Two news stories today relating to students’ intake of various substances, and the people who want to control them:<\/p>\n
First, an essay in the New York Times<\/cite> about misguided anti-obesity measures in the public schools<\/a>. It’s got the requisite list of dodgy medical statistics, and some shots at the BMI as a measure of “obesity.”<\/p>\n At a higher educational level, there’s an Inside Higher Ed piece about debates over the definition of “binge drinking.”<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n The main point of this post is just to throw those links out there, but I’ll include some miscellaneous commentary below the fold.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.”… Continue reading Intake Police<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}