EPIDEMICS IN THE MAKING
A Medical Practitioner’s View of Educational and Domestic Duties, and their effect on the Health and Prosperity of the Nation.
We are witnessing an “epidemic in the making”, with regard to nutrition.
The explosive increase in childhood and adult obesity, and adult diabetes is completely out of control and almost 100% due to failure of the education system.
This is not the fault of schools, but the fault of education authorities and the penny pinching of successive post world war 2 governments, of either party.
The failure of education of the 1970’s has led to a failure of parenting skills and which also denied the same “home based” educational needs, to today’s children.
We cannot blame children for choosing junk food, when that is all that they have ever experienced.
Schools cannot afford to waste their limited financial resources on food that does not get selected and eaten by the pupils.
Jamie Oliver is right, there should not be any choice, but healthy foods on school dinner menus. There was no junk food when I was at school in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It was all freshly prepared from raw materials.
The use of refined sugar is the administration of future diabetic disaster. The use of any sugar and the excessive use of foods containing high flour, or starch content is also a delayed action time bomb. Pastry, Pies, Pasties, Potato, even Pasta in larger portions, and Rice all contain far too much carbohydrate, unless the portions are kept small.
The low fat meals that are recommended to “be good to yourself” or “healthy options” etc, have simply replaced the high calorie fat content with an excess of carbohydrate.
This is just as bad as the meals they replaced.
The problem is that protein rich foods are always more expensive.
Potato, Bread, Flour and Fat rich products should always be used sparingly in our diets. Green vegetables and Proteins should make up the bulk of our food.
Dinner plates should be replaced with Side plates to restrict the portions to avoid food overload and obesity.
Teaching of cookery in schools does not need Chefs, or teachers, it simply needs a patient well motivated good home cook! Even dinner ladies could be used to teach boys as well as girls, how to prepare inexpensive wholesome home meals.
Another Epidemic in the making is Impecunity/Insolvency
At home, the lack of budgeting skills of parents, have led to the increased use of convenience and fast foods, because they are quick and mindlessly easy to dish up, but the cost is never considered by parents, who have never learnt to budget their incomes. This also has a bad effect on the affordability of their foods.
These families often end up in serious debt, often made worse by the banks encouraging them to borrow on credit cards and make purchases on payment by instalments. Some of these people should never hold credit cards. It is as dangerous as asking an alcoholic to hold an already opened bottle of whisky.
Budgeting really only requires the most basic of numeracy skills of addition and subtraction and nothing more.
Balancing outgoings to match income is all that is necessary, and to nearly everyone it is easy, but it is arithmetic exercise that is seldom, if ever, taught at schools.
Oh, they teach algebra and geometry, (none of which I have ever used in my entire working life!)
Nobody ever showed me how to match my outgoings to my income. I had to learn it for myself, in my postgraduate employment years.
Children don’t realise that they can use simple arithmetic to plan their spending.
To them, it is just more boring classwork or homework.
They should be sent out in groups to supermarkets and price up a shopping list, then return to the classroom to see what non-essential cuts they could make, to fit their prospective purchases to their “virtual” money they have been allocated.
To be able to do arithmetic, is not enough.
Children need to be shown why it is needed, what it can be used for and given plenty of practice at doing it.
In the affluent cultures of the United Kingdom and probably the USA too, poverty is caused through ignorance. Nobody needs to be poor in these societies, but education has failed them, because they do not know how to “make ends meet”.
We MUST teach our children, and some parents, how to cook and how to “make ends meet”. We should welcome parents into classrooms where they too, can probably learn new skills alongside their children. We adults are never too old to learn.
Let’s make the current generation the last of the domestically ignorant and the first of the competent parents of future generations
Everyone male and female needs to be taught at school, to prepare food from fresh materials, from the very earliest age through to school leaving age. They also need to learn to budget.
