2021: The COVID Paradox
Many people, including the news media, are under the belief that COVID-19 is permanently subsiding in the spring of 2021. This is borderline delusional. There are solid reasons why this is likely not the case. Let’s understand why and explore.
Vaccines
Yes, the vaccines are a cause for hope. Unfortunately, the design of these vaccines doesn’t warrant celebration that the virus is going away any time soon. While the vaccines may help reduce symptoms and mortality rates, the vaccines likely won’t stem the tide of the virus spread (at least not instantly). Why? We’ll need to understand the mechanism of action for these vaccines.
The vaccines have been designed to teach the body’s immune system how to respond to this virus invader, or at least the portions that do the damage. It does that by taking certain portions of the virus’s genetic makeup and have the body respond to these genetic markers as though the virus were present. However, it does this by not having the immune system take a severe response, but instead only a mild response. This teaches the body about this foreign invader without having to become infected or have severe symptoms.
That’s a great design, but it also has one humongous flaw (and several others, which I’ll circle back to). That major flaw is that it still allows the virus to infect the vaccinated person. More than this, the vaccinated person can still spread the virus to others should they become infected. While the vaccine purports to reduce the effects of the virus’s symptoms, because portions of the virus are already understood by the immune system due of the vaccine’s method of action, the vaccinated person can still become contagious and transmit the virus. This contagious transmission is one of two big flaws that threaten to undermine the vaccine’s usefulness (at least in the short term while the United States attempts to distribute the vaccines to everyone). The second being…
Vaccine Longevity
Each vaccine’s duration has been assumed to last between 9 and 12 months in duration. That means that a vaccinated person can expect reduced symptom effects (after COVID-19 infection) for between 9 and 12 months, assuming this suggested manufacturer longevity holds true. By comparison, it has been typically found that a person who survives a natural infection from COVID-19 without having been vaccinated has antibodies that last about 3 months. For natural infections, 3 months after survival of COVID-19, antibody tests may no longer find antibodies present. Whether 9-12 months for the vaccine or 3 months after a non-vaccinated COVID-19 survival, the body is likely once again capable of a full blown severity COVID-19 infection.
With that said, we have a bigger problem looming. Before I jump into the looming problem, let’s discuss what’s happening today.
Spring 2021 COVID-19 infection rates
During the spring and summer of 2020, infection rates drastically dropped after winter had passed. There are a number of reasons for this fact, but suffice it to say that the pattern we saw in 2020 we are now seeing again in 2021. States (and news media) now believe that the vaccines are the reason. However, in spring 2020 we had no vaccines available and the virus infection rate went down just as dramatically.
While I know that state officials want to believe that the vaccines are playing a big part in this reduction of cases, the real answer is that the vaccines likely aren’t contributing much to this decline at all. The reduction in 2021 is most likely due to the same reason(s) we saw in 2020, without vaccines. The vaccines may contribute a tiny bit, but logic dictates that the reduction is simply because a warmer, sunnier outdoor season is upon us. Once the spring rolls around, people are outdoors more often, instead of huddling in stores, in restaurants or in their own homes. Less indoor huddling means less mechanisms of transmission. Thus, lower infection rates. Weather may also be a factor in the reduction, such as rain, humidity and storms which may reduce COVID-19 air transmission and surface longevity. Whatever the combination of reasons, it’s clear that what happened in spring and summer of 2020 is again repeating in the spring and summer of 2021. Yet, I hear crickets for news media discussing this.
Because this is most likely a repeating pattern, the fall and winter of 2021 will again bring more infections. The question is, how many? Will the vaccine make a dent by the fall? That’s a double-edged sword. Let’s now jump into the looming problem I mentioned above.
First Vaccinations
The first person vaccinated in the US for COVID-19 was December 15, 2020. Nine (9) months from December 15th is September 15th, 2021. That means that if the antibodies have worn off by September 15th, all of those first responders, elderly and those early vaccinated will again be ripe for infection by the fall and winter of 2021… assuming they don’t receive a booster vaccination sometime in mid-to-late summer.
Looming Problem
Because of all of the above, the COVID-19 infection rate is likely to go back up to record numbers by the fall if those early vaccinated don’t receive a booster shot soon. It also means that those who received a shot in late spring or summer of 2021 are more likely to endure a COVID free fall and winter than those who received their shot in December 2020 or January 2021.
Remember, though, the vaccine doesn’t prevent virus spread. It only reduces symptoms after infection. Those who are infected, but vaccinated can still spread COVID-19 to others around them while they remain contagious. Worse, because symptoms are drastically reduced, some people might not even know they have been infected other than a runny nose, itchy eyes, a slight fever or some other easily ignored symptom. Those vaccinated could even assume a mild cold or even allergies.
What that all means is that those who are vaccinated can easily keep the spread going unknowingly, particularly to those early adopters who may lose their antibody protection as early as September, possibly even earlier.
CDC Planning and Pattern Recognition
While the CDC has been intensely focused on getting the first round of shots into people’s arms, the CDC, CNN, New York Times and all the rest have completely ignored this looming threat that is but only a few months away. Worse, the optimism of this seasonal downslope is once again tricking people into a false sense of security. We were tricked into it in 2020 and the fall of 2020 was the worst in our history. Here we are again being sucked into this trickery a second time. It seems that the United States is entirely ignorant of its own recent history repeating.
This situation is as plain and obvious as the nose on the proverbial face. Anyone who can see patterns can see this is a repeating pattern. This repeating pattern, unfortunately, has an unexpected twist: the antibodies will be subsiding in the earliest vaccine adopters by the time December hits… which means that the 2021 holiday season may shape up to see one of the worst COVID death rates on record. Not only are we entirely ignoring the downslope pattern of the spring and summer, we are ignoring the fact that the vaccine antibodies will be expiring in the earliest adopters just at the time when COVID will be ramping up transmission rates again.
Can this juggernaut be stopped?
Unknown. The vaccines don’t halt the spread, unfortunately. If all of the United States can be vaccinated (and boosted) before September, maybe. Eventually, the virus will burn itself out because every vaccinated person will have been infected and survived. Once there’s no one left to infect, the virus will cease to exist. That’s herd immunity.
However, the United States is under a ticking clock. Because the health departments, the White House and the CDC are so focused on simply getting first vaccinations completed, they are entirely forgetting about those early vaccinated whose clock is ticking down to the holiday season.
Keep in mind that being vaccinated in December 2020 or 2021 January, February, March or even April, the antibodies will not carry you through the entirety of Winter 2022. Which means that a vaccine’s effects may start waning in the middle of a new pandemic surge.
States and Reopening
Because states have decided it’s time to reopen in full, that middle seats are again open for sale on airplanes, that movie theaters, pubs and restaurants are back to 100% seating, we are opening the United States up to an even worse seasonal pandemic in fall and winter of 2021, particularly without taking into account the longevity of the vaccine. Without boosters for those who received shots in December through April, the virus will again have fully vulnerable hosts to infect by winter.
States which have chosen to reopen in full are simply feeding into this pattern and into this false sense of security. They are also setting each state up for a particularly bad holiday pandemic season.
Alarmist
Some might call this article alarmist. I disagree. I call it being a realist and being able to recognize patterns. No one can really know the longevity of a vaccinated person. We won’t know until we know. The vaccine designers can make guesses, but that’s as good as it gets. We could find that the vaccine longevity is 6-8 months. We might even find that some who’ve received the vaccine might last as long as 3-5 months, in similar form to a non-vaccinated infection survival. We’re guessing about longevity. Even I am guessing based on the numbers given by the vaccine manufacturer.
Still, a booster is a must. To be completely safe, we must assume that 9 months is the limit. Meaning, those already vaccinated will need to have a booster prior to 9 months to make sure the antibodies remain active for another 9 months. This, at a time, when most of the population hasn’t even had a first shot.
The White House
Joe Biden and team have stated they are making the pandemic response a priority. Yet, you can’t make the virus a priority when you aren’t planning for ALL eventualities… even those listed in this article. Planning to stop this virus means not only inoculating first timers, but keeping those who are already inoculated valid. I can’t even recall one single news service like CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC or any other large audience news service discussing this potential looming crisis.
Unfortunately, too many of these news services are far too optimistic and wish to bury their collective heads in the sand as if the vaccine is the end-all-be-all. That once we have a vaccine in our arms that it’s all over. Optimism has its place, but not when discussing a pandemic. A pandemic needs a realist, not an optimist. It needs someone who identifies patterns, calls them out and helps prevent that pattern from recurring. It also needs someone who understands exactly how these vaccines work and calls out gaps in when and how these vaccines might fail us.
The White House needs a better set of persons managing the pandemic instead of Dr. Fauci and the CDC. Optimists won’t stop a virus. Only doing the right things will. Unfortunately, the White House is allowing states to reopen in full without warning of these looming conditions.
Is the Pandemic Over?
While a lot of people seem to think so, I’m very cautiously optimistic. Instead, I’d rather look at all of the problems that can occur and see that unless these problems are handled before September, the fall and winter could see very bleak times again. In fact, I’m so cautiously optimistic about this, that’s why I’m writing this article. It’s easy to get caught up in this spring downslope as a sign that it’s ending. Unfortunately, we saw this same downslope in 2020 (as I stated above). Because of these repeating patterns and because of the (lack of) longevity of the vaccines, that’s exactly why I’m cautiously optimistic and exactly why I’ve written this article.
It’s too easy to get caught up in a false sense of security and then as October rolls around, we’re seeing a huge uptick in admissions to hospitals once again. I’d prefer to not see that occur, but unfortunately the United States and the expiration of the vaccines is setting us up for exactly this scenario.
Maybe I’m wrong. If I am wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that I was wrong. I’ll also be very happy if I am wrong, because that means far fewer deaths. Unfortunately, it’s not me who’s controlling these situations. It’s the vaccine makers, the state legislators, the White House, the CDC and even the news media who are making these decisions. It is these people who may be setting us up with a false sense of confidence that the virus is subsiding.
However, I don’t believe the virus is quite yet done… and it will find a hole to work its way into. The COVID-19 virus doesn’t care about human rhetoric, news programs, politics or optimism. It cares about one thing only, replication. That’s what it does. If the vaccines begin expiring just at the time when the holidays roll around, the viruses will find that weakness and exploit it. That’s what a virus does.
What can I do?
If you have already been vaccinated, you need to discuss getting a booster shot around August 2021 to reinforce your antibodies going into the fall and winter. If you have elderly loved ones, you will need to make sure they also get a booster. Remember that the vaccine doesn’t prevent infection or transmission. That means that having the vaccine, you can still bring COVID-19 home and infect those around you. If their vaccine antibodies have expired, but yours is still active, that means they could be in for a more severe infection or possibly death.
Additionally, you still need to wash your hands thoroughly before touching loved ones. You need to wear a mask. If you work in a high risk job interacting with lots of people in a public space, you will need to be cautious when you arrive at home to loved ones… taking all precautions. Precautions like washing hands, taking a shower, washing clothing immediately and wearing masks in close proximity to those who are more vulnerable.
At a workplace, you should avoid face to face contact when necessary and avoid small conference room gatherings with others. Instead, you should request your manager to adopt at-desk virtual meetings (i.e., Zoom or similar) to allow for minimal interaction and contact with other face-to-face workers. The phone is also your friend. Use it to contact workers instead of walking to their desk. If people like to swing by your desk for drop-in requests, ask them not to do this. Instead, ask them to email you or call you on the phone instead. Email and texting are additional options.
Workplace environments also tend to be petri dishes, including toxic air conditioning systems which can easily spread coughs and sneezes around the entire office. If it’s a multi-story building, the air flow handling system can carry particles from other office spaces into yours. This means you should step outside as often as you can. Get out of the building and away from a crowded work environment. Unfortunately, stepping outside probably means enduring smokers. You’ll want to avoid smokers as well, unless you smoke.
Finally, you should contact your healthcare provider to determine how to get a booster going into the fall. Without a booster of those early vaccinated, the fall of 2021 can easily turn into something worse than 2020’s death toll. A false sense of security is a very real thing. Let’s not get trapped into it again this year.
Unmasking the Vaccinated
The CDC just today (May 13, 2021) issued new guidance that the vaccinated no longer need to wear masks indoors or outdoors, nor do they need to follow distancing guidelines. On the surface, this seems like happy news. Let’s understand why it is not happy news and why it plays directly into what could be a terrible pandemic winter.
Masks do little to protect the wearer from receiving the virus. If someone without a mask coughs or sneezes, wearing a mask is of little protective value. A mask, on the other hand, prevents a cough or sneeze from traveling beyond a few inches, thus preventing spread via long and wide air transmission.
Without a mask, a sneeze can travel 8-15 feet. With a mask, a sneeze might travel just a few inches away from the person wearing the mask. Let’s apply this to those who have been vaccinated or even to those who claim to be vaccinated (more important distinction).
The CDC has opened the door to allow basically everyone to remove their masks. Why? Because there’s no way to tell who has been vaccinated and who hasn’t. There isn’t some magical instant mechanism to see who has and who has not been vaccinated. Worse, the COVID hoaxers are real. They’ve been patiently hiding behind the scenes waiting to pounce on the day when the mask mandate is lifted. Here we are. Effectively, the CDC has told everyone they can remove their masks… not just those who are vaccinated, but everyone. Since there’s no way to tell who has been vaccinated, it’s now a free-for-all.
Worse, because the vaccinated can easily spread the virus far and wide, because they can become contagious, this is the first salvo towards another much more wide and deep pandemic surge. The CDC is supposed to be the Center for Disease Control, with “control” being the operative word. Yet, here we are. The CDC’s guidelines have given the United States a free-for-all open door pass to remove masks… this at a time when only 32% of the United States population has had only one shot. Less, if you consider those who have had a full two shots and have waited through the build-up period.
The reality is, it’s way too early and too fast to be mandating mask removal. Worse, this now opens the door to massive spreading by the vaccinated to those who have yet to be vaccinated. It’s a bad situation now being made worse. Sure, the numbers are dropping, but not because of vaccinations, but because of the repeating pattern we saw in 2020. While I know the CDC believes that the vaccines are responsible, that is a mistaken, almost deluded belief. Yet, here we are.
How this all plays out is as yet unknown. However, I’d expect to see infections begin ramping up by mid-july with hospitalizations increasing all throughout August and September. By December, we’ll likely once again be so deep in the middle of deaths that the CDC will have to reverse all of this guidance and realize, too late, that the vaccines haven’t made a dent. Oh well, I guess we now get to see just how bad it can really get even with vaccines in play.
↩︎
Is the COVID-19 vaccine safe?
If you’ve watched CNN, Fox News or CNBC, you’ve probably seen a number of medical correspondents like Dr. Sanjay Gupta or Dr. Leana Wen who consult for CNN during this pandemic. Let’s explore their lack of fiduciary responsibility to the general public.
Medical Doctor or M.D.
To get a license to practice medicine, a person must not only obtain a preset amount of medical training and gain experience in the form of internships, they must also agree to the Hippocratic Oath. This oath originated with Hippocrates (born 460 bc). This oath essentially states, among other information, “First, do no harm”, however, this exact wording does not exist in the oath in its original Ionic Greek form. Instead, it has been translated with levels of interpretation necessary to be understood by an English speaking audience. One might say that the original Ionic Greek form has been altered and updated to modern society standards.
The difficulty with revisionism by third parties is that these revisions were not by the hand of Hippocrates. Regardless, the sentiment of what Hippocrates wrote still essentially remains.
With the phrasing of “First, do no harm”, this runs quite a bit counter to the COVID-19 vaccine. Let’s dive in and understand exactly why.
Mouth Piece
One thing you have to understand about the medical industry, particularly for “celebrity” medical doctors is their level of sway they have with the general public. With a brand like Dr. Sanjay Gupta, he has built his celebrity reputation on seemingly good and sound medical advice over the years. As he has so carefully built this brand, he has been careful to ensure that his messages are in keeping with his brand message and also doesn’t run counter to his medical training or, in general, the medical industry. The same can be said for Dr. Leana Wen, though her brand image is far less solidified than Dr. Gupta’s.
Unfortunately, during this pandemic, these medical “doctors” have taken an odd turn, staking their own personal brands and reputations on a rushed vaccine.
Instead, these medical correspondents, not just for CNN, but all of these news networks, have simply become talking head mouthpieces for the medical industry as a whole. While the pandemic rages and gets worse, killing ever more and more people, these mouthpiece medical practitioners sit in front of cameras spewing the rhetoric of an industry that really hasn’t proven itself to be harmless. More specifically, the pharmaceutical industry.
The Medical Cycle
The medical industry is, unfortunately, a bunch of collusive teams all working together to create a whole. I’m not here to say that each of these industries are bad in and of themselves; it’s just that when combined, they create a whole that’s not completely without “First, do no harm”. It’s very difficult to regulate disparate industries that have only minimal relationships with one another.
Below is an image that demonstrates both the collusive and parasitic nature of each of these industries. With that big $ sitting in the middle, it represents an industry that makes trillions every year. Let’s understand exactly how much money is at stake:
“How much money is in the healthcare industry? In 2018, the global healthcare sector’s revenue was $1.853 trillion, an increase of 4.5% on a year-on-year basis. When it comes to healthcare expenditures, the US tops the list, spending $10,224 per person.”
https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/healthcare-statistics/
Over $10,000 per person per year! Wow! What other industry in HISTORY makes this much money per person per year? Yeah, collusion.
What the above image says is that Hospitals rely on both Doctors and Pharma companies for their continued monetary success. Note that I didn’t include equipment manufacturers in this graph, but know that they are out there. Medical equipment manufacturing is a tertiary industry that is needed to supply all 3 of these industries with similar equipment. In fact, the equipment manufacturers are probably the only industry that are mostly outside and don’t act in collusion, but instead, they sit to the side and feed above monetary cycle. However, these equipment manufacturers also make more than their fair share of money from this industry.
Also note that the arrows flow in both directions because money flows both ways. Doctors feed the pharma companies by prescribing. In return, pharma companies grease the Doctors via kickbacks, residuals and free medicines. Hospitals pay their Doctors, in return Doctors act as sales persons for the Hospital by using their expertise and brand reputation to bring repeat business to the hospitals. Pharma and Hospital relationships are entirely obvious and money flows both ways buying and using medicines.
There’s also the research arm of this industry, but most of the drug research resides within the pharma companies. There are also the insurance companies that, while not directly part of the medical industry, act as the glue between the public and this entire industry. Without this “monetary glue” the entire medical industry would fail and couldn’t exist. Should insurance companies be included in the above? No, because they do not practice medicine in any way. They believe they should by making medical decisions based on when to cover and not cover illnesses, but they are firmly outside of that industry.
I don’t wish to digress into the scammy and unnecessary nature of the insurance industry, so I won’t. However, I may write a follow-up article to discuss just how much of a leech, a scam and an unnecessary burden is the insurance industry on pretty much every part of life. I’ll leave it at that. Let’s continue.
Industry Acceptance, Coercion and Blackmail
Doctors are practically held over a fire to keep their license. Instead of being about altruism, it ends up being about falling into the trap of someone bigger than you. A doctor’s practice is held over the fire by their license. Without a license to practice, doctors can’t make a living. It’s basically a legal form of coercion.
What that means is that unless a doctor practices social restraint and, in fact, continues to tow the industry accepted lines of thinking, the doctor may find themselves out on their ass without not only their job, but without a way to make a living. This means that a doctor is almost constantly “coerced” into towing both big pharma ideals, but in towing hospital ideals. They must make sure their opinions don’t run afoul of either of these two entities, either one of which could see to it they can’t make a living.
Either of these “big brothers” may coerce and collude to keep the doctor in line, just like a parent keeps their petulant child in line. Threats of being fired or, worse, losing their license is a strong incentive not to make waves in the industry and to tow the sometimes distasteful practices that have been tossed at their feet.
Medical Correspondents and News Channels
As we circle back around to news channels, we now begin to understand why both Dr. Gupta and Dr. Wen mostly pretend that the COVID-19 vaccine is entirely safe and effective. If they don’t do this pretending, particularly with their powerful celebrity status, this could torpedo the entire vaccine acceptance strategy (and their own personal careers).
I’m not here to say that these vaccines aren’t safe or effective, but I’m cautiously optimistic… the exact stance a medical professional should take. When Dr. Gupta got his shot on camera, I could see a fair amount of trepidation in his eyes. However, his words (and forced expressions) overrode his eye and body language. Just watch the video below and notice his wide eyed expressions closely:
What this says to me is that while he does in some way believe the safety and efficacy, he also realizes the dangers of this mostly untested vaccine. In fact, I got the distinct impression that he felt like an unwitting pawn in this situation.
Levels of Desperation
With the amount of deaths per day, the medical industry feels a tremendous amount of pressure coming from every angle. There’s pressure coming from politicians (and the President) to come up with a solution to the pandemic. There’s also internal pressures coming from pharma companies towards doctors to push their latest “vaccine” as efficacious and safe.
With this measure of not only industry pressure, there’s the level of desperation by the public into wanting a fix and wanting it yesterday. The economy is failing. Businesses are closing. Unemployment is spiking. The pandemic is taking a huge toll on our current way of life. It’s digging deep into every industry, every person and into every single aspect of our current social existence.
Because of all of these levels of desperation, pharma felt pressured to delivery something, anything. They did. The difficulty is not that pharma delivered, but what they delivered.
Prudent or Reckless?
There’s a fine line between being prudent and being reckless and sometimes it’s difficult to see when that line has been crossed. Unfortunately, desperation is never the reason to jump into something that appears to be a miracle. That miracle might, in fact, turn into hell.
The doctors claim that the medical technology used in the vaccine (messenger RNA) is something that’s been in existence for years. The difficulty is that this technology has never been used in vaccines, at least not until today. Even while the technology may have been known for years, putting it into practice is an entirely different thing.
From concept to vaccine delivery was a total of about 9 months, the time it takes to conceive a baby and deliver it. Those 9 months included a rapid clinical trial of a month or two at most.
