinking thing, I think that the four-or-five drink threshold for “binge drinking” suffers from the same problem as any other prohibitionist scare tactic. Once people see that the low threshold level doesn’t cause any significant problems, any sensible advice that may have accompanied it goes out the window. It’s the same as the problem with DARE– if you tell kids that marijuana is incredibly dangerous, and will wreck their lives from the first puff, the discovery that one joint doesn’t hurt anything immediately calls into question all of the scary information you provided about cocaine and heroin and methamphetamine, too.
Alcohol scare tactics have the additional taint of hypocrisy– everybody wrings their hands over the thought of “binge drinking” on college campuses, but nobody applies the same standard to adults. As I’ve noted for years, by the standards campus officials use, most adults who drink are “binge drinkers.” A cocktail before dinner, a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, and you’re right at the threshold. Make it two cocktails before dinner, or a nightcap, and you’re on a “binge.” But nobody is concerned about thirty-year-old accountants having dinner in a restaurant.
Most times when I bring this up, people rightly point out that college students who cross the threhold rarely stop there, but go on to ten, fifteen, or twenty drinks at a time. Which is true, but if that’s the real problem, why set the threshold so low? If the behavior you’re really concerned about is the way-over-threshold stuff, stop trying to scare the more moderate drinkers with definitions of “binge” that include, well, every Friday night in my parents’ house.
Anyway, the basic point here is that I’m not really happy with the intake control approaches described in these articles. As usual, they leave me wondering how it is that public health advocates can be so incredibly dense about the ways people, particularly young people, actually behave. But I say this as someone who hosted a dinner for a rather raucous group of 19 college students last night, and heard a few stories of real binge drinking at the time…
weight loss industry
That’s the key phrase. Obscene amounts of money are being made by frightening people, playing on their insecurities and pandering to the deliberately freakish body images that the fashion industry promotes as normative. You’re better off, health-wise, to be carrying a bit of a spare tire than to be working your way through fad after fad trying to lose the padding — but there’s no way to profit from telling people they’re fine the way they are.
The formula is simple: make people feel ugly and worthless, promise that whatever crap you’re selling will fix things, get them to blame themselves instead of you and your crap when it doesn’t work, sell them more crap on the same basis.
But that’s not the whole story. There are also a significant number of people who seem psychologically invested in the virtue/vice view of weight — so invested that they reject any factors outside of that view. Most interesting is the rejection of studies that show rolling weight change results in a higher mortality rate than being constant but overweight (with a few specific conditions excepted: people with diabetes or hypertension for example.)
As for the question of school policies to limit calorie intake by middle-schoolers, it continues to amaze me how consistently stupid school administrators can be.
I’m not sure which direction you’re arguing this is (which I guess makes me stupid, as well). My views are:
1) Schools are there to turn children into properly functioning adults. Just like they should (within constitutional bounds) promote citizenship, hygiene and decorum, they should also guide students towards water and vegetables. That doesn’t mean mandatory portion control on bag lunches, just that a school isn’t a 7-11 where product selection is driven by demand.
2) Schoolchildren aren’t a market to be sold to the highest bidder the way the airport sells me to CNN. That just shouldn’t be.
3) For some reason, my generation was able to survive a school day on water fountains and 8 ounce cartons of milk. Unless there’s been some evolutionary change where people need to drink bottled or brewed beverages every 15 minutes in order to stay “hydrated”, it seems to me that water is a perfectly adequate source of “hydration”.
I’m not sure which direction you’re arguing this is (which I guess makes me stupid, as well).
No, it just makes me late for work, and insufficiently clear in my writing. Some of the policies described in the Times article sound like the work of someone who views “Harrison Bergeron” as an operations manual– the fat kids shouldn’t be allowed more than one slice of pizza, so nobody can have more than one slice of pizza, and that sort of thing. Attempting to micomanage what kids eat is a waste of resources that would be better spent on, say, halfway decent science education.
As for the question of what students should be supplied in schools, I absolutely agree that water fountains ought to be sufficient, and there’s no reason for copious junk food to be made available in schools. Of course, I also think that college-age kids ought to be able to make it through a one-hour lecture without needing to go to the bathroom, and I’m apparently wrong about that, so what do I know?
I’d say you’ve forgotten statistics. If your typical class size is 30, only one person in 30 needs to drink too much, forget to visit the toilet before class, have a medical problem, etc.
Of course, some classes are much larger than 30 – at the small (~28,000 students) university I went to, basic general ed classes that many degrees required ran to class sizes of 300+ .
On the other hand, that “binge drinking” threshold is probably too high as well. As a student, I would almost automatically drink two beers an hour – one every thirty miutes – as that was the level that slowly gave me a buzz without having to run to the bathroom all the time (the adage really is true: you don’t buy beer, you rent it). But, for party nights, first at student houses, then in someone’s dorm, we’d be doing this from perhaps eight in the evening to eight the next morning. I would certainly qualify it as “binge drinking” even though the rate was below this threshold. Rate of drink is a lousy gauge to begin with.
If you do want to be concerned about college students’ alcohol habits (and there is some reason to be for a minority of students), focus on the relevant parameters – effect of drinking, and the frequency. Do you drink enough to not walk unaided, or to the point of throwing up or becoming unconcious? Do you do that more than once a week? Is it over the course of months, not just a single party week or two? THen yes, you’re probably developing a problem there.
I have school-age child so I am pretty sympathetic to any improvement in the food offered in schools, even if some such attempts end up being misguided. Before being introduced to school cafeteria my daughter never had hotdogs, pizza, hamburger, soft drinks, etc. etc., at least not on a regular basis. Amazingly, she (and myself when I was her age) did just fine without the junk. I find it unfortunate that part of her education should include bad eating habits.
So, my stance is, the problem is not the second slice of pizza, the problem is the first…
So, my stance is, the problem is not the second slice of pizza, the problem is the first…
Well, you have to have SOME exposure to pizza. Otherwise the kids will never understand fractions!