Most drugs that hit the market have had years of clinical trials (i.e., plural… more than one). This vaccine had a total of one clinical trial. Sure, the amount of participants was large, but it was still only one clinical trial. In fact, the trial excluded certain at-risk groups of individuals, such as pregnant mothers and other at-risk people. In effect, the trial utilized only healthy adults without preexisting risk conditions. Unfortunately, that leaves the vaccine at risk of causing harm “in the wild” because it won’t just be put into the arms of those non-risky individuals. It will be inserted into the arms of pregnant women, children, asthma sufferers, COPD sufferers and all manner of people with diseases of the mind and body.
In short, the quick trial skipped key tests… test that may negatively impact those at-risk folks who were not represented during the clinical trial. It’s risky and it’s disturbing.
Let’s come back to Dr. Gupta and Dr. Wen on CNN.
When these correspondents appear on CNN, their banter about the vaccine is one-note. It’s almost as if what they’re saying is entirely scripted by the pharmaceutical companies and not of their own words. I’ve yet to hear ANY cautionary warnings or verbal trepidation from either of these “doctors”. As I said, “Scripted”.
It all seems so contrived and canned as if to “reassure” the public how safe and efficacious the vaccine is.
Exercise Caution, Restraint and Critical Thinking
While these TV news doctors continually spout almost 100% positive rhetoric that these vaccines are perfectly safe, I’m not convinced… yet. I’m firmly still in the “wait and see” camp. The clinical trial was way too quick, provided way too convenient results and hasn’t in any way been challenged by doctors who should be challenging how the trial was handled.
Instead of challenging anything about the trial, these doctors are being shown given a literal shot in the arm (see above). Even politicians are doing this.
Is the vaccine efficacious AND safe?
The theory behind the vaccine formulation has merit, to be sure. It forces the body to create and replicate antibodies against alleged innocuous portions of the virus. The difficulty is that the mRNA is a foreign invader. It’s something the body hasn’t seen before. The body’s immune response may be somewhat calculated, but there’s no way to know long term effects on the body.
Could the vaccine lead to disruption in key functioning of other body functions either now or in the future? These are thing we can’t know. Because the clinical trial wasn’t able to test any portion of it long term, we simply have no idea what long term effects the vaccine may have on the body’s systems. We simply don’t know what the vaccine may cause 1, 2, 5 or 10 years later.
Compared to getting COVID-19, it’s a toss-up. COVID-19 may also produce these same effects in the future. We can’t know what we haven’t tested… and that’s exactly where we are with the vaccine. Injecting portions of this foreign invader into the body with a minimal tested trial, we simply don’t know long term effects.
We aren’t even sure just how efficacious this vaccine technology will be against the virus in the future. We might find that even after the second dose that the vaccine’s effects wear off 6 months later. The vaccine’s effects may not even be effective against future mutated strains of COVID-19. Again, because the clinical trials couldn’t test long term ANYTHING, we simply have no information. This is the reason why critical thinking is important. We must use our brains and realize that without proper testing, this vaccine may not be all of what it is claimed to be.
Not only might it not be effective, it might cause more side effects than giving us the immunity it was intended.
Wait and See
If you’re thinking, “I work on the front line so I need it”, think twice. That’s desperation talking, not critical thinking. You can’t jump on board simply because you fear getting the virus. You must take the vaccine because it has proven itself useful, not because someone says that it is. Believing hearsay is the quickest way to problems.
I’m not saying the vaccine isn’t efficacious. What I am saying is that the vaccine hasn’t yet proven itself efficacious other than under very specific and controlled circumstances. The world doesn’t work like a controlled clinical trial. There are far too many unknowns when giving shots to people who are not under controlled conditions. This falls under the safety factor. These unknown safety issues can lead people to injury and death. These are possible consequences from these vaccines. It seems that the clinical trial was mostly focused on efficacy over safety. That’s not to say that safety wasn’t a factor in the trial, but it wasn’t the primary motivation in its formulation.
Injecting an unknown substance into your body always has risks, from infection, to allergic reactions to unforeseen consequences, such as Bell’s Palsy, injury or death. We simply can’t know what we don’t know.
Money
Let’s come back to that big $ hanging out in that image above. Money is how the world works. No one does something out of 100% altruistic intent. No, money is how the world-goes-round. Big pharma companies aren’t in it for the altruism. They are in it for how much money they can make. While those who receive the shot may not pay for it, make sure you understand that pharma companies are well paid for producing these vaccines. Without money, these vaccines wouldn’t have been made. It is about how much money pharma can make off of it with as few negative consequences as possible.
Unfortunately, drugs aren’t without side effects. Pharma companies are well aware of that fact. Therefore, for every drug they introduce, they have not only insurance, but also lawyers to work through injury and death lawsuits.
With the pandemic, we really don’t know if suing Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca will even be allowed. Because of the pandemic, the government might give these pharma companies complete immunity from prosecution or lawsuits. What that means is that these pharma companies might have been given carte blanche by the government to produce whatever they want with impunity… no matter how damaging it may become.
Future Vaccines
There’s also a danger in the manufacturing process. As the first batch of vaccines might be somewhat effective, future produced vaccines might not fare as well. As the manufacturers find cheaper materials, faster processes and more efficient manufacturing, that can cause errors to creep into the formulation. That could also mean that vaccines made in February might be less efficacious and more dangerous than those produced in December.
We simply don’t know what Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca might introduce, alter or change in a few months or even next week. It’s extremely hard for me to jump right into this “vaccine is safe” argument and state that the vaccines are 100% anything. There are way too many unknowns to make blanket statements about this vaccine.
For this reason, I’m firmly in the wait and see group. I want to allow others to have first dibs at the vaccines to see how well they fare and what possible outcomes might result from their experiences. After I see how that works out for them, I can then look at those side effects and make a better informed choice.
Right now, we simply don’t know enough. We are flying mostly blind. We need to be able to see exactly how bad the vaccine’s effects may get to judge it against what we know about COVID-19. Only then can we make an informed choice. You don’t want to jump into the vaccine only to find yourself in the hospital clinging to life because the vaccine had a severe consequence on your body. COVID-19 is a bad disease, but the vaccine’s long term consequences could ultimately be worse. We simply don’t know… which is why waiting at least some time is prudent.
Vaccination Confusion
As we move into the vaccination process, comes confusion and, in some cases, sabotage. The confusion stems from many different reasons and from different directions. The first confusion is the two dose schedule. Some people will assume one dose is enough and skip the second dose. Worse, some patients may not be told that there is a second dose (or will forget due to memory issues) and will end up skipping the second dose not knowing it is required to receive full effect from the vaccine.
The second problem stems from multiple vaccines from different manufacturers. As of this article, there exist two approved vaccines in the United States, including the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. There are three more are on the horizon including AstraZeneca, Janssen and Novavax. Because each of these vaccines have different storage requirements and likely different administration schedules, this puts the onus of which virus vaccine you receive on you. If you get a first dose of the vaccine, but you don’t remember which manufacturer’s vaccine you received a few weeks later, you won’t know which follow up dose to get. That leads to…
If you get the Pfizer vaccine initially… then for the second required dose, you can’t switch and get the Moderna vaccine. The two don’t work together. Because each vaccine has a different mechanism of action and formulation, the vaccines are not interchangeable from the first to second doses. You must get the same vaccine for the second dose that you got in the first dose. Some people will conflate this, take the wrong second dose, assume they are protected and then get COVID-19.
The next problem is vaccine administration practices and vaccine authenticity. A hospital has already gotten mixed up and administered the wrong medicine instead of the vaccine. While this may seem to be a clinical error, it goes way deeper than that. As administrators of smaller and smaller hospitals and medical clinics become responsible for buying vaccines to administer to their patients, inevitably these mix-ups will become intentional. For example, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some clinics are intentionally injecting plain sterile water into the arms of individuals instead of the authentic vaccine. It could be that the clinic simply can’t get a supply or it could be the administrator is unscrupulous and is selling the vaccines out the back door for real money while injecting patients with fake product.
Speaking of intentionally doing things, we have already seen a hospital worker allegedly intentionally sabotage a supply of the vaccine by taking it out of the fridge overnight. That hospital worker has since been fired (and now arrested), according to many sources, but all of the above is just the tip of this unsettling iceberg.
Counterfeit Product
This last problem, keeping in mind that this is not an exhaustive list, is grey and black market product. As vaccines slip out the back door of hospitals and medical facilities, unscrupulous scalpers may attempt to sell and inject this grey and black market product into people who are way, way down the list. These products might range from authentic to plain sterile water to dangerous drugs. You don’t know what you’ll receive when you go the grey market route. Keep in mind that even reputable hospitals might even fall prey to injecting grey market or counterfeit vaccines into people. There is a wide range of ways that all of this can manifest.
Right now, we’re at the very start of this process. By the end, we’ll have heard of most of the above, if not a lot more shysters, scams and hucksters trying to make a quick buck off of the vaccine.
For safety precautions, always ask to watch the medical worker pull the vaccine from a properly labeled vial. If you can request them to show you the vial beforehand so you can read the label, all the better. Make sure that the label appears genuine and that the product appears authentic. While fakes can sometimes appear better than a genuine product, in a hospital medical setting, one would always hope that everything dispensed is entirely genuine. If you’re visiting a urgent care clinic or a small medical facility, like a doctor’s office, make sure that you ask when they received the vaccine, how old it is and if it was properly stored.
If you’re injected with an improperly stored vaccine or, worse, a fake product, it might do nothing at all or it might have negative health consequences. So, to the best of your ability, request to inspect that the vaccine is authentic and ask all of the right questions about storage and handling. If your doctor suddenly says they have vaccine doses at a time when hospitals are unable to obtain them, this should be a huge red flag. A doctor’s office may have gotten counterfeit product from a scammer.
Scammers abound and these are people who are more than willing to take advantage of small doctor’s offices for their own scamming benefits. They will pretend to be medicine distributors only to sell the office cheap and fake products. By the time the doctor’s office realizes and potentially injects some patients, it may be too late.
When considering your turn at the vaccine, be exceedingly cautious as the vaccinations progress into the future. Scammers WILL find ways to scam this entire process if not outright sabotage it. You must be diligent and ask the right question before they jab that hypodermic needle into your arm.
↩︎
The rise and danger of private fat loss infomercials
Recently, a number of seemingly trustworthy individuals have arisen from who-knows-where to put out very long form infomercials (around 40-50 minutes or longer), which ultimately espouse some kind of fat loss product. The dangers with these infomercial claims lie within. Let’s explore.
Dr. Amy Lee
While I despise calling out specific individual web hucksters, here’s one who claims to be an M.D. or medical doctor. While she may have an M.D. degree (though, I can’t easily confirm this), she is clearly misinforming the public with her long-form video.
In her exceedingly long form video, she calls out 3 harmful foods and then proceeds to describe why these foods are so harmful, in her opinion. The ‘in her opinion’ is exactly why this video is so dangerous to watch.
Let’s closely examine one of these three “damaging” ingredients, high fructose corn syrup, otherwise known as HFCS.
While I’m not going to state that eating HFCS is good for you in any way… and it isn’t, Dr. Lee is sadly and completely misinformed with this substance. She claims that HFCS is treated as an unknown substance by the brain and body. This claim is entirely and 100% patently false. The body knows exactly what fructose is and how to process it. It is NOT “unknown” to the body or the brain. Fructose is a simple sugar (unless bound to glucose as a complex sugar), one of many forms of sugars available in foods. High Fructose Corn Syrup is just as it sounds… a syrup that contains a high amounts of fructose. How it gets that high level concentration of fructose is in how this syrup is produced.
Fructose is a naturally occurring sugar in nature and occurs in all fruits in combination with sucrose and glucose (other forms of sugars). The body knows exactly how to process and break down sucrose, lactose, maltose, maltodextrin and, yes, even fructose. The digestive tract has enzymes ready to break these substances down into glucose for use by the body. Glucose is sometimes also called dextrose. To be fair, fructose (when not bound to glucose) is considered a simple sugar which is broken down in the liver, which is the reason it can cause liver problems if eaten to excess (more on this below).
The body cannot utilize complex sugars (sugars with multiple molecules bound together). It must break these into the simplest sugar, glucose. The body utilizes enzymes for this process. Only glucose can be used by the body within the blood stream.
Dr. Lee is entirely misinformed and is then misinforming you when you watch her video. She doesn’t seem to understand that fructose is not an “unknown” substance. It is very much a known substance to the body.
Let’s get down to the reason why HFCS is bad for the body. High fructose corn syrup is ultimately processed by the liver (at least the fructose portion) in ways that can lead to liver damage and liver disease. It is this liver damage which leads to further reactions by the body, such as insulin problems leading to obesity which can lead to diabetes. It is this liver damage and potentially other organ damage from consumption of high levels of fructose that can lead to these problems.
The body can tolerate levels of fructose consumed from fruits. One orange may contain ~12g of sugar with about 3.2g of that being fructose (about 27% of all of the sugar in that orange). One can of soda may contain up to 36g of sugar when sweetened with HFCS and may contain at least 18g of fructose (half of all sugars in that can). It would take consuming 5.6 oranges to consume the same amount of fructose in one can of HFCS sweetened soda. If you consume 5 cans of soda in a day, you’ve consumed the same amount of fructose as eating at least 28 oranges during that day. Who eats 28 oranges a day?
While it’s easy to consume 5 cans of HFCS soda, it is indeed much more difficult to consume 28 oranges in one day. That doesn’t take into account additional sources of HFCS that can also be found in ketchup, bread, cereal, yogurt (yes, that fruit at the bottom may contain HFCS), jelly / jams, peanut butter, candies (Snickers, Mars Bars, etc), salad dressing, juices, cereal bars, baked goods (cookies, cakes, pies) and the list goes on. Just read the ingredient label to see if a specific food contains HFCS. If it does, you might want to steer clear.
However, Dr. Lee suggests HFCS interferes with hormones, particularly the hormone that regulates hunger. It might do this, but more likely it interferes with liver function which leads to other problems within the body. The liver is designed to weed out toxins from the body, but if HFCS is interfering with or blocking that process, toxins may be getting into the body to interfere with the hormones, the pancreas and other organs in the body. It may not be HFCS directly causing these issues, but instead the fructose overload causes the organs of the body to fail their functions, such as the liver and pancreas.
Additionally, overloading the body with sugar is never a good thing, no matter the type. Fructose is but one sugar. Keep in mind that HFCS contains approximately 42% fructose with the remaining 68% made up of sucrose and glucose. It’s not necessarily just the fructose doing the damage here. The remaining 68% of sugar is still acting on the body in ways that may be triggering other problems. Sure, fructose is there, but it’s entirely disingenuous to ignore the remaining 68% of sugars in HFCS as if it weren’t there and as if weren’t potentially problematic.
When you’re watching videos like hers, use caution and do some research to find out if what’s she’s saying makes any sense at all. Don’t blindly follow a person like her without doing research. Doctors may seem intelligent because of that degree hanging on their wall, but it’s clear that many don’t do their home work. Dr. Lee clearly hasn’t been doing her homework.
“I’m Full” trigger
Further, Dr. Lee suggests blame on HFCS for interfering with the “I’m Full” signal after eating. It’s not just fructose that triggers that response in the body. Any sugar (or even high starch food) does this. Consuming massive amounts of sugar or starch in any form automatically interferes with the “I’m Full” sensation. Why? Because consuming sugar triggers this response early, but it doesn’t last.
After the consumed sugar, which is entirely devoid of vitamins and minerals, is done being processed, the body realizes it hasn’t received any nutrition. From that sugar intake, the body has simply received a quick energy boost. That’s great if you need that energy boost to run or perform exercise. That sugar is used by the muscles to function. However, that sugar, once processed and done, leaves the body wanting actual sustenance. It wants vitamins and minerals that were not in that sugar. So, the body triggers the hunger sensation to force you to eat food again hoping that you’ll eat something meaningful this time. Something that satisfies the body’s need for vitamins and minerals.
This is why when you eat a meal that’s healthy and nutritious, you feel satisfied for far longer than when you consume a can of soda or a candy bar. A soda can satisfies the hunger craving for a very short time… perhaps 30 minutes. After that, the body then asks for food again, the actual chewable kind.
Processed Food vs Whole Natural Food
Here’s where we come to the crux of the problem. The body was designed to process whole natural foods, not highly processed, concocted food items from industrial machines.
By pulverizing ingredients into tiny, but concentrated powders, then reconstituting them into baked goods, pies, cakes and candies, the body wasn’t designed to handle foods with these levels of ingredient concentrations. The body was designed to handle and process naturally occurring concentrations as they were grown in nature. When these items are pulverized, powdered and highly concentrated, then reconstituted, the body doesn’t handle these overly concentrated foodstuffs well at all. Oh, it will process much of this highly concentrated food, but it will also just as easily put it on your hips.
This is why cakes (and breads), which rely on concentrated processed flour and concentrated processed sugars aren’t always considered the healthiest of food choices. Healthy foods come from nature, directly from nature. We all know that. Foods that don’t come from nature and which are manmade are typically considered less healthy food options. Though, bread has its place when consumed in moderation.
Olean
Here’s where Dr. Lee’s video takes a huge weird turn. Now she begins harping on a product that is not only not a carbohydrate (which she clearly states it is), it’s almost non-existent in the market. Olean was a type of oil or fat. Dr. Lee is clearly misinformed about this product. It’s also exactly when I rolled my eyes and turned her video off as pointless.
Olean or Olestra was a type of alternative oil that was briefly introduced into the market for commercial use. Some potato chip makers adopted this new oil in hopes that it would be a miracle baking product. Unfortunately, this oil product turned into a literal nightmare for potato chip producers and any other company that chose to use it in baked goods.
This oil is not at all digestible by the body. Most oils are fully digestible as fat. Olean isn’t. Whenever it is consumed within foods, the body excretes this product 100% through the bowels. The trouble is, at the time, it caused many problems with many people. Because this “new” oil was touted as a low fat alternative, people bought and ate these chips with all of the careless abandon you might imagine.
The trouble is, eating foods to this level of excess, particularly this food ingredient, led to many problems including anal leakage and major bouts of explosive diarrhea. Because too many people chose to eat Olean-fried potato chips to excess, this is how Olean got such a bad wrap. As a result and because of all of the complaints, about 6 months after introduction, potato chip makers stopped using this oil completely. This all happened in the span of about 6-9 months in… get this, 1996.
This product hasn’t been widely used in commercial food products in over 20+ years. Yes, that’s 20+ years! Apparently, though, Olestra may still be in limited use in certain products in very small quantities and it may go unlabeled due to its small quantities. Why Dr. Lee has decided to dredge up a 20+ year old oil food product that is effectively no longer on the market to harp on as though it were still being sold in products today, I have no idea. Sure, it was a bad product at the time, but it was off the market in around 6-9 months after introduction and hasn’t been used in any substantial way since!
Again, Dr. Lee ends up way off on a tangent that has no practical value in the fat loss or nutrition industry today. There are basically no food products today that contain Olestra / Olean. Even at the time, you couldn’t purchase this oil for use at home. The only oils available on the shelves then were those that are still available today, like peanut, olive, safflower, corn, vegetable and, yes, even Canola (introduced in 1978). While coconut, avocado and olive oils were burgeoning during the 90s, they have since become much more ubiquitous and commonly available in regular supermarkets. Olean / Olestra was never made available to consumers, only to commercial food producers. I know from first hand experience. I attempted to buy Olean in supermarkets, but it never appeared on the supermarket shelf during its short time on the market.
History of Products
It’s important to understand the history of food products that a would-be huckster uses to entice you to buy into whatever thing they end up hawking. Once you know the history of a product like Olean, you can easily spot when someone is trying to pull the wool over your eyes with their lies.
Doctor or not, she has a fiduciary responsibility to understand what’s she’s saying. If she’s trying to pull some bullshit on you, you need to be able to recognize that quickly and easily.
Hucksters Abound
This isn’t the only private web site infomercial like this. I’ve seen several others about this length in duration. Typically, they’re hosted by either a seeming professional, like a doctor or they’re hosted by a 20something male or female bodybuilder in near perfect shape.
It’s these tricks that video producers use to lead you in and then foist a bunch of garbage on you to make you think the host is intelligent and knows what the hell they’re saying. In fact, if you dig deep, you find that it’s a script written by someone who just threw together random unrelated “facts” (which usually aren’t facts at all) and then use that rhetoric to entice you into some supplement product that they plan to sell you for $40 to $100 per bottle.
Once you get to the end of the video, if you even last that long, I urge you to take the name of product and Google it. Look and see if that same product is being sold on Amazon and, if so, look at Amazon’s reviews closely. Most times, you’ll find the product doesn’t work. Sometimes these products don’t make it onto Amazon by name. Instead, find the ingredients and look for a similar product on Amazon containing the same ingredients and look for those reviews.
You might be surprised to find that people using a supplement with those same exact ingredients have found it not to do anything other than make a hole in your wallet. It’s wise to be cautious when watching these purported self-proclaimed authorities when the whole goal is to hawk some product at the end.
Fat Loss
If you’re really intent on losing fat, you’ll need to do three basic things and none of these rely on taking “magic” supplements:
- Choose whole natural foods that will fill you up and leave you satisfied
- Eat less foods throughout the day (i.e., monitor your calorie intake)
- Eat smaller, but more frequent meals throughout the day.
Number one keeps your hunger in check. You can keep your mind occupied on other tasks for longer and have the energy needed to maintain those tasks.
Number two reduces the amount of calories you eat. By eating properly following number one, number two may sort itself out naturally. But, you may still need to count your calories for a period of time to be sure you remain on track.
Number three keeps your metabolism at full steam throughout the day. If you have a slow metabolism, you will need to increase the frequency of meals, but reduce their size. Around 250 calories per meal is enough. This keeps the furnace lit and the body’s metabolism high enough to burn fat.
The best type of food to eat is the food you make yourself. Why? Because you know exactly what goes into that food. You made it, you added the ingredients, you chose what went into it. When you eat out at restaurants, you have no idea what they choose to add to the foods. Could they use Olestra? Doubtful, but it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. Unlike store bought foods which require Nutrition Facts labels, restaurants are under no such obligations to tell you exactly what goes into their menu items. If you want your best option for fat loss, you need to control the foods you eat and you can only do that by making your meals yourself at home from whole fresh ingredients.
The final thing that you need, which isn’t in the list… is to know your resting metabolism. This is important to know what calorie level you need to remain in fat burning mode. Additionally, you may need to stop drinking alcohol of any kind for a period of time. Alcohol consumption may halt fat loss and put a stopper on it for several days. If you’re intent on losing fat, you’ll need to make the necessary dietary changes to ensure your body remains in fat loss mode. That only happens by eating under your resting metabolic rate (RMR) and by eating in an appropriate way with healthy nutritious meals.
Typically, an average adult’s RMR is somewhere between 1700 and 2000 calories per day. You can get your RMR measured at many gyms and fitness centers. Your doctor or a nutritionist may also have access to such a device. Knowing your resting metabolic rate is key to understanding how much food is too much or too little per day.
↩︎
Will there be a second COVID wave?
This seems to be a burning question on everyone’s mind. Unfortunately, the information on this front will not be good news. Let’s explore.
CDC and WHO Guidelines
Both the Center’s for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have fairly stringent guidance as to how the world should reopen during this pandemic. Even the White House has come up with its own 3 step plan. Unfortunately, the world’s leaders are far too anxious for their own good. I fully understand why. The economy is tanking, unemployment is now at an all-time high, and many business are on the verge of collapse.
With that level of pressure, any political leader would be anxious to want to reopen. The problem with reopening is not the reopening itself. It’s the second wave that’s looming. We’ve already seen, numerous times (here, here, here and here) that people can’t be trusted nor do they have any discipline to stay home, when given an inch. The only way this can happen is strictly by forced closure. It’s unfortunate that people feel the need to defy closure orders and safety advice, but here we are.
When restaurants open, when bars open, when stores open fully, when beaches and parks open, throngs will (emphasis WILL) head out in droves. It’s not a matter of IF it’s a matter of WHEN. There are many reasons for this defiance, but many who turn out believe that the whole COVID-19 problem is either a hoax or isn’t serious… or they are self-centered and simply believe it does not apply to them.
Whatever their deluded mentally deranged reasons, they head out in droves… and they will again. This is why reopening will lead to a second wave.
Second Wave Deaths and Reopening
Because many people are fed up with staying indoors at home, tired of being around their kids day in and out and eating the same home cooked meals, this sows the seeds for wave 2. After all, many people erroneously and foolishly believe, “It doesn’t apply to me. I’m healthy. I won’t get it.” Additionally, many also justify their actions by, “I’m healthy, why should I stay home?”
It is for all of these irrational thoughts that people flock to flea markets, beaches and other large gatherings… New York City Blue Angels flyover anyone? The point is, people cannot be trusted to stay home. If a crowd gathering event opens, people will come. It’s inevitable.
The point is, reopening of ANY sort will automatically trigger, in many people’s deranged minds, that it’s now okay to go hang out with the masses ignoring social distancing, ignoring face masks and ignoring any guidelines whatsoever. It’s clear, as I’ve shown above, there’s no way any early reopening ends well for the public. The public is not at all well disciplined enough for that.
Double Whammy
The bigger problem is the double whammy effect. People are fed up at staying home. Any chance they have to get their kids back into school or head back into the office, they’re going to take it like a kid grabbing candy from a stranger. That anxiousness will be on overdrive. It will override many sensibilities of health. People will be grasping at ANY straws that lead them into a feeling of comfort and safety when none actually exists.
At this level of desperation, people will begin congregating together in masses simply because the government leaders have relaxed the requirements even just a little. For many, “A little ain’t enough.” In fact, the other adage that applies is, “Give an inch and they’ll take a mile.” And yes, people WILL most definitely take that mile, and then some. Many people have no self-control at all. They’re social creatures and must live in the moment with other people around, regardless of their own safety or the safety of others (if they are infected).
It’s not a matter of IF, it’s a matter of WHEN. When is coming and very, very soon. With both the White House and the state governors feeling the pinch, not only are they feeling that pinch with their own state economies, they are getting the pinch from businesses too. It’s just a matter of time before the states, counties and cities succumb to these pressures and reopen out of desperation to placate businesses, but not to satisfy public safety.
Is COVID-19 subsiding?
In short, no. It is not subsiding. Distancing measures and stay-at-home orders have slowed its progress, but all of that will be entirely undone by reopening. Once people can travel, shop, stay at hotels, visit beaches and generally bunch up together like lemmings, COVID-19 will not only break out again, it will do so with a vengeance the second time around.
It won’t be a sparse set of cases in specific locales, it will be all over the country. Lifting stay-at-home orders is tantamount to ordering a second wave on a platter. In fact, COVID-19 may very well arrive on a literal platter for some.
Let’s consider the infection rate in the US. There are around 330 million people in the US. If 3.3 million people have been infected, so far, that means the United States has only seen a 1% infection rate. That means that 99% of the population of the United States remains susceptible to infection.
While some of those 1% who’ve already been infected may be out and about feeling confident about their ability to withstand another COVID infection, 99% have no immunity at all (assuming a past survivor has any immunity). That means that the vast majority of those who are out and about will be people who’ve never had COVID-19. It will be these people who will strike up the second wave.
Brutal
While the first wave was somewhat brutal with potentially up to 3.3 million infected and around 80,000 deaths (and counting), this death rate will skyrocket come reopening day.
Just like 1918’s pandemic, people are now being lulled into a false sense of security because the numbers are dropping. Many justify that the lower numbers are because the virus is not intense, but that simply isn’t true. The virus is not only highly contagious, it’s extremely virulent and, to many, deadly. This is why the second wave will be brutal.
Because of the callous disregard for safety, people will chance their own lives in an effort to get back to some semblance of normal social interactions with their friends, co-workers, clubs, gyms and faith. It’s a chance that will end up in death.
For this reason, the second wave will be even less forgiving than the first. Partly, this will be because of the carelessness of individuals, but partly it’s because this virus has mutated 12 times in 3 months. The virus strain that has been going around Europe has made it onto US soil and believe to be what’s causing most of NY’s cases. It is this strain that may even see even those who have even survived an earlier strain back in bed again, let alone the remaining 99% who’ve never been infected who now get sick.
Hard Lessons and Death Statistics
Death is never a lesson that people should have to learn. Unfortunately, it is a lesson that many are learning, at least via their surviving loved ones. Even seeing the White House is not immune to close colleagues becoming infected, it proves just how easily transmissible this virus really is. If the White House can’t keep it out of their doors, then no one can.
Unfortunately, I believe we are now firmly following down the same path as the 1918 Pandemic which struck and killed somewhere between 20-50 million people worldwide. Yes, you read that correctly: 20-50 million people. The first wave of COVID-19 will seem like small potatoes next to the next wave that’s coming… and coming, it is.
Protecting Yourself
Unfortunately, many of us need to work. At the same, we need to protect ourselves. Many business owners / executives are not amenable to people working from home. For this reason, they may mandate people back into the office earlier than is safe. This is likely to be the first salvo for the virus. Workplaces are communal environments. There’s no way you can avoid becoming infected in such a communal environment. Worse, many rented office spaces utilize recirculated air. These systems can pose a risk to everyone in the building. It only takes one COVID infected individual to cough, sneeze or otherwise expel their bodily fluids and some portion of the building can become infected. This is the reason that people in one part of the building can become infected by others in that same building, but without having any personal contact.
Closed recirculated ventilation systems and other communal office spaces can see to the transmission of COVID-19 across individuals in buildings. You might even get infected by performing something as simple as using the copy machine or drinking from the water fountain or water cooler or touching the faucet handle. Though, transmission through the ventilation system is still a big problem in many, many commercial building structures.
As a personal example, I worked in a 6 story building for 5 years. In that time, I’d had maybe 2 colds the entire time I worked there. These illnesses were within the first year. The remaining years I got sick maybe once. I moved on from that business and hired into another company that rented office space in a 16 story building. I worked on the 11th floor. In the first year that I worked there, I’d had several colds, the flu and an extremely long bout of bronchitis. That building’s A/C system was incredibly bad and seemed to circulate air not only from our floor, but apparently it also circulated air between multiple floors through a common shaft.
This ventilation system left everyone in the building vulnerable to sickness. I’ve never been sick that often in any other business where I’d ever worked. This building was so poorly engineered and because the company encouraged sickness in the office via its exceedingly poor sick leave policy, I had considered leaving the company just from this alone. Even when I attempted such things as social distancing, avoiding the kitchen, bringing my own food, washing hands often and staying at my desk as much as possible, none of it helped. I still got sick too often. There was truly “something in the air”. I finally left that company and I’ve not been sick since. That building was just one big petri dish.
Sick Leave Policies
The whole building situation was made worse by, you guessed it, HR’s sick leave policies. Many corporate sick leave policies are less than ideal. For example, some businesses choose to gang up sick time onto paid time off (PTO). This is a bad, bad idea.
This means that your allotment of PTO must cover for all out of the office situations, including when you’re sick. This means you have to use up precious PTO to be at home nursing a cold or the flu. Not many people are willing to give up their PTO (i.e., their vacations) to be at home sick. Hence, people arrived into the office sick and worked sick at their desks. This crappy sick leave policy actually encouraged people to come to the office while contagious, thus infecting everyone around them. This company also took no steps to send people home if they appeared to be sick.
Companies which choose to separate PTO from sick days off tend to have less problems with people working sick at the office. The company where I worked prior to this poorly ventilated building company had an “unlimited” sick time policy. Keep in mind that “unlimited” isn’t truly unlimited. What that means is that if you’re sick, stay home and get well and take however many days is needed to get better. However, if you’re at home sick often, your job is in jeopardy. This meant that as long as you were truly sick and your boss can see it (or hear it), staying home is an option. Although, even though you’re at home, that doesn’t mean you’re not working. While you have claimed a sick day, you could still be called to work on projects or issues while in the throes of the flu. While an “unlimited” sick time policy is novel, it still has limits and requires manager approval every time you’re sick. Getting this time off can be tricky with many managers.
I’d prefer companies give realistic hard set amounts of sick time off per year. Just define an amount (5 days per year) and hold us to it. Because it’s hard sick time, you don’t need approvals. Just use it when you need it. You will need to inform your boss that you’re at home sick to avoid “no show” problems, but you can use that sick time when you need it. If you run out of the allotted amount of sick days, you may need to consider disability leave or PTO instead. That’s a separate issue from ganging up sick time onto PTO up front, which is not a good idea and encourages the wrong behavior.
COVID and Corporations
Corporations are difficult slow boats. What I mean is that trying to get stick-in-the-mud executives to change corporate standards to help reduce or eliminate sickness in the office can be a real challenge. Human Resource staff might have a better time at steering that slow barge than those of us not in HR. The difficulty is, many executives don’t really care. They want butts in the office. They don’t care about people being sick. In fact, many executives don’t care about the welfare of their employees specifically. That’s left up to the HR team to handle. Many times, the HR team operates benefits from the cost perspective. If it costs too much, it won’t get implemented. This can leave situations like the above, where sick time is ganged up on PTO time. Yes, the HR team came up with that idea and implemented it.
Unfortunately, the costs outweigh the fact that such a policy encourages people to horde their PTO time at all costs. That means seeing people at their desks wheezing, sneezing, coughing, with runny noses and contagious with the flu. Staff simply won’t give up their vacation days to stay at home sick. They value that summer Hawaii trip way more. In fact, many of these people may even show up to work sick facetiously in an attempt to “get back” at the rest of the office for its asinine sick time policy. They are willing to let their co-workers, boss and other office staff become sick just to fulfill a vendetta against a perceived corporate injustice. Yes, this does happen.
COVID won’t be different
With many corporations, they can be exceedingly slow barges that simply can’t or won’t course correct their corporate culture and policies for something like COVID. Some might, but many won’t. If it’s going to cost the corporation even more money in benefits, then you can bet it won’t get implemented. This means that such antiquated sick time policies, such as the one stated above, will continue to be enforced in a post-COVID world.
Some corporations do legitimately care for their staff. Other companies really don’t give a damn. Only you can review your corporate policies to see if your company is trying to make positive changes with COVID or not.
Unfortunately, many corporate policy changes are simply for show. What I mean is that corporations appear to make policy changes simply to get free press from the industry. However, internally, these corporate changes are mere window dressing. This means that the policies remain exactly identical as before. What’s stated to the outside is not what’s being practiced on the inside. It’s more about making the company look good than it is about that company actually being sincere. There are plenty of companies that follow this asinine example. Yours may even be one of them.
Ultimately, what this means for COVID is more and faster infection rates. Corporations are itching to get their offices open with employees back at their desks so they can continue to sell and make money. It’s all about the money. Unfortunately, the money motivation can remove motivation from keeping employees healthy. In fact, many corporations see employees as disposable commodities. If a position becomes vacant, they believe they can fill it almost instantly. In an employer’s market, that might be true. In an employee’s market, that’s absolutely false.
Economic Impact and Employer’s Market
Here’s where we are. Because employers have furloughed or laid off millions of workers due to temporary closure, it is now back to an employer’s market. That means that any employer who is now hiring has an unfair advantage. This means the employer can demand less wages, poorer working conditions, longer hours, less benefits, more dedication with less rewards and on and on. Because people are now firmly out of work, this means employers who have positions to hire hold the upper hand.
While once we had days where employers were bending over backwards to get new talent in the door, we now have the reverse situation where there’s too much talent looking for work. This means that employers can write bad sick time policies forcing employees to use their PTO as sick time… or even worse, reduce PTO days.
As a result of the poor economy, we have now firmly moved back to an employer’s market where they can treat their staff with all of the careless disregard they so rightfully wish. That can only last for so long, but it’s here for now. The problem is, COVID can easily infect not only staff in the office, but the executives. Unfortunately, we’re likely to see most executives board themselves into their offices and never come out to see anyone. That assumes that many executives choose to even come into the office at all. Many executives may not even show up and, instead, choose to work from home. While those executives practice stay-at-home, they firmly will not allow their staff to do so. It’s a, “Do as I say, not as I do” situation. Unfortunately, these truly one-sided executive privilege situations occur with much more frequency in high unemployment markets, just as we face in 2020.
Worse, these callous self-centered greedy executives will treat their bottom end employees as entirely disposable. Because of the high unemployment rate, this gives them the opportunity to treat employees poorly while tossing them aside with frequency and impunity. If a few of their employees die to COVID, they don’t really care. This also means that COVID will spread with all of the careless abandon it needs to usher in wave 2. These poor corporate decisions will also be one of the primary reasons why wave 2 starts, though it won’t be the only reason why it continues to propagate.
That will be thanks to public transportation, beach gatherings, public gatherings, shopping in stores, restaurants and so on. All of the standard social fare that everyone has become accustomed to every day and on weekends, these will be the method of propagation of COVID-19. It may start in the office, but it will transmit through “open channels”. Though, as I said, it will also transmit due to poorly conceived office spaces combined with executives treating staff as dispensable in a high unemployment market. If someone in a corporation gets COVID, executives won’t necessarily take swift action. They might disinfect the workplace, they might not. It all depends on the corporation. Many corporations, as I said, don’t really give a damn about their employees’ health.
Worse, far too many executives are sociopaths. They really don’t care one wit about anyone other than themselves. They put on a good face, but behind that is someone who doesn’t actually care. If someone gets COVID, they don’t really care as long as it doesn’t impact them directly. As long as they continue to practice stay-at-home, they won’t be affected. If half of their office staff gets COVID, they’ll simply fire them and get more staff. However, that might only work for so long until they have a huge lawsuit pending against them for improper staff treatment (and a number of COVID deaths). OSHA won’t take too kindly to sociopath executives playing games with their office staff in this callous and reckless way.
By the time any kind of litigation is forthcoming, the damage will already have been done. This means that COVID-19 will be firmly partway through its second much larger and deadlier wave. Those executives might be fired or the company might have to shut down, but not before the damage to the population has been done.
Second Wave Part II
Don’t kid yourself. The second wave is coming. As soon as the politicians decide that we need to reopen the US (and, indeed, the world) is the day the seeds for the second wave are planted. It only takes 14-28 days to incubate COVID-19. Within that period of time, we’ll see a ramping up, again, of the number of cases. Within 30 days, assuming the politicians keep the economy open, the cases will skyrocket. Unfortunately, we’re presently in the lull just before the storm. That 14-28 days will seem like everything is status-quo. That we’ve gone back to our older days. People will be out and about, happy, content and oblivious. All the while, COVID-19 is transmitting between many people. You can’t see it transmitted. You can’t feel it. It’s there, but it’s invisible. The only way to know is 1) getting tested or 2) getting sick.
Because we, as a nation, seem to have opted to go with #2 as a primary means of detection, this means that we have to wait until its far too late before understanding just how badly the whole situation is screwed up. The numbers of dead in wave 2 will far exceed the numbers of dead we’ve seen so far.
Grim Statistics
Here we come to how this may all pay out. It’s also the place where we need to review numbers. If numbers aren’t your thing, then it’s a good thing I saved the best for last. Let’s get going.
My guestimate is somewhere between 2% – 5% of the nation dead assuming an infection rate totalling at least 50% of the population (165 million).
At a 2% death rate at a 50% infection rate, that’s 3.3 million dead… and that’s just for starters. If the death rate reaches a whopping 5% (likely once hospitals reach capacity), that’s 8.25 million people dead. Those numbers are still less than the total number of dead from the 1918 pandemic at 20-50 million dead worldwide, though it’s much higher than the ~700,000 dead from the 1918 pandemic in the US. Keep in mind that in 1918, the population of the US was around 103.2 million people or roughly 1/3 of the population in 2020. Extrapolating the death rate from 1918 using 2020’s population of 330 million, the 1918 pandemic would have claimed 2.1 million people in the US alone. With COVID, we’re no where near that death rate yet. We’ve got a long way to go, which is why reopening now WILL only lead to a much more severe wave 2 death rate.
The sheer fact that we may not yet have even reached a 1% US population infection rate should be wildly concerning. We’ll need to reach an 85-95% infection rate across the entire US population before COVID-19 is considered “done”. We’re no where near those numbers. Opening the economy at this moment invites many, many more infections. You don’t even want to consider about the numbers of dead once we reach an 85% US population infection rate. Though, we’re quickly heading down this road.
Steps to Reopening
Unfortunately, we can’t stop the tide that is now turning. Politicians are going to do what they’re in the process of doing. If that’s reopen the economy, then that’s it. Come hell or high water, we’re reopening. That means that any published steps for how to safely achieve that reopening are mere suggestions. There’s no way that any leader will follow every step to the letter. Indeed, we’re likely to see some state governors open their entire state back up simply out of fear of political reprisal. Some deluded people have even called for recall of some governors. Governors are doing what they are doing to protect that state’s citizens, not because, as some people have put it, that those governors are “drunk with power”. It’s not a Kool-Aid issue. It’s an issue of public safety.
Though, some people don’t seem to get this. I get it. They’re out of work. They have no income. It’s difficult to make ends meet. I get that wholeheartedly. The problem is, what are we opening back up to if we do it now?
If “you” want to go to back to work face-to-face with the throngs of the COVID-bearing public, go for it. If you get COVID-19 and perish, that’s your choice. That’s a Darwinian Award level choice. While it’s fine to make such decisions for yourself, don’t drag other people into your quagmire along with you. If you have a death wish, that’s yours alone. Leave other people’s lives, health, safety and livelihoods out of it. If we choose to stay out of the public, that’s our choices. Don’t attempt make choices for or force choices on others. We all can make choices for ourselves. If the rest of the country chooses not to have a death wish, you must respect that choice.
If your employer chooses not to have that death wish, you must also respect their choice. If your company wants you back to work tomorrow and you’re willing, that’s also your choice. If your company wants you back at work and you’d prefer to stay-at-home as ordered, that’s a choice companies also need to respect without ramifications. If you can safely and effectively work from home, then a company needs to allow that choice. So long as stay-at-home orders remain, companies should be required to abide by those orders regardless of whether their business is now allowed to reopen.
Corporations and small businesses alike will do whatever is most cost effective to operate their business, rather than operate in the public’s best interest. The difficulty, with both business and government alike, is having a death toll approaching 3 million is catastrophic to any economy. If it gets to has high as 8 million (this is entirely possible), the economy will be way beyond problematic. It is, unfortunately, where we are presently heading with the early reopening that both the President and the governors are pushing hard, regardless of their documented steps.
↩︎
Causes of Obesity in the US
There have been many people espousing different ideas around the obesity problem within the US. One I’ve recently come across is Dr. V, otherwise known as Duc C Vuong. He has a YouTube channel and attempts to impart the reason for obesity. I have other thoughts. Let’s explore.
Medical Doctor Credentials
One of the problems I have with MDs espousing their opinions, particularly on platforms like YouTube is that far too many viewers believe this advice wholeheartedly simply because this person has a degree. They don’t rationally think for themselves and use their own critical thinking skills to understand which parts of his extolling are valid and which parts are fallacy. Opinions are always opinions no matter from whom they originate.
When it comes to obesity, there are many thought rationales. One just needs to peruse the virtual book shelves at Amazon to see how many weight loss books there are, each with differing opinions on the topic. Let me dissect his special brand of thought and then talk about what I believe to be the actual reason for obesity.
In all of this, let’s keep in mind one tenet: KISS or Keep It Simple Stupid. It’s a phrase that means don’t go looking for complex answers when there’s a much simpler explanation staring you in the face.
Dr. V’s explanations are too long winded, complex and give too much credit to psychological pressures. Psychological pressures do play a part in the role of obesity, but not so substantially that you can’t get around it.
Psychology and Weight Loss
Dr. V explains that “Circle of Influence” is a big factor in obesity. What does he mean by “Circle of Influence”. These friendships are all psychological. The circle encompasses whom you choose to befriend and hang around with socially. These people can influence your social interactions and, more specifically, your eating behaviors.
This is true, but to a point. Unfortunately, Dr. V tends to give way too much credit to this aspect of peer pressure than is due. You don’t just bumble your way through life being towed along by your friends. Everyone wants to be known as a unique individual with individual likes and tastes. Yes, we are influenced by what our friends like, dislike and sometimes eat. However, we do also have our own tastes, including taste in food. Just because a friend likes sushi doesn’t mean I must also like it.
If peer pressure were the complete answer to obesity, then cutting off your friends should cause weight loss. Does it? No. Your eating habits are your own and you are responsible for how you eat. You may be influenced in some small way by what your friends are eating or the peer pressure they apply to you, but even when you are alone you’re still going to eat at your favorite restaurants in the same quantities. Is that psychological pressure? No, that’s personal habit.
In other words, blaming your obesity on your “circle of influence” is like blaming your friends for all of your problems. You can’t do this. Everyone must take responsibility for their own actions, including what they put in their mouths. No one forces you to shove food in your mouth. You do that all on your own. You can make smart choices or you can make not-so-smart choices.
Restaurant Influence on Obesity
With that said, there is one level of influence that does matter and is much larger than “circle of influence”… and it definitely matters a great deal. This influence is a restaurant menu. When you sit down to eat at a restaurant, we tend to assume the plates are mostly “set in stone”. What I mean by that is that the entrée comes to you as-is. A big part of this issue is that you have to buy the entrée sight-unseen. This means that you won’t really know how much food that plate holds is until the plate arrives from the kitchen.
This also means that it’s difficult to know how much food you will be consuming until you see the plate. Additionally, the pressure to send perfectly good plates of food back to the kitchen is also almost never considered. Most people won’t do this because they realize it will probably be thrown away and no one wants to see that happen to perfectly good food. Anyway, who would send a plate back to the kitchen because the portion size is “too big”? No one.
This is a ultimately a psychological pressure that goes back to our parents. Parents chide us for not eating all of the food on our plates. We continue to live with this stigma into adulthood. It stays with us every time we sit down to eat a meal. Restaurants prey on that. They give us excessively large plates of food knowing that patrons will typically eat every bite. This leads to obesity.
On the flip side, though, restaurants also do this because of cost to enjoyment ratio. Restaurants want to get maximum bank out of every plate served. Offering up larger portion sizes equates to a happier customer and larger per plate fees. Restaurants have no desire to decrease portion sizes to be inline with the recommended daily intake. Instead, they wish to line their banks with lots of greenbacks. To do that, they have to provide a good “bang for the buck”, so to speak. That’s exactly what restaurants do, but at the cost of serving way too much food and contributing to obesity.
This means that restaurant goers need to wise up to this ploy. When you eat at a restaurant, it’s important to understand that the restaurant is planning to serve you way too much food. Way, way too much food. This is something everyone needs to understand. It doesn’t matter if it’s McDonald’s, Chili’s or Olive Garden. All restaurants do it (except one type which I’ll talk about in a moment). McDonald’s (and other fast food) does it through its “meal deals”. Chili’s and Olive Garden play this game through oversized sized plates and sometimes all-you-can-eat breadsticks or salad.
In recent years, some states have forced restaurants to fork over the estimated calorie content of its meals, sides and drinks. This has helped some, but some restaurants have realized the need to pull this information off of the main menu and instead offer a separate calorie menu that you must ask to see. They don’t leave this calorie version on the table. Though some restaurants do have it on the menu (particularly restaurants that have a “health conscious” bent and some fast food places), many choose not to do this and instead begrudgingly offer up a separate menu… a menu that, unfortunately, can be exceedingly difficult to read with extremely small text. Worse, in these separate menu restaurants, if you ask for one, you may be greeted with “Sorry, I can’t find one”… leaving you high and dry to know how much food you’re actually eating.
Five Star Restaurants
The exception to the above for portion sizes can be five star rated restaurants. Instead of serving you excessive sized meals, these expensive 5-star rated restaurant chefs tend to serve significantly smaller portion sizes. This sizing occurs for a number reasons. The first reason is cost. Most five star restaurants purchase their foods fresh almost every day. The second reason for the smaller portion is to keep the quality high. Higher quality comes from trimming and tossing away undesirable portions leaving only the “prettiest” plate. What you consume at a five star restaurant is almost assuredly the highest quality ingredients possible (and the best looking). These ingredients are usually hand selected by the chef. Though, sometimes they are delivered from higher quality grocers. The third reason is variety and rarity. You can only find the more exotic type meats on these 5-star menu, such as pheasant, quail and even Japanese Wagyu.
With all of that said above and when you order a meal at a five star restaurant, you’ll receive a smaller portion size more which is appropriate with the calorie levels you might find on the government’s daily intake requirements. This isn’t always true, however. Many five star restaurants utilize heavy cream, wine and other high calorie, high fat ingredients to flavor the meal. This can add hidden calories. As for presentation, you can usually find your five star meal stacked as layers in the center of an excessively large plate or bowl. Potatoes on bottom, then veggies and then protein on top with some kind of fresh garnish. It’s neatly stacked on the plate to make it presentable and pretty. Some chefs plate their meals with other layouts around the plate, but stacking is a common chef presentation. It looks good and it keeps the rest of the plate neat and tidy.
That’s not to say that all five star restaurant portions are small, but many are. The unfortunate problem with these restaurants is that you’re likely to pay at least $100 per plate or more for your meal. While in some cases these expensive meals may offer a more healthy food choice, it is way too pricey to eat every day for most people. It’s also not a feasible meal choice option, especially considering most of the best restaurants sport long wait lists. Even at these restaurnts, you must be careful because hidden calories can still impart more calories than you might expect.
Bars and Drinks
Here’s a second area where there is zero nutritional oversight by the government. Alcoholic beverage creators are not under ANY obligation to add nutrition labeling. In this day and age where the “Nutrition Facts” label is extremely important in understanding what we are eating, it is incredibly disheartening to find that wine, beer and spirit manufacturers STILL aren’t required to place a “Nutrition Facts” panel onto their products.
How is it that the alcohol industry has remained so unregulated for nutrition when it is one of the biggest sources of unlabeled calories? Let’s explore to better understand these unlabeled calories.
Red Wine
A standard bottle of Red Wine contains 750ml or a little over 25oz. You can get five standard glasses of wine from a 750ml bottle of wine. We’re talking a standard sized pour here, which is approximately 5 ounces. A 5 ounce glass of red wine has between 120 and 130 calories per glass. If you consume 2 glasses, you’ve consumed 240-260 extra calories on top of anything else you’ve consumed.
White Wine
White wines fare a little better at around 115 calories per 5 ounces.
Beer
A 12 ounce beer can contains 154 calories. A pint glass of draft ale (the standard size served in bars) is 16oz (473ml) and contains 196 calories. Drinking two, three or four of these adds up fast.
Liquor
A shot of alcohol, about 1.5oz (44ml), ranges between 96 and 115 calories depending on the specific hard spirit. This category doesn’t include specialty liqueurs like Bailey’s Irish Creme, any flavor of Schnapps, Kalúha, Midori or any other sweetened alcoholic liqueurs. That’s next.
Liqueur
A shot of Bailey’s Irish Creme (44ml) contains around 147 calories approaching the number of calories in a 12oz (355ml) can of beer. A shot of Midori, however, contains only 80 calories (less than a shot of many liquors). The range for liqueur is somewhere between 80 and well over 147 calories per shot! These sweet alcoholic beverages can really land on the waistline fast.
Whiskey (or Whisky depending on your part of the world)
One shot of whiskey (86 proof) contains around 105 calories. From livestrong.com:
If your whiskey or vodka is 40 percent alcohol, or labeled as 80 proof, you’ll get less than 100 calories from the 14 grams of alcohol in a 1.5-ounce shot. Having the same amount of 45 percent whiskey or vodka, which is known as 90 proof, will give you 110 calories from the nearly 16 grams of alcohol. A 50 percent whiskey or vodka liquor, or 100 proof, has closer to 125 calories from nearly 18 grams of alcohol, in that same 1.5-ounce shot.
As the proof increases, so too do the calories. If you’re unsure of the proof of what you’re drinking at a bar, ask the bartender to allow you read the bottle or ask them for the proof.
Alcohol’s Double Whammy
Unfortunately, alcoholic beverages are also a double-whammy food. If you consume fat along side your wine, that fat (and some of the alcohol) will be taken up much easier (and faster) into adipose tissue due to the presence of the alcohol itself. From vice.com:
First, less than five percent of the alcohol you drink is converted into fat. However, that doesn’t mean it has no effect on weight gain. Rather, alcohol reduces the amount of fat your body burns for energy. Just two drinks of vodka and diet lemonade has been shown to cut whole body lipid oxidation—a measure of how much fat your body is burning—by more than 70 percent.
This means that the consumption of alcohol while on a diet can not only lead to halting your fat loss progress, it can actually lead to a net gain in fat with regular binging. This goes with the consumption of any alcohol, not just wine.
Alcohol changes the metabolism due to the alcohol itself and how alcohol is metabolized within the body. You’ll want to carefully consider ingesting alcohol with your meals (or even in general) if you’re concerned about controlling your weight. Overindulgence with alcohol can halt weight loss and actually put on pounds.
Restaurants and Bars
These two institutions in every day life are primarily what’s leading to obesity within America. Eating out and heading to bars are definitely everyday conveniences. One nourishes us (sometimes too much) and the other lets us blot out our everyday pains with the warm and fuzzy of alcohol, making us happy (and loopy).
Both together are what’s leading America to obesity. It’s not brain surgery or rocket science to understand this American dilemma. No one wants to blame restaurants or bars for this, but that’s exactly what we must do. They are leading American’s down the primrose path to obesity.
Psychology of Obesity
Let’s swing back around to psychology and peer pressure. It’s easy to succumb to your friend’s pressures to knock back Jello shots or chug some beer. However, you can say, “No”. If these people are truly your friends, they’ll let it slide. If they won’t, then maybe it’s time to consider new friends.
You don’t have to listen to your friends. You don’t have to chug beer, do shots or do anything you don’t want to do. Eating at restaurants isn’t always necessary and even when you do you can still make smart choices. When at the drive-thru, you don’t need to buy meal deals. If you’re at Olive Garden, ask them not to bring bread or even their bottomless salad. When you order your meal, buy from a menu that lists calories. Choose portion sizes that make sense for what you need to eat to live… keeping firmly in mind the 2000-2200 calorie recommended daily intake.
Home Cooking
Better, create and eat your meals at home. Instead of having to navigate those not-so-great menu choices and attempt to request custom meals from restaurants, eat at home. You can then make choices that fit with your body’s needs. You don’t need to make meals the size of Olive Garden. You can half (or less) the portion size and make smaller meals. This saves on your home food costs and it also means you’re eating healthier, smaller meals.
On the flip side, if you’re consuming a whole chicken in one meal, that’s way too much food. A whole cooked chicken contains between 1190 and 1400 calories for an entire single chicken. If you add onto that bread, mac and cheese, green beans and mashed potatoes, you can easily exceed 2000 calories in a single meal! That doesn’t even take into account the calories in a desert or drinks.
That’s not to say that rotisserie chicken is an unhealthy food, but it IS when eaten to excess. The key to health and maintaining a healthy body weight is eating in moderation… or, more specifically, within the US Government’s daily intake guidelines of around 2000 calories per day.
Isn’t Chinese Food Healthier?
Unfortunately, no. Many Americanized Chinese foods are breaded and fried, making them even less healthy food choices than rotisserie chicken. Breading and frying adds unnecessary calories that you should avoid. However, it is fine to indulge occasionally with these kinds of foods as a treat. Just don’t make them your everyday staple meals.
With Chinese food cooked using mostly veggies and some protein, you’ll need to determine the health of this food for yourself. If it appears to be mostly veggies with limited fat and a reasonable serving of protein, it might be an okay choice. If you want to wok cook at home yourself, you can choose your own oils, veggies and proteins in whatever quantities you are comfortable.
However, even Chinese restaurants fall into the trap of overly large portion sizes when serving to the table. Many Chinese food places even have buffets. Let’s jump right into this one…
Buffets
Chinese restaurants aren’t the only places that choose to offer large food buffet bars. You can find these in many different styles of food. For your weight and your health, you’ll want to completely avoid buffet restaurants. Not only are they not a great deal, they will most definitely inflate your waistline and they can also make you sick.
Buffet restaurants encourage overeating in all of the wrong ways. For consumers to feel that they’ve gotten their money’s worth for a $22 per person fee, you’re going to have to eat what you feel is $22 worth of food. That’s the wrong motivation for eating. You eat to satisfy hunger, not to satisfy your wallet or your guilt for spending.
Buyers remorse is heavy at buffet restaurants. Avoid this guilt entirely. If you must eat out, eat at a restaurant that hands you a menu and makes your food fresh in a kitchen.
There are other more serious health reasons for avoiding buffets to which I discuss in this past Randocity article. Suffice it to say that during winter months, avoiding buffet restaurants is your smartest and healthiest choice. Far too many people touch the serving spoons used to dish up the foods. Unless you plan to wash your hands immediately after plating your food, you’re simply asking to contract the Flu or a Cold virus or even COVID-19.
Restaurant Cleanliness
Ignoring the sanitary issues with buffets mentioned above, it’s way too easy when eating out to contract seasonal viruses even by just sitting at a restaurant table and ordering from a menu. After all, many restaurants barely even clean tables between patrons. When they do wipe down a table, they use a towel that has likely not been sanitized between uses. Think about this for a moment. Worse, when they do choose to wipe down a table, it’s just enough to get the crumbs and sticky off of it. That cloth simply moves the viruses around that were already there (or on the towel). They rarely, if ever, wipe down the seating or other surfaces around the table. Menus fare even worse. Menus are almost never sanitized.
Worse, restaurants with bars have different cleaning routines when it comes to bar glasses. While restaurants do have commercial dishwashers in the kitchen, they take way too long to run a cycle. When bars become low on glassware, the bartenders use a three water bath wash on glasses (soapy water, bleach water, rinse water). The theory is that germs can’t live through this. However, this relies on proper ratios of soap to water and bleach to water. Many restaurants don’t adhere to proper ratios in their zeal to get glasses washed quickly.
This means that your glassware can be contaminated with colds or viruses from a previous use when washed by a bartender. Why is this a problem if you’re not ordering from a bar? Because restaurants which have a bar usually have waitstaff order all drinks from the bartender for speed. This means that even though you didn’t order anything from the bar, you are likely being served in glassware cleaned by the bartender rather than from glassware washed by the dishwasher in the kitchen. This is particularly true of a restaurant during peak hours. If you’ve ever gotten a glass with lipstick on it, this is why. Nasty, right?
While getting sick at a restaurant doesn’t necessarily contribute to obesity directly, it calls out why restaurants aren’t the healthiest places to eat… even above their overly large portion sizes.
Psychology Revisited
Choosing to make your own food at home is really the only choice to reduce obesity. Of course, you also have to make the smart choice. You need to also understand the US Government’s daily recommended guidelines. From the health.gov’s What it is and What it is not information about the Dietary Guidelines:
The main purpose of the Dietary Guidelines is to inform the development of Federal food, nutrition, and health policies and programs. The primary audiences are policymakers, as well as nutrition and health professionals, not the general public.
The difficulty with this “not the general public” statement is that while the USDA and other government institutions try to enforce these guidelines on businesses by setting up such mechanisms as the Nutrition Facts panel on most food products, it has failed to impress the value of these guidelines on actual American consumers. Policymakers don’t care if their constituents become obese. They’re not going to even make obesity a talking point. That leaves only nutrition and health professionals covered. These people are typically only consulted on an ‘as needed’ basis and usually for pay. That leaves the American people in a substantial vacuum for general nutrition advice. Indeed, without this information, there is no advice at all.
Yet, if you read the guidelines, they do offer solid, constructive advice, but they have chosen not to target the general public with this information? How insane is this? Because of this, restaurants, bars and even grocery providers can run amok providing little, if any actual food guidance. It is this policy that leads all other industries by the hand. Yet, this leading hand doesn’t actually lead. It just throws the information out there without anything or anyone on the other side listening.
You can’t teach people how to eat when this information isn’t targeted towards the correct audience.
Schools
This situation get worse before it gets better. Schools simply don’t teach children proper food and nutrition choices. Some schools have limited student access to poorer food choices such as candy bars, soda, chips and deserts. That’s more about preventing those food choices than explaining how these foods can be used in a proper diet. It’s easier to withhold the foods rather than explain proper food choices.
Worse, many public schools don’t even offer nutrition programs as part of the curriculum. Sure, they offer home economics, but these classes don’t impart nutrition. They impart the knowledge of how to operate a home, including cooking.
Schools, in fact, also play a large part in America’s obesity. This is partly because of the lack of curriculum, but also because of bad cafeteria food choices during lunch. School lunches can be some of the worst teachers of food choices. Instead of teaching children the proper way to consume food and teach a child the proper relationship with food, they teach children to eat their poorly conceived cafeteria food choices in 15 minutes or less, by feeding them poor quality nutrition. Pizza and Salisbury Steak aren’t great nutritional choices.
If schools aren’t there to teach a children a proper relationship with food, then who is? Clearly, the parents won’t do this at home because they naturally assume the school is doing this. Yet, schools don’t do this either. So, in effect, no one teaches children the value of nutrition and proper food choices.
Even when attending college, this situation doesn’t improve. I don’t know of many universities that require nutrition classes as part of a generalized degree program. Certain health degrees (kinesiology) may require such nutrition classes as part of that degree, but degrees outside of health programs almost never require this. This further contributes to obesity.
Compounded Information Creates Obesity
All of the above compounds to create a situation where people become obese without understanding why. We’re not taught by our parents or by any schools about how to handle our diets. We’re left to fend for ourselves. This firmly allows psychological peer pressure to take hold and influence bad food choices, but more than that, restaurants and bars are also to blame. People are led astray by restaurants because of their large portion sizes. Many of us begin to believe that the portion sizes served by restaurants are actually the correct food sizes. Instead, we are being taught improperly.
Still, we must all assume the consequences of our own decisions. Only we can feed ourselves. Only we can stop the insanity, as Susan Powter once said. While her delivery of this nutrition information was way over the top, her message was no less valid. We must choose to change ourselves. We must choose to change our relationship with food. We must choose to say, “No” when an 1800 calorie plate is dropped in front of us. We must read food packages with a critical eye. We must understand when manufacturers are trying to pull the wool over our eyes with their silly portion sizes on “Nutrition Facts”.
This doesn’t mean you can’t eat a candy bar, eat a piece of cake or drink a beer occasionally. But, these should be only occasional treats eaten no more often than once a week. Less, if possible.
Food Lifestyle Changes
More than this, we must learn how to change our relationship with food. We must eat to satisfy, not until stuffed. There is a difference. We’re not turkeys being prepped for Thanksgiving meals. We’re people who need nutrition to sustain our energy levels.
To that end, to lose the weight and gain a healthy waistline, this must start in the kitchen, not in the gym. You can’t lose weight by running on a treadmill if you eat more calories than you burn from running. Exercise improves the body’s circulatory system, but it cannot lose weight unless you have a calorie deficit in the body.
This only occurs when you have the proper intake of food. In fact, you can restrict your food intake and still lose weight without entering a gym. The body still burns calories by sitting in a chair typing on a computer. However, the body burns less calories than when running on a treadmill.
Here’s a chron.com article that illustrates how exercise can fail weight loss efforts:
In one hour a 160-pound person can burn 204 calories walking at 2 mph and 314 calories with walking at 3.5 mph. … A 160-pound person can burn 606 calories by running at a 5 mph pace or 861 calories by running at an 8 mph pace for one hour.
Let’s examine the above closely. While this information describes a 160 pound person example, this weight isn’t the norm in today’s world. Even thought this article chooses to ignore the obesity issue and further illustrates its point with an impossibly low weight for most people, this information is no less important to understand. An hour of jogging at 5 mph burns ONLY 606 calories. That’s approximately HALF of the amount of calories in Chili’s Molten Chocolate Cake desert which has a whopping 1160 calories. Even if you increase the exertion to an 8 mph pace, at the increased 861 calories burned, you still burn way less than Chili’s chocolate cake desert!
If you visit Chili’s and eat a meal including that cake desert, you’re still taking in more calories than you’ve burned in exercise. This example is exactly why you can’t rely on cardio exercises to make up for those extra calories you consumed at a restaurant. You would have to double or even triple the amount of gym effort to come close to burning enough calories to justify eating that desert. This is why so many people become disenchanted with gyms and why gym workouts don’t seem to work. It’s because people assume exercise burns way more calories per hour than it actually does. This is why the next section is more important… and it also shows you how you can skip this gym fallacy.
Weight Loss Begins in the Kitchen
Randocity has already written an extensive article on this very topic. I urge you to read this article if you’re interested in this one. What I will say here, in short, is that your relationship to food begins in the kitchen, not in the gym. You can’t lose weight at the gym unless you’ve gotten your food intake under control.
Even fitness centers themselves do not impress the importance of this when looking to sign up new members. They want to teach you the importance of supplements, pills and their equipment… basically, everything that they sell in their store. They want you to buy their junk, not to learn how to manage your weight. Even personal trainers are not versed in this. They will teach you how to do cardio, run you through quick condensed workouts and utilize other techniques, but they will not at all examine your food intake. In fact, none of them really want to talk about this when at the gym. You are firmly left to your own food devices.
Not once when I had a personal trainer did they ask me to supply them with what I was eating regularly. It’s more about making you buy new supplements and gear, but they offer nothing to ensure you’re meeting your weight goals through proper food choices.
The point here is that you can’t rely on fitness businesses that rely on taking your money. You must, instead, rely on yourself and your own accumulated knowledge. You must be curious to learn how the body works, how it burns food and how it gains weight. Once you understand these body functions can you make the proper association with food, understand food choices and buy and consume the proper amounts of food to lose weight and/or maintain your current weight.
Until you make the choice to invest time into understanding your health, you can’t make this choice. No one is going to do this for you. No, not even the government (see above). The government seeks to regulate business and income, not make sure its citizens are healthy. That’s crystal clear. You must help you to succeed. You must choose not to put that fried chicken in your mouth. You must choose to eat foods in the proper amounts. What you choose to eat daily is really up to you as long as you keep the caloric intake at the proper level. You don’t want to eat 2000 calories of nothing but Oreo cookies. This is where you need to be more smart about consuming foods in moderation.
Bariatric Surgery
No, you don’t need a lap band. You don’t need to have your intestines shortened. You don’t need your stomach stapled. You can lose weight by eating properly. The only thing that bariatric surgery does is FORCE you to eat less. The entire point to these procedures is to force you to reduce the amounts of food to be consumed and processed at a single meal. This is exactly the same as eating less. You don’t need a procedure to force you to eat less. You can do this on your own.
You just need to make up your mind towards this goal. In fact, making the choice without surgery means you can maintain it. Surgery means that you will eventually slip back to your old ways. These surgical techniques are temporary until you stretch out the stomach or intestines and which allows you to go back to eating large quantities again. Your body will work around the procedure eventually making it impossible to remain being forced to eat less forever.
If you make the concerted choice to stop eating as much and begin making healthier food choices on your own, you can keep the weight off on a permanent basis. Surgery is a temporary fix unless you also make the choice to also eat less even when that surgery’s temporary nature wears off (and it will). Many people don’t understand the temporary aspect of bariatric surgery.
Overall
In life, we have choices. That’s really all we have in life. The ability to make choices for ourselves. That’s the freedom we own. We can buy and wear the clothes we want. We can eat the foods we want. We can drive the car we like. These are some of the choices that we get in life.
Food choices only seem complicated because everyone makes it appear hard. It’s not hard at all once you have the goal number in your head. That goal number is 2000-2200 calories. Stick to that number and you can maintain your weight. Below this number and you can lose weight. It’s actually one of the simplest things to understand about the body.
Sure, you can blame your friends, you can blame restaurants and you can even blame the government for your weight. And yes, they do play a part in it. However, it is you and your food choices that matter. You can choose to lose the weight. You can choose to do the right thing for your body. It all starts in the kitchen… not in the gym. The gym makes you the body more fit, the kitchen helps you lose weight.
COVID-19 and Stay-At-Home
Now that we’re all stuck at home eating food we must make ourselves, this is the perfect opportunity to jump into making smart choices for yourself (and maybe even your family). It’s time to rethink your food choices and food lifestyle. If anything, this time teaches us that restaurant food isn’t truly necessary. We can eat at home from foods we make ourselves and we can consume the proper amount of food that can help us lose excess weight.
Now it’s up to you!
Good Luck!
↩︎
Health: How to prevent COVID-19
COVID-19, otherwise known as the Coronavirus, is spreading. The difficulty with this situation is that there is too much conflicting information. Let’s learn how best to protect ourselves from this virus. Let’s explore.
Method of Spreading
There has been a lot of debating and guessing at how this virus is being spread. We simply need to use common sense here. It’s a virus. As a virus, it will spread in all of the same ways as the flu or cold viruses. COVID-19 is not some type of “magic” virus that has the ability to do anything different than any other virus. As I said, it spreads like all other virus types.
How do other viruses spread? There are three primary ways to spread a virus:
- Via direct contact with an individual by touching them
- Via airborne infection from droplets from an infected person (sneezing or coughing)
- Via latent contact of a virus sitting on a surface that you happen to touch
Let’s better understand vectors impact you and the likelihood of infection.
With direct contact with someone who is infected, this has the highest probability of infection. This type of contact is a double-whammy. It has both the latent type of contact, like #3 and can have airborne infection like #2. If they talk to you, cough, sneeze or in any way send spittle in your direction, you could become infected. Direct contact with random individuals should be avoided.
The second highest probability for infection comes from incidental airborne contact. For example, you are flying on a closed ventilation system plane, these droplets could easily spread throughout the plane and infect a number of passengers in the vicinity of someone infected. It could, in fact, infect people throughout the plane. When you’re sitting in a waiting room and someone across the room sneezes or coughs. When you’re standing in line and someone around you coughs. They aren’t near enough to you to latent infect you, but they can aerosolize their body fluids which can land on surfaces or in your nose.
The third highest probability for infection is via latent virus left on a surface after an infected has gone. For example, touching a banister, railing, seat cushion, door handle or even touching buttons on point of sale systems at supermarkets.
These are the same types and methods of infections of cold and flu viruses.
Symptoms or Not?
To be honest, this part doesn’t much matter. Yes, to researchers, people showing symptoms might matter. In reality, there are simply some people are carriers who will never present symptoms, yet they can spread the virus. Others will have symptoms including fever, coughing, sneezing and other visible symptoms.
Some researchers theorize that those who have been labeled as asymptomatic do, in fact, have symptoms. They theorize that some symptoms are so mild as to be shrugged off as a basic cold. I have long believed that there are carriers who never actually become symptomatic. Their systems thwart off the virus quickly and efficiently without ever having a single symptom… with exception of maybe a day headache or something equally easy to be ignored.
This means that these carriers go about their regular daily lives breathing on, coughing on and touching surfaces without ever knowing they have been a super spreader. Yes, there might also be some people who have such mild symptoms that they chalk it up to a cold or the flu. Again, they go about their daily lives spreading it.
Virus Spreading
I’ve always held that people who are visibly sick with fever, coughing and sneezing should firmly stay home. Don’t go out. Don’t go to the store. Don’t go shopping. Don’t do things you normally do. Too many of these people don’t understand that these viruses are highly contagious. Yet, there are many people who simply don’t care or are uninformed. For them it’s, “all about me.” They could care less about whether others become infected so long as they can continue to eat out and shop and do “normal” everyday things.
Having worked at an large theme park a long while back, I saw just how many people showed up sick. I never really understood that. Why would you spend (at the time) $50 (or more) to get into the park while you’re sick? It doesn’t make sense.
Types of Sick People
What I’ve come to learn is that, psychologically, there are several different types of virus infected sick people and the way they handle their sickness (in no particular order):
- Don’t Give A Damn — These people are the types of people who really don’t care about others. They hop in their cars, eat a restaurants, go to amusement parks and do whatever they please while in the throws of a virus. Instead of staying home in bed and nursing themselves back to health, they are out running around spreading their viruses to others. These people aren’t intentionally infecting others, but they are incidentally infecting others due to their reckless nature. These people aren’t sociopaths, but they are ignorant of what they are doing.
- Stay At Home — These sick people are the cautious types who stay home and stay in. They don’t go out unless it’s absolutely necessary, such as to get medicine or something similar needed to combat their symptoms. They limit their interactions to necessary trips only. These people are cognizant of spreading their illness to others. They aren’t necessarily overly cautious about it, but they don’t run around with wild abandon.
- Plan Ahead — These people are sick folks who, like #2, stay home. However, these folks do not go out at all until they are much better. These are also the types who plan ahead by stocking up on necessary medicines, tissue and foods during times when they are sick.
- Sociopaths — These are the most dangerous type of sick people. These people are similar to #1, but with the added twist that they actively and intentionally seek to infect others. They intentionally interact with random people and readily leave body fluids behind so as to infect others. These people are intentional super spreaders. These people know that they are sick and they actively seek to infect others. They really have no remorse and honestly don’t care how many people they infect. They may even believe, “I’m sick, so I need to make others sick.” For example, they might go to a grocery store and intentionally sneeze and cough all over products in the store. It’s gross, I know… but these folks are sociopaths. They actually derive joy from knowing that they’re doing this. The danger with these folks is that they are masters at hiding symptoms. These sociopaths can appear normal and healthy and happy, yet be massively sick.
I know it can be difficult to avoid going out when you’re sick, but prudence is always warranted when ill. Staying at home helps you get well faster and prevents making others ill. Nothing is worse than going to work only to find the person sitting next to you has a raging cold or flu… coughing every few minutes.
Prevention
Now we arrive at the section that you have been patiently awaiting. Let’s get started.
With COVID-19, panic has more-or-less ensued. This means that stores may be running low on food, drinks and other essentials. What that means for you is the possibility of heading to multiple stores to find the things you need. You may need to resort to purchasing some foods from Amazon for 1 or 2 day delivery.
While this section isn’t really prevention per say, it does contribute to it. If you have to run out to go get foods and whatnot, you’re putting yourself at risk of infection. Each time you leave the house, you could run into an infected person, but it’s more likely you’ll pick up an item that has a latent virus on it. Let’s get started with those things you can do to help prevent you from getting COVID-19.
1. Social Distancing
This is the act of staying at least 6 feet away from others when out and about. This may be easier said than done depending on the situation. Let’s understand what it means for store owners to fully understand what I mean here.
For store owners, the act of Social Distancing means reducing crowds within their stores so that people can remain 6 feet away from others. The difficulty is that if stores begin limiting how many people can enter and shop in the store at one time, that forces people to remain outside of the store in a crowd. Sure, you can sit in your car, but the store likely doesn’t have any way to accommodate those waiting in their cars. If you want a place in line, you must stand in that line. Standing in crowded line doesn’t afford social distancing.
Worse, some stores have reduced their open hours. For example, Safeway and Walmart formerly offered 24 hour locations. During the height of COVID-19, these stores have drastically reduced their open hours. What that means is, again, damage to social distancing. When you could formerly shop at 2am when there were but a handful of people in stores, you must now shop during these much more limited hours when everyone and their dog must also shop. This doesn’t afford social distancing. In fact, reducing hours has the exact opposite effect.
This means that you have to carefully consider all trips to stores now. You also need to understand their open hours. The best time to shop is usually immediately when they open or within 15 minutes of closing. The problem is, when these hours are firmly within “prime time” hours, you will be unable to perform proper social distancing.
Stores are, in fact, contributing to the spread of the virus by not keeping their regular store hours. For you, as a consumer, you will need to consider these aspects when you head out to the store. If you normally shop during 6am to 9pm hours, it might not affect you. But, if you were hoping to perform proper social distancing, this may no longer be possible due to stores reducing their hours of operation.
2. Wash Hands Frequently, Wear Gloves and Use Hand Sanitizer
With all of the stores selling out of hand sanitizer, gloves and other protective gear, you may find it hard to take advantage of these extra steps. But, you can wash your hands frequently. When you get home after a day of shopping, take your cloths off and wash throw them into the washer using hot water wash. Then, dry them in a hot drier if at all possible. Don’t leave clothes you’ve worn out sitting around unwashed for you to touch again. Then, after starting laundry, wash your hands before you finish dressing and sanitize the washer knobs.
3. Tanning Beds
The UV produced in tanning beds (UVA and UVB) will kill viruses on the surface of your skin and clothing. If you visit a tanning salon and hop into a tanning bed for 3-5 minutes (not enough to burn you or fade your clothing), you can kill any viruses on your skin and clothing. If you use a standup tanning bed, you don’t have to touch many surfaces. Just be sure to wear protective eye gear. After done, wash your hands. This can help you prevent viruses from entering your home. You’ll want to do this just before heading home for the day.
4. Avoid Bars with Restaurants
Bars sanitize their glasses rapidly through a three water bath. These baths are soap water, bleach water and rinse water. They are then allowed to dry. Depending on the bleach concentration of the bleach water, it may or may not be enough to fully kill COVID-19. If you visit a bar, the bartenders follow this glass washing practice because it is the “norm” at bars and recovers dirty glassware quickly. Unfortunately, using a glass washed like this could leave you infected with COVID-19. You’ll want to avoid heading to a bar, if not only for the social interaction reasons, but also for how bars wash their glasses during busy times.
If you’re unsure exactly how a bar washes their glassware, you should ask the bartender. Only drink beverages from glasses which have been properly washed via a commercial dishwasher and not through the quick three bath solution utilized at most bars. Better, perform social distancing and avoid bars entirely. If you must drink, buy your liquor at the store and mix your own drinks at home using your own properly washed glasses.
If a bar is also a restaurant, the server may order your drinks from the bartender (even if they don’t contain alcohol). This may mean the bartender can potentially use glasses sent through the three bath solution instead of through a proper hot washed sanitizing dishwasher. For this reason, it is best to avoid the restaurant + bar combo establishments. Instead, visit places that either serve paper cups or that serve you on glassware that has been properly sanitized in a dishwasher.
5. Avoid Buffets and Restaurants
This one goes without saying. Buffet bars are some of the most unsanitary restaurants in existence. With serving spoons that may have had hundreds of hands touching it, this can easily infect you. During the height of the flu season, let alone COVID-19, you should always avoid buffet bars. Flu season begins around September and doesn’t end until around May. You should avoid buffet serve-yourself restaurants during these months. Until COVID-19 is under control and subsiding, you should continue to avoid buffet style restaurants.
In fact, it’s probably wise to avoid all restaurants. If you must have restaurant food, use the drive-thru or have it delivered. Both of these options avoid the use of glassware and, instead, provide disposable containers which are less likely to hold latent viruses. It also avoids the need to enter the interior of the restaurant and interact with the staff or other customers. It can be difficult to practice social distancing once inside of a restaurant.
6. Close All Windows
While this one might not seem obvious, it will make sense once you understand. If you live in an apartment complex or in a house that’s close to your neighbor, someone coughing or sneezing could have their virus carried into your house. If you want to open your windows, do so during off-peak hours (after midnight, but before 6am). Close your windows during the day to keep the viruses out.
The same goes for driving in a car. If you’re out and about, keep your windows closed and your car’s A/C system on recirculated air. Don’t allow external air to blow inside. Even HEPA filters can’t filter out viruses. The best bet is to keep your car closed up tight.
7. Work from Home
If your company allows, work from home. Don’t head into the office unless you absolutely need to be there. If you have a client meeting, attempt to schedule these through video conferencing. Avoid face to face meetings unless absolutely necessary.
8. Don’t eat or drink after someone else
This should be common sense. Don’t drink from anyone else’s glass or eat food from their plate. It doesn’t matter if it’s your brother, sister, wife or mother. Don’t do it.
9. Take a shower
When you get home after work or after having been out and about, throw your clothes in the washer and then take a shower. Cleaning your clothing and taking a shower will remove any possible latent viruses you have picked up, not only from your hands, but any other portion of your skin or clothing.
10. Cover All Sores
If you have a cut, scrape or scab anywhere on the surface of your skin, cover it with a bandage. If it’s a fresh cut or scrape, be sure to use an antibiotic ointment on the bandage. This gives you two layers of protection. While the antibiotic ointment won’t kill a virus, it does help put up a barrier between the skin and the bandage that a virus will find hard enter. Simply, make sure to cover all cuts and scrapes. Don’t leave them open to the air.
If you have a liquid bandage that you use, I’d recommend covering the liquid bandage (after it’s dry) with a cloth bandage to, again, afford two layers of protection.
11. Wash All Packaging and Cook All Foods
After buying any prepackaged foods from a grocery store and because of the sociopaths of the world, wash everything in hot soapy water, if possible. Toss any outer packaging immediately, then wash hands. For example, many items are packaged in plastic. These are easily washable in the sink. Wash them thoroughly.
For produce (such as lettuce, celery, tomatoes and so on), these may be more difficult to wash. Instead, don’t eat these raw. Cook all produce until such time as COVID-19 subsides. Cooking produce with sufficient heat will ensure that any latent viruses are dead, including COVID-19. Cook all foods.
12. Microwave Takeout
When you get home with your bag of takeout, carefully remove the food from its packaging (preferably without touching the food itself with your hands) and place it onto your own dishware. Use chopsticks or tongs and avoiding touching the grabbing end with your fingers. Throw away all packaging immediately. Place the food into the microwave for 30 seconds to 1 minute to increase the temperature to ensure that the food will be disinfected. Wash your hands while the microwave is running.
If you’re buying raw food like Sushi, Poké or salad, avoid this type of food until COVID-19 subsides. It is recommended not to eat raw cold foods unless you’ve purchased the ingredients yourself from a grocery store and you’ve properly washed them. Still, I’d recommend cooking all foods until COVID-19 subsides.
13. Dishwasher and Dinner Parties
If you have a dishwasher, wash your dishware in a dishwasher to properly sanitize. This is particularly important if you choose to have people over for dinner. Better, avoid having people over at all. If you must, then be sure to wash all dishware in a dishwasher with a heated dry cycle.
14. Avoid Parties and Social Events
This one should really go without saying. Social events should be taken off of the table. Don’t go to parties or visit any large social gatherings. This includes gatherings like conventions and expos, movies, sporting events (whether for your kids or professional), concerts, parades, caucuses and primaries or any other event designed to lure in many people in close proximity. Stay away from these events until such time as COVID-19 has subsided.
15. Don’t borrow someone else’s phone
This section is not exclusively about borrowing phones, but this one is a common request. Your phone’s battery is dead, but you need to make a call. What do you do? You ask your friend to use theirs. Don’t do this. If your phone is dead, find a place to charge it (like in your car) or head home. Better, bring an extra battery with you to refill your battery on the go. Don’t rely on borrowing stuff from others. Not only does using someone else’s stuff break social distancing, it also means you’re touching something which could have latent COVID-19 on the surface and then putting it near your face. If it all possible, avoid touching something owned by someone else. This means, yes, avoiding picking up stuff for someone who drops a bag. Let them pick up their own stuff. Courtesy is all well and good, but you don’t want to risk your life over helping someone pick up a bag of spilled groceries.
16. Public Transportation
If you must travel on public transport, stand up. Don’t sit down. Hold onto the hand rail with only one hand if possible. Make sure your hand doesn’t have any cuts or scrapes and if it does make sure they are properly covered. Wear a glove if necessary. Sitting down means you will touch more surfaces that could be covered in COVID-19. Standing means touching far fewer surfaces.
17. Avoid Touching Anything
This can be very difficult. When purchasing, if you carry exact cash with you, you can drop that cash down and not touch anything in the process (put it onto the counter, not in the cashier’s hand). Giving exact cash means no change in return and nothing to touch. Note that I talk about ATMs including paper and coin money infection just below. The only thing you’ll touch is the receipt, but you can request that the cashier drop that into the bag without even touching it. The fewer things you touch, the less likely you are to get infected. If you use a credit card, you’ll have to touch the screen or press buttons to complete the transaction. If you can avoid this process, you have less chances of contracting COVID-19. If you need to touch a screen, buy and bring with you a touch sensitive pen.
Avoid touching your face including your eyes, nose and mouth. If you must scratch an itch, then wait until after you’ve washed your hands with soap and water or after using hand sanitizer. If you are wearing dispoable gloves while out, toss the glove before you scratch. Then, don another glove.
ATM machines are also ripe for COVID-19. If you must touch the screen or press buttons, carry with you a touch sensitive pen and touch the screen with that pen. Use that same pen to press buttons. Try not to touch any of the ATM with your fingers. If you have gloves, you can use them, but be sure to toss the gloves immediately after or wash cloth gloves when you get home. Note that paper or coin money itself can carry COVID-19.
There’s no easy way to solve this money dilemma other than through UV disinfection. If you have a UV lamp at home, you an place the paper and coin money under UV for a few minutes and kill any viruses on the surface of that money. If only banks would invest in a UV lamp system in their ATM machines to properly disinfect the paper money before it’s dispensed. Perhaps with COVID-19, this will send a wake-up call to ATM manufacturers and banks will follow suit with money disinfection.
18. Receipts and Photos
When you do receive a receipt from a purchase, the best option is to use your phone’s camera to take a picture of the receipt immediately and have the cashier toss the receipt. Though, you can choose keep the receipt if you wish. As long as you retain the photo of the receipt, it should be enough for the store to accept an item’s return. Carrying a photo of the receipt avoids having to touch that paper again in the future.
With stores like Target and when using the RedCard, you don’t even need the receipt. All of your purchases are stored with your RedCard which can be viewed within the Target app. The receipt may not show up until the next day, but you can toss the paper receipt and go with an electronic receipt when shopping at Target using a RedCard. Hopefully, more stores will move in this paperless direction, doing away with the paper wasting receipt.
19. Grocery Delivery
The best way to handle not going out is to order groceries for delivery. The fewer people you have to see, the better. That doesn’t negate the need to wash the items you receive from the grocery store as described in #11 above, but it does mean you don’t need to leave your home to have groceries delivered. For those in the highest risk group, grocery delivery is the best answer. There’s a caveat and risk here, based on the economy. I’ll discuss this aspect last.
20. Face Mask Deception
Loose fitting face masks can’t protect you against viruses. Many people think a mask can, but it can’t. The only masks that are less likely to see you get infected by an airborne pathogen is the one that fits tightly against your skin, not allowing any air to seep through the seal. This forces all air through the mask’s filters. Even these filters, however, may not filter at small enough sizes to keep certain particulate matter from entering your respiratory system.
The only thing the loose fitting masks do is protect others from YOUR coughs and sneezes. If you are sick and you wear a mask, the mask can prevent aerosolizing your sickness onto others. These masks don’t protect you from others who are sick and not wearing masks. The only thing that protects you from others who are sick is staying as far away from them as possible.
Economy
Because much of the US is now shutting down as a result of the fear of COVID-19, it appears that the US may be going into a recession. Because so much of the world culture thrives on large gatherings, cutting down on large social gatherings means less business for those businesses.
It also means that people are now more likely to cook and eat at home rather than dining out. Dining out keeps restaurants afloat. When that stops, restaurants lose. For now, COVID-19 means the economy will need to transition back to less restaurants and more home cooking. This transition was inevitable at some point. This means that grocery stores will need to stock more foods to handle this drastic increase in home cooking. As people transition to cooking for themselves, it means the need for stocking up mostly empty fridges and cabinets.
Stores like Target are bearing this transition out. Just visiting Target, you’ll find bare grocery shelves. Target was never one to stock large quantities of grocery items. For a store like Target, it doesn’t take much for these items to disappear from the shelves. Visiting my local Target, the fresh meat area is bare, the fresh produce area was nearly bare, the fresh fruit area, save for some apples and grapefruits was bare. In effect, this transition is being born right now.
Of course, it didn’t help matters that Target also decided to go ahead with their 2 for $10 weekly sales on specific foods like frozen pizza. Target should have suspended all of their two-for sales amid area lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders. They can resume their planned sales after this situation is resolved. In fact, they should have limited quantities and stopped the sales. Having these two-for sales in place incites people to buy large quantities… something that caused Target’s shelves to become bare faster.
Shelter In Place
With some areas of the country on full lockdown and other areas enforcing shelter-in-place (an action just short of a full lockdown), this will force people to stay at home and make and eat homemade meals. Restaurants for delivery may still be open, but even those businesses may tank… forcing them to send their workers home and possibly to even shut down.
For shelter-in-place and lockdown orders, it’s difficult to move about. It also means absolutely no social gatherings at all or face jail time or fines. This means staying inside.
If you live in an area of the country which is not yet under lockdown or shelter-in-place orders, you should still practice the above preventions. Even after COVID-19 has subsided, you should still practice the above. In fact, even during regular cold and flu season you should practice the above precautions. Some of these are definitely a bit over-the-top for a standard cold. If you wish to stay healthy, then the above suggestions offer your best protection.
Caveats — Can the US transition back to what it once was?
This is a great question, but one that doesn’t yet have an answer. We simply don’t know. Once people understand that they can make and eat foods at home, they may be willing to stick with this regimen going forward while still remaining a little bit cautious. What this means to grocers is the need to increase their orders to their suppliers and then increase stock on shelves to fulfill this newly increased cook-at-home demand.
Stores like Target must take this into account. Currently Target’s ordering of grocery items was perfectly acceptable for the shopping amounts before COVID-19. However, Target’s buyers will need to reconsider the amounts of grocery items they are now ordering and shipping to stores amid the COVID-19. They need to do this quickly. Other grocery stores will also need to consider their ordering process.
The difficulty is that stores may not be willing to place bigger orders for fear that much will go to waste, especially with some areas of the country under lockdown and shelter-in-place orders.
Grocery delivery may only last as long as they have business. However, I fully expect home grocery delivery to surge during this crisis. This means that Safeway, Whole Foods and Instacart will likely see a huge boom in deliveries. They may also take advantage of this by increasing surcharges and delivery charges. For this reason, be cautious of delivery services. Make sure you fully understand the surcharges and delivery charges being applied to your grocery delivery order. You may find that it could be 10% or more of the total bill. Also note that some companies like Instacart mark up the grocery items themselves. This can also add to the overall cost of your grocery delivery order. Personally, I call it price gouging, but so far no government organization has taken issue with these delivery markup scams.
Will the economy revive? Sure it will. It will take time for this virus to run its course and subside. It happens with cold viruses. It happens with the flu. It will happen with COVID-19. The question is, how long will it take?
With lockdowns and sheltering in place, it may take less time for COVID-19 to disappear than anticipated. If left unchecked, it will definitely continue to spread. Locking down social gatherings will prevent the spread via latent and active spreaders. The worse case is probably until the hot weather arrives. Hot weather has a way of killing off viruses. Unfortunately, cold and rainy days leaves latent viruses sitting around on surfaces to be picked up by someone’s finger. Once the heat arrives, it will bake these viruses and they will eventually disappear.
Normally, the heat arrives sometime around May or June for much of the US. Hopefully, these lockdowns will slow the spread and give time enough for the economy to recover once they are lifted. I’m not sure that April will be appropriate enough time to make that happen. If April is still rainy and cold, the virus could still flare back up after the lockdowns end. We may have to wait until the summer heat begins before we see COVID-19 begin to fade.
↩︎
Are contact thermometers spreading the coronavirus?
This seems a fairly straightforward question and seems like it should have a fairly straightforward answer. With all sorts of makeshift fever checkpoints being set up to screen for the coronavirus by so many cheapskate companies, it’s definitely a risk. Let’s explore.
Contact Thermometers
What is a contact thermometer? It is an electronic thermometer that looks something like so:
These contact thermometers must come into skin contact with the forehead or ear to perform its job. Why is this important to your health? It’s important because many makeshift fever screening zones for the Coronaviris (COVID-19 aka nCoV-19) utilize such low cost contact thermometers to check for fever, but at a severe risk of transmitting it.
Sweat and Transmission
Many people believe that sweat can’t transmit a virus. However, if you’ve got a fever, you’re likely perspiring a little. Even still, that doesn’t make using a contact thermometer an unsafe choice by default. But, it can still spread a virus for other reasons.
When people are asymptomatic (or even symptomatic), they can rub their noses or eyes, then rub or scratch other parts of their faces. This can then rub the virus on other portions of skin. This means that using such a contact thermometer could pick up a latent Coronavirus on a forehead or ear and transmit it to at least the next person that thermometer touches.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to protect yourself from such a screening point unless you turn around and leave or refuse to use their contact thermometer. While in the US, such refusals might be met with some consternation until explained, in a country like China, it might lead to much more drastic action by the authorities.
Amateur Hour
However, those in charge over the setup of these impromptu screening zones and which are forcing the use of contact thermometers (without any sanitary protection) are clearly medically untrained amateurs. A virus is a virus. It transmits like all other cold viruses, through contact. If that contact is through the surface of a thermometer or by rubbing your hand across a railing someone has just touched, you can pick up a virus. This type of spreading is called contact spreading. It’s one of the primary reasons that cold viruses spread so easily and rapidly.
You will still need to put your hands in your eyes, nose or mouth to fully infect you, but that’s not at all difficult considering how frequently we touch our eyes and noses and scratch itches. We also must eat, so touching our food with an infected hand is very common. It’s not a matter of if, but when after exposure.
Washing Hands
Hand washing is important, particularly before consuming any food or drink, after having been out and about in public. If someone touches an unsanitary thermometer to your forehead at a screening zone, visit the restroom and wash your face and hands immediately. Don’t wait. Use soap and hot water, if available. Better, don’t allow a fever screening area to touch anything to you.
Non-contact Thermometers
There are non-contact thermometers available on the market. Unfortunately, they are much more costly than the contact variety. Cheapskate companies may not be willing to shell out the $$$ to buy these more sanitary thermometers. There are also other sanitary versions of thermometers which utilize disposable tips. Either of these two methods of screening thermometers would be fine for use at a public screening check point. However, all skin-to-skin contact thermometers need to stop being used at public screening checkpoints.
In fact, I might even attribute some of the spread of the coronavirus to such well-meaning, but entirely amateur fever screening points… points which have unwisely chosen contact thermometers for public screening.
If someone intends to place a thermometer against your forehead, say, “No.” If they seem dismayed by your statement, explain, “That contact thermometer is likely already infected, if not even by the coronavirus.” No one wants to get the regular cold or flu, let alone the coronavirus. Nothing should touch your skin when being checked for fever at a public screening point. If that screening point can’t determine if you have a fever without touching something to your skin, that’s a sanitary issue on their part… and not your problem.
Screening Points
Anyone in charge of setting up impromptu screening points to test for fever needs to use a device that either has disposable sanitary coverings between each check or is of the non-contact variety. Preferably, nothing should be touched to the surface of anyone’s skin, then touched to another person. Anything that performs skin to skin contact has a high probability of transmitting viruses from one person to another. This makes these fever screening checkpoints exceedingly risky ventures with a potential for legal liability should death or injury occur.
I’m guessing that these check points were not designed by someone in the medical profession, that or these operators simply don’t understand how viruses are transmitted. Either way, it comes down to amateur hour.
If you happen upon an impromptu fever screening check point, do not allow anything to touch your skin. If they can’t check your fever without touching you, simply leave and go somewhere else. There’s too much risk of infection by allowing someone at a checkpoint to touch you.
↩︎
Weight Loss begins in the Kitchen
Many people are under the mistaken impression that you need a gym membership to lose weight. While it’s great that gyms may motivate you to improve your health, it may not help you lose weight. This article = ~19 minute read. Grab a coffee and let’s explore.
Preface
Before I begin this article, I just want to state that I’m not a fitness, medical or diet professional. I have experience with this subject due to my own reading and research on this topic. I’ve also had personal life experiences with weight loss and weight gain several times throughout my life. I’ve definitely come to find what it takes to manage weight properly (although, not always perfectly… we’re human, after all). This article is meant to be informative. It is not intended as professional advice in any form. If you need professional advice for your specific body situation, you should seek the help and advice of a medical or dietary professional who can properly assess your personal situation and weight loss goals.
The Kitchen Part I
Many people mistakenly believe that you need to run, or cycle or lift weights to lose weight. You don’t. Weight loss is not about how much weight you lift or how many miles you’ve cycled, it’s about a healthy relationship with food based on your current energy requirements. That starts in the kitchen.
The body wants to lose weight. It’s the way it was designed. Food replenishes (and gains) that weight if eaten to ‘excess’. The difficulty in knowing how much is considered ‘excess’. This is the key to successful weight loss. Exercise is for fitness. Food is for weight management. The kitchen is where the food is, not the gym.
Resting Metabolism
Most people are only active for short periods of time throughout the day. For example, that might be an hour at the gym or 30 minutes on the treadmill or bike… and so on. The rest of the 23.5 hours of the day, you might be sitting at a desk, sleeping or possibly walking only occasionally. Because the majority of that 24 hours is in a resting metabolic state, you need to eat to cover the resting metabolic requirements, not the small amount of active time requirements.
A good rule of thumb is the 2000 calorie a day diet as “recommended”. However, even this diet may provide more calories than your resting metabolism needs.
If you need to assess your resting metabolic rate (RMR), you should enlist a local diet professional to help you pin it down. There are tests where you sit and breathe for about 20 minutes. During that 20 minutes, the test assesses your oxygen levels and how many calories you burn. That can be extrapolated to an hour, then 24 hours. This gives you a very good baseline on exactly how many calories you need to eat to cover your daily requirements. If you add in exercise for 30 minutes, you can modify the calories of your RMR.
As an example of an RMR, I had mine tested at 24 Hour Fitness as part of a membership. My RMR came back at 1700 calories per day… 300 under the suggested 2000 calories per day. This means that were I to follow the 2000 calorie per day suggestion, I might continue to gain weight. This meant adjusting my diet to eat less than 1700 per day to create a calorie deficit (on days when I didn’t work out). I might be able to adjust my caloric intake upwards a little 100-200 calories if I spent time in the gym.
To put that in perspective, that would be adding an extra piece of bread or two, a piece of fruit or two or a small cookie or two. You can see that’s not a lot of extra food. Even then, I would want to eat these with a meal, not before or after the meal or as a snack.
The Exercise Con
Too many people mistakenly assume that, “If I add some ‘cardio’ to my day, I can eat what I want”. This is not true. In fact, you should continue eating normally even if you do add some measure of exercise into your day… particularly if you want to lose weight. Adding more food in an attempt to compensate for that small amount of exercise is likely to put on more pounds than take them off.
As a case in point, I once had a boss who biked into the office every day. From his house to the office was at least 20 minutes of cycling. In total, that would be 40 minutes of bicycling every weekday five days a week. In the 10 years that I worked for this company, he never dropped a single pound… and I never got the reason why until I realized that weight loss begins in the kitchen, not on a bike. In fact, the company bought us snacks including Popcicles (his favorite), nuts, coffee, cereal and milk. The kitchen was well stocked. This meant he always ate calories in excess if he were trying to drop the weight.
While exercise is great at getting and keeping the body’s systems fit, it might not help you lose weight unless you take steps to make weight loss a reality.
The Kitchen Part II
It’s true that weight loss begins in the kitchen, not in the gym. Weight loss is about what you eat, not how often you use a treadmill. The treadmill is great at cardio and raising your heart rate, but raising the heart rate is not about weight loss, it’s about fitness. There’s a distinct difference between fitness and weight loss. Yes, they go hand in hand, but they are separate distinct concepts requiring separate critical understanding.
To lose weight is all about arriving at a food lifestyle that helps aid you in your weight goals. For example, it’s about creating a food lifestyle goal such as eating only meals at meal times. Snacking is off the table, except only occasionally and only if you can’t make a meal.
Dietary Restrictions
I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss this aspect of a food lifestyle. Some medical conditions require eating only specific foods and sometimes at specific times of the day… particularly if you have diabetes. In the case of diabetes, you will need to keep your blood sugar in check. This means eating the right foods in the right amount to manage that.
Again, even this situation begins in the kitchen and it requires a food lifestyle change. Hopping on a treadmill won’t necessarily manage blood sugar levels (other than perhaps dipping blood sugar after exercise). In the case of diabetes, you should follow the advice of your medical professional in terms of frequency of eating.
Because diabetes can be difficult to manage at times, if you’re intent on weight loss, you should seek the counsel of not only your doctor, but ask your doctor to recommend a dietician who is knowledgeable about diabetes. This dietician can then work with your weight loss goals and still allow you to manage your diabetes properly. In the case of this (or any other weight loss article), you should disregard any Internet advice and follow the advice of a professional who is versed in diabetes, specifically your type.
Healthy Adults
With that said, this article is intended towards adults who do not have extenuating medical conditions that might make weight loss difficult. Even without diabetes or other medical conditions, we should all seek to moderate foods in our diet… including artificial products, refined sugars, white processed flours, processed cheese food and processed meats. We should seek natural, whole foods that are as close to nature as possible. I’ll talk more about this in the next section.
I’m the kind of person that if I have a food in the house, I’ll eat it. For me, that means not bringing home anything I don’t want to eat, such as candy. That means rarely bringing home diary free ice cream, potato chips, cheese dips, candy bars and so on. Because I’m somewhat lactose intolerant, I steer clear of milk, sour cream, cream cheese, extremely soft cheeses, yogurt or anything that contains a boatload of lactose. Milk has a secondary problem for me as well and that problem is casein. Casein is a milk protein that causes allergies in some individuals. For me, milk is a double-whammy of lactose and casein.
To avoid this, I choose alternatives such as non-diary creamer instead of milk when making foods that require milk. Non-dairy creamer is artificial, so I limit my use of this ingredient. But, when I need milk in certain recipes, non-diary creamer is my goto choice because it doesn’t trigger me with lactose and casein. When I make bread, for example, I use non-diary creamer instead of non-fat dry milk powder. For cereal, when I rarely eat it, I choose almond milk instead of non-dairy creamer. It just tastes better on cereal. However, I rarely eat cereal.. and even then, the only cereal I like is Crispix, primarily because it’s not like eating a bowl of straight-up sugar and it stays crispy in milk.
Whole Foods vs Processed Foods
Many people have claimed that processed foods may slow weight loss progress. I can disprove that. I occasionally eat processed foods (i.e., hot dogs, Velveeta cheese, Spam) and I’m still on the road to my weight loss goals. Eating these foods may slow down the weight loss process slightly, but it won’t outright stop the weight loss so long as you keep your caloric intake below your RMR.
What’s more important isn’t processed or whole foods, but calorie dense foods. For example, vegetables and fruits are far less calorie dense than, say, pound cake or brownies. This means you must eat more vegetables and fruits to eat an equivalent amount of calories in a piece of pound cake. For this reason, calorie dense foods should be considered a ‘once in a while’ treat. Another calorie dense food is beer, wine and spirits. Drinking a glass of wine adds a lot of calories to your diet. Think of a glass of wine the same as a sugary can of Coke. It’s basically empty calories. Alcoholic drinks consist mostly of water with, in the case of wine, alcohol and fruit sugars. You don’t get any nutritional benefits from Wine, but you might get limited health benefits from the alcohol due to its blood thinning capabilities.
Treats
You sometimes can’t get away from social situations with food and drink. This means that when you’re out and about at a restaurant or at a party, you might be required to indulge in foods and drinks which aren’t part of your lifestyle. You don’t really need to worry about this interfering with your weight loss goals as long as it’s a ‘once in a while’ situation. At a social situation, you can choose to abstain from eating these foods outright. However, abstinence may be seen by the host as displeasure with the food choices. In other words, you might be judged negatively for not eating the foods or drinking the drinks. If you know you’re going to have a problem in a specific social situation, it’s best to stay away rather than showing up and being a picky eater.
In these cases, you have two options. Attempt to avoid such social situations or choose to lightly indulge in the foods offered. Basically taste them and carry around the remaining food on a plate. You can even throw away the plate after a few minutes and grab something new. If you have a third option where the host provides you the choice of foods you can eat, then take advantage. However, few party hosts are that obliging, particularly if you’re taking a client out to dinner or to a company party. Be prepared to find something at the party to snack on. Or, alternatively, eat your meal immediately before the party and politely explain you’ve just eaten dinner.
You don’t need to eat a meal there, but you can pick whatever you find is the most healthy option. Sometimes they offer deserts with fresh fruits. Sometimes they offer hard cheeses. These are good options to help you retain your food lifestyle. Though, you can mark such social occasions as ‘treat day’. I’ll talk about ‘treat day’ a bit later.
Food Lifestyle
I know I’ve mentioned this term several times in this article and I think it’s about time that I define it properly. A food lifestyle is about changing your habit with food on an ongoing basis. The word ‘diet’ has a long held the connotation of being ‘temporary’. You diet, you lose weight, you go off the diet. You can’t do that and maintain a healthy weight.
To maintain a consistent healthy weight, you need to change your food choices on a permanent basis. This is the act of creating a continuous food lifestyle. A continuous food lifestyle is the goal if you want lasting weight loss, including weight maintenance.
You can’t go ‘on a diet’ and then later ‘go off the diet’. That’s a recipe for weight loss failure and is the key to Yo-Yo dieting. No. You want lasting change for the rest of your life. This means making food choices that you are willing to live with day in and out, week in and out and year in and out. You need to be able to live your food choices.
This also means a balanced approach to food. This means choosing to make home cooked meals over eating out. This means buying fresh whole foods to cook those meals.
If you’re used to eating out at McDonald’s weekly and eating out regularly throughout the week, making home cooked meals may initially be somewhat of a shock. It takes time to cook meals, but with the proper tools, you can cook meals at home in similar amounts of time as McDonald’s takes to prepare your meals.
For example, I can make a homemade hamburger and fries meal at home in as little as 15 minutes. It takes perhaps a little longer than it takes McDonald’s to serve a meal, but my meal means I can choose my ingredient choices. For example, I prefer actual Swiss cheese on my burgers. Few fast food restaurants offer that choice. If I want to use Avocado oil mayo on my burger, I’ve got that choice also. If I want Sriracha, it’s right there. For example, where will you find a burger made with Romaine lettuce and heirloom tomatoes? These combinations just don’t exist at fast food restaurants.
Making your meals at home means you can choose the ingredients that you like, that you will eat and that are hand-selected by you.
Homemade Meals versus From Scratch
Many people think that a home cooked meal signifies that it was made from scratch. In fact, that’s not necessary. For example, hamburger buns are a common thing we buy at the grocery store rather than making them ourselves. I’ve personally made hamburger buns myself and I prefer my home made versions, but it’s a time consuming process waiting for the bread to rise and then baking them.
You can easily make meals at home from packaged foods rather than making everything yourself. Obviously, you’re not going to go butcher a cow just to get a specific cut of meat. You’re going to visit a butcher counter and pick from those in the counter. That’s a time saving example.
Like the bread and steak examples, you can also make other foods from mixes or boxes. You don’t need to spend time doing everything from scratch. Yes, there is a satisfaction to making everything from scratch, but unless you have excessive amounts of time to kill performing these steps, making boxed or bagged mixes is perfectly acceptable time saving approaches to making home made meals.
You can even save yourself kitchen time by using a slow cooker or a pressure cooker. These are other cooking alternatives to getting the job done with the least amount of your time. You just need to find these time saving approaches. For example, using the microwave to grill hamburgers or steaks using specially designed microwave grills. These can be tremendous time savers.
Treat Day
As you approach a new food lifestyle, you’ll want to include a full treat day once a month. This day is the day where you can eat things not normally on your regularly scheduled food lifestyle. These might include eating out at your favorite restaurant, staying home and eating ice cream and/or popcorn in front of a movie. Perhaps you like drinking Coke or Pepsi or making an ice cream float out of these. Or, maybe it’s eating birthday cake.
These are treats you let yourself have once per month. You choose the day and then stick to it only on that day. These days are great days for social events, going to parties or hanging out with friends at a bar. This allows you to eat whatever you want and then fall right back onto your food lifestyle the following day. It’s a day where you don’t have to worry about what you’re eating. However, it’s always prudent to moderate your food intake no matter where you are. Being overindulgent in anything, particularly food, is never a good idea. You don’t want to wake up sick from eating too much food.
This day is actually important to your body. It’s a way to get your body out of its metabolism “comfort zone” and, for a day, make it change how it works. This breaks the monotony of eating similar foods day after day and aids your metabolism achieving your weight loss goals. Sometimes, the metabolism needs a little kick in the pants. That’s why treat day is important.
You don’t have to do a treat day every month if you don’t feel like it. Also, if you need to move your treat day to a different day, that’s also fine. However, having it on the same day makes it easier to manage and know when it is. I always preferred having treat day on a Friday as it was always like a tiny celebration.
You should also include a mini-treat snack once a week. This is a time when you can have a single treat, like a small sundae, a small cookie, a piece of chocolate, a small piece of cake or a dessert after your meal at a restaurant. You just want to tickle these taste bud receptors so you don’t get tired of your food lifestyle. These are to break the monotony of not having a sweet food at your meal. You don’t want to do these often, but you do want to do them occasionally to allow for a piece of chocolate or candy bar or glass of wine. We all need to indulge occasionally.
This system allows you to indulge in your favorite snack foods to prevent you from rejecting your chosen food lifestyle outright, forcing you back to a weight gain diet. You want to be able to treat yourself every now and then. The reason most “diets” fail is because they deprive you of the foods you love. A mini-treat prevents that deprivation problem.
What I have found is that even though I do have a treat available, I don’t always do it. Some days I just don’t want sweets or other treats. Occasionally, I do want them and that’s when I include a single treat during a day or I add it to my chosen treat day. If your monthly treat day is coming up in a few days, just hold on until then and have your snack then.
Note that fresh fruit and fresh veggies don’t count as ‘treats’. You can include these in your food lifestyle. Treats are defined as calorie dense processed foods such as wine, beer, spirits or decadent desserts such as a brownie with ice cream, cake or a candy bar. Yes, even a protein bar, a breakfast bar, a protein shake and even cereal should be considered ‘treats’. Basically, anything that is calorie and sugar dense should be considered a ‘treat’. The rule is, if it’s sugary and/or overly fatty, then it’s considered a treat.
Peanut Butter (or any nut butters)
Peanut butter is an odd food that seems like it should fall under being a ‘treat’. Depending on which version you buy, it might or might not.
The one thing I will say about peanut butter is to moderate no matter which version you buy. It’s a calorie dense food that’s reasonably fatty. If you buy commercially produced “smooth” peanut butters, these contain sugar. These peanut butters should be considered a treat.
If you buy All Natural (i.e., requires stirring), these are not considered as a treat. The difference between the commercial and all natural versions is additives. Commercial peanut butters insert additives to make it ‘smooth’ and to not separate. These additives, like sugar, make this version of peanut butter into a treat.
All natural peanut butters only have peanuts, peanut oil and possibly salt. These are the definition of whole foods. This type of peanut butter isn’t considered a treat, but peanut butter should always be used in moderation. For example, if you can buy freshly ground peanut butter from Whole Foods, this is actually the best type of peanut butter to get.
If you make a PB&J sandwich, this is definitely a treat no matter which peanut butter you choose. Jelly, jam and preserves are definitely considered a treat food because of the excessive amounts of sugar and because of its processed nature.
How many times removed from nature?
Eating natural foods is the goal of a food lifestyle. These are typically whole raw, steamed or cooked foods. You want to eat foods that are as close to nature as possible. For example, eating a raw Romaine lettuce leaf is as close as you can get to a natural food as it exists in nature. Once you process a food, such as turning a raw fruit into preserves, that’s considered to be removed from nature several times. Once to cook it down into a slurry, once to add in sugar and other additives and once to can it.
Bread is a food twice removed from nature. It begins as a whole grain which is pulverized and processed into a powder (once removed). Then that powder is mixed into water to make dough and then baked into bread (twice removed). Once something has been removed from nature more than once, it’s considered processed. Processed foods are not the goal of a healthy weight loss lifestyle. However, bread has a place where jam and preserves don’t.
Bread is a form of fiber and fiber aids in digestion and slows the conversion of sugar in the blood stream. Unfortunately, jams, preserves and jellies have removed all fiber from the fruit, which leaves pretty much jellied sugar. Because sugar is already readily abundant in nearly every food, there’s no need to add extra sugar in the form of jelly, jam or preserves. Yes, they taste good, but they should be considered a treat.
The point is that you need to count how many times a food has been removed from nature to determine if it works towards your weight loss goals. If it’s been removed from nature more than twice, you should rethink that food choice. This goes hand-in-hand with…
Fats, Carbs and Protein
The intake of calories comes from fat, carbohydrates and proteins.
Fat (aka lipid) is fatty acid of any type such as peanut oil, sunflower oil, palm oil, rapeseed oil, canola oil, vegetable oil, corn oil, avocado oil, olive oil and so on. It also includes fats in meats. This category also includes steroids and waxes.
Carbohydrates are any form of sugar including both simple sugars and complex sugars. Simple sugars (two molecule) include glucose, galactose (not generally found as a food ingredient) and fructose (aka levose or levulose). Complex sugars (more than two molecules) include lactose (milk sugar), sucrose (table sugar), sucralose (artificially manufactured), dextrose and maltose. These types of simple and complex sugars can be recognized by the ‘ose’ at the end of the name. Starches are also a form of even longer chained sugar molecules. All sugars and starches reduce to glucose, fructose or galactose in the blood stream. For sugars to be reduced in the body, chemical reactions break the two or more molecule chains into simple sugar molecules for absorption by the body. The body can’t absorb complex sugars, only simple sugars.
There are also sugar alcohols including but not limited to erythritol, maltitol, xylitol, sorbitol, mannitol and inositol. You can identify most sugar alcohols by the distinctive ‘ol’ at the end the name, with the exception of the peculiarly named sugar alcohol, isomalt. Sugar alcohols are curious things. While they can sweeten the food they are in (to a lesser degree than sucrose), they can also add some odd properties. One of these properties is a cooling sensation in the mouth.
Sugar alcohols are used in some cough drops and mints to enhance the mint cooling sensation. Another side effect of sugar alcohols is diarrhea, bloating and loose stools when eaten in sufficient quantity. The difficulty with sugar alcohols is that some people are more sensitive to these compounds than others. It’s best to avoid foods containing sugar alcohols simply to avoid unnecessary trips to the bathroom. It is worth noting that many foods labeled ‘sugar free’ actually contain sugar alcohols in replacement of the ‘ose’ type sugars. The FDA has granted food manufacturers the right to label a food as ‘sugar free’ when it only contains a sugar alcohol. Don’t fall for the ‘sugar free’ label. If you’re watching your sugar intake, sugar alcohols count as sugars.
Other alternative sweeteners include fructooligosaccharides or FOS. This sweetener is derived from the blue Agave plant as well as chicory, leeks, bananas, onions and a few other plants. This sweetener contains multiple molecules of sugar and must be broken down by the body’s chemical processes. This sweetener is not often used in the US, but may be found in some food preparations, including agave based sweeteners. It is a commonly used sweetener in Japan.
Simply for completion, sugars are found in most vegetables and fruits in varying quantities and in varying forms. Don’t get trapped into thinking you’re not eating sugars when eating fruits and vegetables. In fact, fruits can raise blood sugar levels equivalently to candies when eating particularly sweet fruits.
Stevia is short for stevia rebaudiana. While this compound is considered a sweetener, it is not a sugar at all. Instead, it’s actually a plant sterol (aka plant steroid). As a result, the use of Stevia does not raise blood sugar levels. This means it is safe to use as a sweetener by diabetics. However, because it is a type of plant steroid, it may interact with the body’s steroid receptors in other unexpected ways. There is some concern that Stevia may negatively interact with the kidneys, the nervous system and other body functions. It may even interfere with digestion. Toxicity studies assessing side effects around this sweetener are still being determined. As with any foods, you’ll want to assess your own effects after consuming it.
Proteins are any form of branched-chain amino acid. Meats, legumes and eggs all contain chained amino acids. Example amino acid types would include L-glutathione, L-arginine and Leucine which are some of the building blocks of meat, legumes and eggs. Though, legumes contain both amino acids and carbohydrates. Eggs and meat do not contain carbs, but may contain fats. Amino acids are responsible for building muscle in the human body and are responsible for many other building activities within the body.
These three macronutrient types (fat, protein and carbs) form all of the foods in the world. There are also micronutrients within foods. These micronutrient types include the vitamins A, B, C, D, E as well as minerals. All vitamins and minerals are contained in various vegetables including but not limited to green leafy vegetables, beets and carrots as well as minerals (i.e., iron) in meats. Together, the macro-nutrients and the micro-nutrients combine to make up the human food diet.
Man Made vs Natural Food
Above, I discussed how far removed a food was from nature. This is an extension of that discussion. If a food is natural and whole, by its very definition, it is natural. A food made by a human is not natural. Let’s understand natural versus man made in this context.
Corn on the cob is a whole natural food. A tortilla (made from ground corn) is a man made food.
Whole wheat kernels are a whole natural food. Bread (made from ground whole wheat kernels) is a man made food.
Sugar cane is a whole natural food. White table sugar (made from sugar cane) is a man made food.
By extension, further foods can be made from some of the above man made foods. For example, white table sugar is the ingredient to make most confections including chocolate bars, candy bars, cake and even bread.
If a food is man made, it is by its very nature, not natural. If you’re in the store shopping and you’re trying to determine if a food is “natural”, it’s easy to determine. If it’s a box on a shelf, it’s man made. If it’s sitting on the produce aisle in its raw form, it’s natural.
Natural Foods
All of the plant produce products on the supermarket produce aisle are natural. The produce industry further sub-categorizes its produce into “conventional” or “organic”. These labels mean various things to various people. However, produce with the “conventional” label typically means that the plant was grown using standard farming practices, including the use of standard chemical (sometimes toxic) pesticides. The produce may be further dressed using waxes and other “beautifying” techniques to make them pretty for store displays.
Produce labeled “organic” typically means the plant was grown using all natural methods of growth, many times without using pesticides or hormones or fertilizer at all. If a pesticide is used on an “organic” labeled product, it is typically of a non-toxic variety (i.e., vinegar or lemon juice concentrate or similar type edible and easily washable, non-toxic pesticide). This produce is not “dressed” to look pretty. You’ll find that “organic” produce may be misshapen, discolored, smaller, more ripe and may go bad faster. The size difference may mean the lack of using hormones or using “organic” fertilizer (i.e., compost).
The difficulty with these labels is that who really polices them? When you get to the supermarket and see the “organic” label and its corresponding higher price tag, is it really pesticide free? Is it really “organic”? You don’t really know. For this reason, I typically opt for produce shopping by price rather than labels. The only time I shop by label is “Grown in the USA” or “Grown in California”.
When something is “Grown in Mexico” or “Grown in Guatemala”, you really don’t know what pesticides were used. In fact, because it’s grown outside the U.S., many U.S. banned pesticides are used on this imported produce. Additionally, many of the workers who harvest these fruits and vegetables in these countries may actually be sprayed by these toxic pesticide chemicals while still in the field harvesting. As a result of these farming practices, I typically prefer to steer clear of these imported fruits and vegetables and I choose to buy produce “Grown in the USA” or “Grown in California”… particularly thin-skinned root vegetables (i.e., carrots, beets) as well as celery, lettuce and tomatoes. Thicker skinned vegetables, like avocados, I might opt for Mexico produce, but only if they’re the right kind and the right price. If locally grown vegetables are available, I always opt for these.
The Kitchen Part III
As we return to the kitchen with our newfound knowledge, our food lifestyle should consist of whole real foods more often than man-made foods. Clearly, bread is a good thing and can be eaten in moderation, even though it is a man-made food. Rice, on the other hand, is a whole real food. Yes, its hull is removed and each grain is dried, but that’s about the extent to which it is modified, unlike grains of wheat.
Rice flour is available just as is wheat flour, but rice flour is less used to make baked goods than is wheat flour. The point is, bread has a place in the diet. However, so does rice. Both bread and rice are carbs. As a result, you want to treat them as the carbs portion of your plate.
When making meals, you want about equal parts fat, protein and carbs or 33% fat, 33% protein and 33% carbs dividing up your plate. Some say you should have less protein than fat or carbs, but that should be based on how your body responds to these macronutrients. If you can’t seem to lose weight, you might want to reduce your fat and carb intake a little, which will increase your protein intake.
There’s a complex relationship in the body between these three macronutrients. Each play off the other to help build muscle or increase fat. The point is, calories are the measure of how much energy you are expending. The macronutrients (which ultimately make up your calories), see to it that you gain or lose weight based on the number of calories you intake versus what you expend.
The kitchen is the place to make weight loss a reality via what you buy, what foods you make and how much you consume. You can add exercise in to help make your body fit and expend a bit more energy. However, if you do add in exercise, don’t get caught by the exercise trap thinking you can eat a lot more simply because you ran on a treadmill for 20 minutes. It doesn’t work that way. 20-30 minutes of exercise might allow you to eat one more piece of bread than you otherwise could. A single piece of bread is not very much food and definitely doesn’t equate to the calories in a candy bar or a pint of ice cream.
The point is, choose your calories carefully. Eat when it’s appropriate. Treat yourself occasionally. Eat in moderation. Don’t be suckered in by the exercise con that leads you to believe you can eat whatever you want simply because you took a 30 minute walk.
↩︎
How important is nutrition education in Schools?
Happy New Year, Randocity Readers! Welcome to the first post of 2019. Here’s a topic that’s been boiling for quite some time, but never quite mashed it into a written article. With the new year comes resolutions. Considering this is typically a new year resolution, it’s the perfect time to roll this article out. This topic is something I think that public schools and even colleges need to rethink. Let’s explore.
Growing Up, Food Choices and School
One of the things that more or less caused me lots of angst throughout grade school (and even into college), as I now reflect on it, was the lack of mandated nutrition education. I grew up in Houston and went to public school there and later went to college up state. At the time I was in grade school, I obviously didn’t know any better about nutrition and wouldn’t have challenged the ‘establishment’ even if I did. No, I was clearly in the dark on this topic.
One thing that I can definitively say about Houston ISD was its serious lack of food education. While there were classes available like Home Economics, these classes were far less about nutrition and more about how to prepare a meal and not burn it and not cut yourself. You know, the logistics of using pots and pans, cooking in the oven, using a blender or food processor, time budgeting and how to handle kitchen cutlery safely. As I said, logistics. While these are incredibly valuable kitchen safety and functionality education conversations, they have nothing whatever to do with smart food choices or in understanding healthy nutrition.
No, there was no such class available in elementary, junior high (now called “middle school”) or even high school. In fact, the cafeteria’s food choices served to the kids was actually some of the worst, least nutritional meals I’ve ever eaten in my entire life. They were edible, yes, but just barely.
Not only was the school remiss in teaching proper food education, the school entirely failed in feeding the students a proper meal that would aid in the nutrition learning process… which is really the most important part of any nutrition program. If you’re falling asleep in class because you ate the wrong foods, then perhaps it’s important to teach better food choices to avoid this outcome?
Unhealthy Choices
Before I dive deeper, let’s talk about the weird food choices from my school’s cafeteria. While I don’t recall exact meals served in my elementary school, I do recall the pints of milk that nearly every student bought and drank each day… sometimes two. Mostly I missed what was served each day due to the fact that I rarely bought a meal from the cafeteria. My parents packed me a lunch each day. However, what the cafeteria served was one from a set menu each day. One day might be pizza, another day might be hamburger and another might be Salisbury steak. If they served any fruit with the lunch, it was usually in the form of Jello. Oh, how I hated the school’s Jello. For whatever reason, it always had a very hard top “crust” that formed on the Jello that resembled more of chewing on rubber than a food product. Horrible.
As I said, I thankfully missed much of that nutritionally deficient and poor quality food fare as I rarely bought food from the cafeteria. Throughout elementary school, my parents made and packed my lunch in lunch box or bag and I would only purchase a pint of milk to have something to drink with my lunch.
When I did rarely eat a meal at the elementary school cafeteria, pretty much any meal served was either way overcooked, under cooked or simply tasted like a really bad 70s frozen TV dinner. I recall that the food mostly tasted of cardboard (little flavor from that grade C or D food). There was absolutely no care in the quality or the nutritional value of the food. It was simply supplied to “feed” the kids and, hopefully, get them through the rest of the day (at the cheapest cost possible).
It’s not that my bagged lunch was so much better, though. I mean, how many days in a row can you eat a bologna and cheese sandwich, some chips and/or maybe an apple or banana? Yep, that’s pretty much what my parents packed… that or peanut butter and jelly. It was a meal that needed to withstand no refrigeration. By the time we were ready to eat lunch, it was room temperature and was, well, not that tasty.
It was definitely a meal that left me wanting. Peanut Butter and Jelly offered its own share of problems, such as solid sustenance. Peanut butter is tasty enough, but it’s no where near filling enough to substitute for actual protein. The Jelly is just glorified fruit sugar. Jelly simply gave you a sugar high that would eventually drop so low as to make you tired and sleepy. Peanut butter and jelly was, in fact, one of the worst meals I could have eaten. I’m not necessarily speaking for others, but for me that meal didn’t work out. Thankfully, I almost always got lunch meat on a sandwich. Better, but obviously not best. It was almost always a sandwich so they wouldn’t have to pack silverware or containers. Occasionally, they might use the thermos in my lunch box to pack some soup, but that also lacked in being filling as PB&J… mostly because it was usually Campbell’s soup.
I don’t fault my parents as they really didn’t know better. Their food education throughout their schooling was as poor for them as it was for me. They made these food choices for us kids even though it wasn’t always the smartest of choices. It was mostly out of cost value or convenience (read speed). I can certainly understand them not wanting wake up two or more hours early to prepare cooked meals for us, then still be required to go to work later. I get it. But it also meant nutrition that didn’t fulfill our nutritional requirements. The cafeteria meals were hot and cooked, but not always that fresh or tasty. Either meal type left me wanting.
Middle and High School
As I moved into junior high and high school, my stance on nutrition only got marginally better. What I mean by that is that in junior high, I ate most of my meals by buying a cafeteria lunch. I rarely brought in bag lunches at this point. I guess, my parents were tired of having to make a meal every day and I was certainly tired of eating nearly the same sandwich every single day. So, I began buying meals at the cafeteria. Not the best choice I could have made in hindsight, but I definitely remember these meals.
These cafeteria meals consisted of a poor quality protein, including fried chicken, chicken fried steak and gravy, pizza (very, very bad pizza), spaghetti, Salisbury steak, hamburger (tasted like it was frozen) and other similarly horrible entrees. Everything served tasted as if it had been frozen solid an hour before. Our rectangular 4 or 5 compartment trays would also be fitted with a horribly overcooked and/or canned side dishes (i.e., green beans, corn, peas, etc) and a desert (Jello, ambrosia, carrot raisin salad, etc). Sometimes one of the tray slots would be filled with bread. The choices and food combinations were questionable, but always predictably the same. Because the school lunch program published its monthly meal schedule in advance, you could avoid the days when the worst foods were served… which was pretty much every day.
As I moved into High School, the whole lunch food dynamic changed for my first 1.5 years (before the school moved to a new location). Because my high school had no cafeteria at all when I started as a freshman, we had to fend for ourselves at lunch. Yeah, I know, it’s weird. Because of this dilemma at the school, a few of the faculty took it upon themselves to run to Del Taco or some other fast food place and buy a bunch of burritos or hamburgers, bring them back and sell them to us. I’d occasionally used this option when I didn’t have much time between classes. Again, nutrition was a second thought. It was less about feeding the kids a proper meal and more about getting the kids fed. It’s that cattle mentality.
Thankfully, our school campus overlapped with part of Houston Community College’s campus. Because HCC had a culinary program (such that it was), the students were tasked with operating an eatery and, thus, there was a school operated cafeteria on the top floor of their classroom building. Occasionally, I would end up there to eat lunch and, I will say, for the first time I had a reasonable quality and tasty lunch. It was probably even somewhat nutritious as they had a salad bar that I occasionally used. The bar was expensive because it was “by the pound”, but the ingredients were always freshly made and tasty. For me, it was a treat to eat this kind of food for lunch rather than burritos.
The last half of my high school years, the school had moved out of that facility and into a “new” building. I put that in quotes because while it was “new” it was horribly lacking in design and it was incredibly small for a high school building. I’m not sure what HISD was thinking when they designed it. I digress.
Anyway, we were again dependent on HISD to provide us with meals. This basically meant, we had to fend for ourselves because, once again, the food was total garbage. Instead of the cafeteria where you ask them to plate foods from a buffet bar, this was a walk up window and there was a fixed menu. One day it might be hamburgers, another day it might be pizza and another day who knows what crappy concoction they would sell us. The food was horrible, salty, sugary and greasy all at the same time. Yet, that’s what they served us at a similar (or sometimes higher) price to McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Del Taco or Wendy’s. In fact, because we had been so spoiled by being allowed to leave the campus for lunch during those 1.5 years at the older campus, we still took the opportunity to leave the campus to go get lunch. However, many of us ended up over at 7-Eleven because it was on the next block over and we could walk there and back in less than 10 minutes on our strict 30 allotted minutes. Fast food places required hopping into a car and driving for at least 5-10 minutes in addition to waiting on the order during a busy noon lunch crowd. You ended up eating your meal in the car on the way back because you had maybe 5 minutes to eat it if you waited until you got back.
None of these were terribly smart food choices, but this is what choices we had as students. Choices that could have been made better if we had had some nutrition classes to teach us better eating habits and had had better food choices served to us in the cafeteria. Or better, offer the students (at least in junior high on up) a real kitchen facility with microwaves to allow us to make our own lunches and offer up a fridge system to store our lunches until lunch time so the lunches aren’t sitting out for 4 hours without refrigeration.
Junk Food, Candy and Time Management
Candy bars, soda and generally sugary junk foods were common staples in my lunchroom beginning in junior high (7th grade). This was in addition to vending machines… which you couldn’t use during lunch because we were captive in the lunch room (doors were basically locked) and the vending machines were in the hall a fair distance away. If you managed to walk buy one during class exchange, you could buy and stock up before lunch, leaving it in your locker. If you did leave the lunchroom to go to the vending machine and were caught, you got detention.
In junior high, there was the cafeteria line which served “hot meals” on trays with very long lines, but there was also a concession booth in the back of the lunchroom that served foods like hot dogs, candy bars, chips, soda, granola bars, gum, candy with a much, much shorter line. It was basically the prepared stuff you’d find at a 7-Eleven or at a movie theater (minus popcorn).
Why is this important? During junior high school, the lunch line was so long, if you weren’t at the lunch room early, you’d be waiting to get your meal for upwards to 25 minutes in a very long line. The cafeteria workers were incredibly slow and it took even longer to pay for your meal due to the “meal program” slowness. Because the lunch lasted 30 minutes on the dot, that meant 5 minutes or less to woof down your meal.
This is an important point. Having enough time to eat a meal is just as important as the food that’s being served. The school didn’t care that it took students upwards to 25 minutes simply to buy their meal. Woofing down a meal in 5 minutes doesn’t offer enough time to properly chew your food. It just doesn’t work. Again, naïve school administration. It wasn’t my fault that my class was the farthest away from the lunchroom and let out last, yet I was constantly penalized with excessively short amounts of time to eat my meal if I chose to buy a meal from the line.
This meant three choices: bring your lunch, 5 minutes to eat or junk food available almost immediately. There were many times were I opted for the junk food so I could at least have 15-20 minutes to sit down and relax before the next class. It wasn’t the greatest choice, but it was “the lesser of those evils.” Junior high school ultimately taught me how to eat fast AND eat junk, but never eat nutritiously.
When I got to high school, the high school’s lunch window (toward the latter half of my time there) sold both a combination of meals and junk food. You made the choice when you got to the window. Because this window wasn’t part of the “official” HISD lunch program, you’d only find out what was being served the day of. This meant asking when you got to the window and then making a choice to buy or not. If you chose not, then you’d have to leave the campus and find a meal elsewhere. Believe me, the “meals” being served from that cafeteria window were some of the most questionable I’d ever had in school. Not only was the food expensive, it was simply horrible quality food. I walked away empty handed and ended up at 7-Eleven far too much of the time. Ultimately, it was trading one bad choice for another. But, at least it was something I could eat.
However, because of lunch period time constraints, sometimes there was no choice. As an example, one of the “meals” my high school lunch window regularly served (more than twice a week) was a Frito Pie. You know, pouring chili over the top of Fritos and topping it with cheese and onions. Yeah, such great nutrition there, if you consider salt, carbs and grease as nutritious. If you wanted fruit or salad, I can’t recall them ever selling that. Because these healthier choices of foods are more perishable than canned, frozen and bagged items, they didn’t want to keep it in the kitchen. Oh, how I longed for the days of the HCC cafeteria. In fact one or two times I decided to drive over there and eat instead. It wasn’t that far from the new school, but it was a hassle to leave and make it back on time. Instead, I’d usually make my way to 7-Eleven to their cold case and buy something prepackaged or to get a piece of fruit. Even then, towards my final year, the school office was trying to enforce not leaving the campus at lunch time. There’s no way that was not going to happen. Many of us still left to picked up lunch from 7-Eleven or McDonald’s or Wendy’s… just try and stop me.
In my senior year, one of the stickler academic instructors tried to hassle me one day for going to 7-Eleven. I simply told them I was on an errand for another instructor, which was a common request. He had to shut up and go away. Thankfully, it was my senior year and I could finally get away from that crap food.
Nutrition Education
The problem with public schools is that while they do a decent job at teaching the academic basics of history, math, biology and general science, schools typically neglect food science and fail to embrace the holistic idea of how food acts on the body. Students might learn about this topic if they happen to have parents who work in that profession, but many won’t learn it from school… which means most students didn’t learn it during my time in school. Today, schools may have added some nutrition classes, but I kinda doubt they’re where they need to be… teaching only the barebones basics and still serving questionable quality meals.
The closest that schools came to nutrition education at the time I was there was Home Economics (or whatever they might be calling it today). Home Economics is less about food and nutrition and more about the logistics of navigating a kitchen safely, knife handling, food prep, using kitchen appliances and timing of cooking so that all of the food lands on a plate at or close to the same time. It might have even included a discussion on budget shopping. That’s not nutrition, that’s logistics.
Basically, I learned nothing about food or nutrition until into my late-30s. I learned about it on my own slowly, which allowed me to better understand some of the problems I was experiencing to better my own quality of life through better food choices. To some degree, I still struggle with this only because of the lack of formal education around food and nutrition, thanks mostly to the lack of public education in teaching this important knowledge area.
Unfortunately, I moved from one type of “school” to effectively another when I took my first job at a theme park. Because the food being served there was only marginally better than my school’s food, I still didn’t learn about food and nutrition while working there. The food choices there were also questionable… and mostly consisted of a hamburger and fries. The park simply didn’t treat nutrition as anything important. It was more important to serve foods that people liked instead of supporting healthy nutritious choices. As employees, we had to suffer through with that food rationale geared towards park guests.
As employees, we also had no kitchen or fridge facilities to store our foods. If you wanted to bring something from home, you had to bring a small cooler yourself and then find a place to store it. Coolers only marginally worked because of the high outside temperatures during summer. For folks who worked in food service, they might be able to store a brought lunch in their restaurant’s fridge if the manager allowed it. That was only a perk for those specific workers. The general staff was offered no such kitchen facility when there was plenty of park space to build and offer such a lunchroom location.
Food is Energy
It’s clear, food is the energy needed to keep the body working. As they say, “You are what you eat.” That is a fairly accurate statement. Food is about balanced nutrition including balancing carbohydrates, proteins and fats in combination with vitamins and minerals. It’s also about understanding which foods contain which vitamins and minerals and understanding which specific foods fall under carbohydrates, fats and proteins by eyeing the food. For example, a hamburger patty is both fat and protein with very little carbs. A hamburger bun is almost all carbs with some fats. When you add vegetables, such as tomatoes and onions, this is primarily where vitamins and minerals come in.
Candy bars are primarily sugar and fats with a bunch of fillers, flavors and cocoa.
It’s really easy to write this now only because I’ve come to understand what is what. But, when you’re 5-18 years old, you don’t learn this. Like a foreign language, students learn best during these early years. Why this information is not imparted to children at that age just doesn’t make sense.
If I had been taught nutrition during my early school years, I could have moved into my 20s much more informed, with a healthier weight and ultimately made better food and nutrition choices during college years. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
Nutrition Classes
Nutrition is not a hard topic to grasp the basics. For example, understanding the Nutrition Facts label, understanding how to read an ingredient label and understanding what foods fall into which category (fats, carbs, protein) is actually mostly easy today, thanks to the standardized nutrition labeling requirements.
I guess schools thought that the Nutrition Facts label was so simple to understand that there’s no need to teach anything. Well, that’s not true. There are plenty of gotchas when reading a Nutrition Facts label. Sometimes it’s not about what’s on the label, it’s what’s missing from the label, such as food combinations.
Also, it’s quite important to offer sufficient time to consume the food in combination with supplying fresh, high quality meals is what would help the students to perform their best. For a timing example, the short 30 minutes offered to eat lunch in the cafeteria and the 10-15 minutes to woof down breakfast during the first class of the day. Teaching kids to eat fast is not a smart choice. Eating smart and chewing it properly is the smarter choice. As an example, sweet laden breakfasts causes the body to fight against sleepytime as insulin crashes because of the 150g of carbs during breakfast or lunch. This is why understanding smart nutrition is so important… such as how the foods act on the body.
For those students who have diabetes or require special dietary needs, these students become well versed in what to eat and what not to eat because of severe health consequences. Though, temptation is always there, there are severe consequences if they cheat. Kids with diabetes or food allergies learn these consequences early. Why does it take this level of consequence for kids to learn? Why can’t this type of information make its way to the general population of students? Setting up a nutrition class is not that hard to design, but it does require funding by the school. I guess schools just don’t feel that this level of nutrition education is important. It’s a short-sighted point by the schools.
Equipping our Kids for Success
Giving our kids every opportunity to succeed in life should be the goal of every school. Yet, withholding such vital information as how to eat properly in a world full of bad food choices simply doesn’t make any sense.
We teach students about such things as history to help prevent history repeating itself, yet we give students no tools to help manage food, nutrition and their body. Food can make or break the body. As a child, the body is very resilient to the fillers and chemicals placed into junk food. As we age, the body becomes less tolerant to these. This means that as our kids move into becoming young adults, then adults, many will forever struggle with weight issues and food related health problems… because they were given no tools in school.
By failing to equip our students to identify and avoid problematic foods, we are leading some of our kids down a path that will fail them. Knowing history, math, biology and science is great, but it doesn’t fully equip our kids to survive in the world, particularly when it comes to food choices.
Kids need to learn to make smart food choices in elementary school. They need to understand the difference between eating green beans or a salad over mac and cheese and chicken nuggets. They may not like green beans or salad, but they need to understand the positive benefits they could experience by eating them. Kids that age may not want to explore foods like these that early, but with a proper class, we could entice kids to want to explore these foods and become excited over them. This is the benefit of offering food choices and nutrition classes.
Bullying, Obesity and Kids
Much of the reason kids bully one another due to body weight issues. It might be that the kid is too thin and lanky, but it’s just as likely they’ll be overweight or even obese. Thin or fat are two sides of the same coin, usually resulting from improper relationships with food and simply not understanding nutrition. Being overly thin could be a metabolism thing, but it might also be the food choices. Being obese is also a metabolism problem in relation to food choices.
Weight loss or gain starts in the kitchen. The body needs proper nutrition based on the body type. If you’re predisposed to gaining weight, then that requires a different course of action with food than if you’re thin trying to gain weight. It’s all about tailored nutrition.
As I said above, the young body bounces back easily even when the wrong foods are being eaten. This is why kids can be both overweight and still be considered ‘healthy’. At that point, it would be considered a degree of health. Healthy isn’t simply a specific number. There’s variation between levels of health. You can fall under healthy with medical tests, but still feel awful, have aches and pains, sleep poorly and generally feel crappy overall. That’s a degree of unhealthy. Even kids can suffer from this problem.
Growing up, I couldn’t sleep more than 5-6 hours at a time. That wasn’t a sleeping behavior problem alone. That was a food and nutrition problem. When I eat properly at the proper times during the day, I can sleep for up to 8 hours, but generally hit the 7 hour mark before waking. I still struggle with proper nutrition. Today, that’s less about naïvety than time constraints.
It’s also important to understand moderation and variety in food consumption. Eating the same food day in and out may be tasty, particularly if the food is Pizza or Mac and Cheese, but that doesn’t make it a healthy food habit. It’s easy to become deficient in nutrition if you’re not getting balanced foods… like eating a piece of fruit or vegetables at some of the meals. It’s also about cooking and raw foods. Vegetables can be eaten raw or cooked.
The point is, teaching a proper food lifestyle from an early age can mean better body image, feeling better, more energy and a more positive outlook when at school. By eating only junk food and sticking to a diet that consists of the same foods over and over, the body may not be getting what it needs to concentrate in class or getting proper sleep. This can mean irritability, irrational behavior and perhaps leading to bad grades or being a troublemaker. Eating properly cannot in any way fix mental health issues, but it can improve health and well being, including mental well being. This is why it’s important to give students every possible tool to help them not only succeed in school, but have life tools to help them succeed into adulthood.
Raw vs Cooked
School cafeterias always cook the food until it’s overcooked. However, eating raw fruit or vegetables is a very good way to add more vitamins and minerals to your diet. Because we’ve recently had a spate of problems with raw vegetables (i.e., Salmonella or E.Coli), many people feel that they should be cooking their vegetables. Cooking vegetables is great, but it also strips some of the important nutrients from the food. This is why it’s important to include both raw and cooked vegetables in your diet. If you’re concerned over Salmonella or E.Coli, then lightly steam the vegetables. Let them remain mostly raw, but give them enough hot steam time to kill off any outside bacteria. Try to keep that vegetable as raw as possible. If a green vegetable has turned a dull yellow-green, then it’s overcooked. Green vegetables should remain a vibrant green color even when steamed.
To eat fruits and vegetables raw, wash them with at least water. Better, wash them in a diluted vinegar solution (3 parts water to 1 part vinegar). The vinegar won’t damage the produce and also won’t in any way preserve it, but it will kill off almost all of the bacteria and pesticides (and any remaining soil). You can also buy commercial produce wash solutions like FIT or Veggie Wash, but these can be more expensive than plain vinegar.
If you’re really concerned about this problem, I’d suggest visiting your local farmer’s produce market and get to know your local growers. Ask them how they manage their crops, the kinds of pesticides they use, the kinds of fertilizer they use and also ask about their general produce storage and handling practices (make sure they’re keeping the produce properly stored, such as chilled and that they are packed separately from other vegetables).
Shopping for produce also gives you the opportunity to take your children with you and let them pick out produce that is appealing to them. Shopping lets them explore the fascinating world of fruits and vegetables and lets them pick them up, touch them and see how they feel. It’s a way to get your kids interested in more than chicken nuggets, pizza and mac and cheese. Children are naturally curious explorers. Let’s let them do what they do best and explore the world of fruits and vegetables through new eyes. They may not like everything they try, but that’s okay. They’ll find at least something that they like. Kids are also more likely to like it if you let them choose rather than trying to force the foods on them. Food exploration is an important tool to entice children into trying fruits and vegetables. If you take them to a farmer’s market, many produce vendors cut up and offer fruit samples right there. This gives your child a chance to try the fruits right at the market.
Buying local produce, you can typically avoid many of the problems you find with the large commercial growers who supply your local supermarkets… and that includes supermarkets like Whole Foods and Sprouts, even as much as they tout fresh, healthy, whole foods and produce. Buying local doesn’t necessarily get you better tasting produce, but many times it does. For example, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries and raspberries in the supermarket are often bland and not at all sweet. Buying from a local grower, many times you’ll find much, much sweeter berries at or less than store prices. But, it’s really less about the price and more about the quality of the nutrition. It’s also about food exploration.
College
When I moved onto college, not much changed in terms of food quality. Our college cafeteria treated food towards students like someone might treat feeding pigs on a farm…. just throw some random slop out there and they’ll eat it.
My college cafeteria food clearly created some of the worst food I’d ever experienced at a school. In hindsight, the food itself was probably not much worse than HISD’s food… it was the extremely poor food handling practices that made it much, much worse. For example, when the college cafeteria served hamburgers, they would cook the meat in advance, place them into some kind of flavored water solution and leave them overnight in the fridge. Then they’d pull the metal hot table bins from the fridge, unwrap them and place them onto a hot grill to heat them up for the day.
Not only were the hamburger patties not fresh, they tasted weird. I think I only ever ate one or two before bowing out of that mess. Now keep in mind that the college forced a meal plan on every incoming freshman and sophomore who lived in the dorms. I can understand why they forced it. The food was so grade D that there was no other way they could sell that trash to anyone actually willing to pay at the register. On these bad hamburger days, I’d make my way to Whataburger, who always cooked at least grade B burgers fresh to order… none of that weird floating in hot water grade D nonsense.
It also meant that, for the first time, I had the option to make better food choices for myself. Food choices that not only worked for my budget, but that also provided fresh hot nutritious meals; meals that didn’t leave me feeling lethargic, sleepy and generally crap. That not to say I didn’t occasionally overindulge and get that way, but I began learning much more about nutrition on my own while in college. I also began learning because due to the crap way I had been taught to eat my meals in 5 minutes in junior high (reinforced by my first job) and the kinds of food I’d been taught to eat. I had also begun experiencing digestive problems.
At the time, I’m quite sure the college offered nutrition classes because of their various athletics and Kinesiology programs, but I didn’t take any of these classes. Though, I’m certain they were offered. In hindsight, I probably should have taken at least one class just to find out what I didn’t know. Unfortunately, my college degree already kept me busy. My degree plan just didn’t have any room after I’d filled in all of very few electives with classes that helped me graduate faster. However, my public school days definitely offered no nutrition classes. There was simply nothing available. If I had wanted to take a class like this, I’d have had to do it after school on my parent’s dime. My parents wouldn’t have agreed to this. Though, even in junior high, I was aware of services like Weight Watchers… and I’d even considered joining. I simply had no spare time (or spare money as they required you to buy into their food).
In high school, there were sex ed classes, but there were no nutrition classes… definitely none at my high school. In junior high, if there was any nutrition conversation, the extent of it was in a biology class, usually offering a very academic overview… being less about proper nutrition than the sheer basics about how food works on the body. There were zero nutrition classes available during elementary school, the most formative time when children should be exposed to proper nutrition.
Sure, we understand what tastes good (ice cream, Cheetos and Coke) and what tastes bad (broccoli and liver), but that’s such a basic understanding for a child, it’s just surface understanding of food, but completely skips healthy nutrition. It’s just a “I like this, but I don’t like that” kind of preference… which has nothing at all to do with making healthy food choices or nutrition.
No, it seems many public schools completely ignore nutrition and just how much healthy eating contributes not only to weight, but also to overall health, mental health, well-being and focus. That’s not to say that we should eat nothing but Kale salads with sprouts. Moderation is the key, eating healthy means making choices that allow the body to feel its best, act its best, look its best and be its best. Splurging on ice cream or soda or pizza or fried chicken is fine, occasionally. Everyone needs moderation in their diet. These should be rare events rather than every day. Treat them as ‘treats’, not as ‘staples’.
Controversial Topics, Making Choices
Nutrition is kind of a “he said, she said” world. Because there are so many foods (real and fake) on the market, every food industry wants an edge to get their product to sell. For this reason, this is why there’s all of these conflicting food topics… such as eggs are good, then eggs are bad, then eggs are good again… and so on. This has happened with salt, eggs, shrimp, avocados, sugar, saccharin, food dyes, food additives and even Coke. This is why schools probably shy away from setting up classes.
If you set up nutrition class, you’d have to decide which side of the fence you’re on… or at least so a school might think. This means that they might need to side with the egg industry that “eggs are good”. But then, some parents might not like that their child is being taught that.
Schools prefer to avoid this kind of confrontation with parents, particularly vocal parents who might do damage to the school. This is a misguided reason not to include a nutrition program in the curriculum. It would be simply easy to avoid this problem. You don’t spout the marketing rhetoric at all in the class. For something like an egg, simply offer what an egg is made of, the nutrition it offers and let the student (and parents) decide if the food belongs in the child’s diet. Don’t even bring up the industry politics of the egg. The point to school is to create an environment for critical thinking. After all, critical thinking is what we’re expected to do as adults. We need to think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions. No one can really make a choice about their own body but each person. This is the very message that needs to be driven home in any nutrition class. Basically, don’t blindly listen to an advertisement that says, “Eggs are good” or, “Eggs are bad”. Come to your own conclusion for yourself. If you eat an egg and it doesn’t agree with you, then clearly eggs are not for you. If the parents are strict vegans and they project that onto their children, then eggs may not be for the child.
Teaching students to listen and pay attention to how their own body reacts to eating a food is the only way that student can make an informed choice. For example, if drinking milk equals upset stomach and indigestion, this could mean lactose intolerance. This is the perfect example of listening to your own body. If you try something and your body reacts in a way that you don’t expect, perhaps you eliminate that food from your diet.
That’s the key element that needs to be taught in a nutrition class. That’s smart food choices. That’s choosing foods based on how your body reacts to it. We are not taught to do this as children. But, it’s something we learn going into are 30s and 40s when we can put 2 and 2 together. We learn which foods work for our bodies and which do not. Most of us learn this by trial and error. Some of us never learn and continue to feed our bodies with foods that make us sick and sicker.
Nutrition Concepts
This is why it’s important to introduce nutrition concepts early in a child’s life. Get them thinking about it in 5th, 6th or 7th grade. By this point, most children have probably experienced getting sick by eating some sort of food. Learning by experience is an important tool that schools can leverage in any nutrition class. Teaching young children about these concepts early will help them use critical thinking skills in the future… a valuable tool that can be used for a whole lot more than food choices and nutrition. It may even save a child’s life for critical food allergies.
For example, when I was aged 10-12, I never put 2 and 2 together about food. My parents would drop me off at the YMCA for a summer camp program. We would be out and about on a bus the whole day. I was packed a bag lunch, just like at school. Every day when we arrived back at the Y and before being picked up, I’d have a raging headache… every single day. One thing that I would get nearly every day was a chocolate candy bar from the vending machine when we would get back. Because we ate promptly at noon, we had no other food for the rest of day from then until around 5PM when I got picked up. I was rather hungry when we got back to the Y, particularly if we had run around outside most of the day. I’d save up the 35¢ or so for the candy bar and buy one most every day.
It never dawned on me that it was likely both the chocolate and the sugar rush that either caused or exacerbated the headache. I can’t say it was a migraine as it didn’t last overnight. Looking back now, I’m almost certain it was a sugar related headache. It might have been low blood sugar due to not eating much after our lunch or it could have been the rapid rise and fall of blood sugar from the precipitous insulin rush. It might have also been that I already had the headache and chocolate bar doubled or tripled its effect.
Since I was never diagnosed and because I had no classes in nutrition, it was only guesswork for both myself and my mother. She always found it curious that I had these, but it was never investigated because it was gone the next morning. If I had had nutrition classes during my time at public school, I might have been able to find the trigger and, with my parents help, eliminate the problem so that I could come home each day after camp feeling just fine with fond memories of what we had just done that day. Instead, most of what we did at camp is just a blur because the headaches seems to have not allowed those memories to “set”. Keep in mind that just a few years later, I worked outdoors every day and rarely, if ever, had headaches at the end of the day. I also didn’t eat candy bars after working. It’s one of life’s critical thinking skills that you must learn when considering nutrition and how nutrition and food affects each of us. This is an important lesson that could be taught much earlier to students, but isn’t.
Grade School Today
It has been a while since I’ve attended grade school, so I will concede it appears school districts have implemented some food science and nutrition programs. It seems that HISD is now offering a Breakfast in the Classroom program which allows students to eat at their desks during morning announcements. Unfortunately, what is served is limited to a single entree item. Students are also given a short amount of time to consume the food. If what’s offered is not something a child can eat (i.e., diabetes, allergies or autism), then they go hungry for the morning. I’d also include that some example meals include Turkey Sausage Egg Sandwich, Beef Kolache, Yogurt, Chicken Biscuit and Strawberry Oatmeal Breakfast Bar as the ‘main entree’. Along with this ‘entree’ portion, the students are served regular or skim milk and a selection from: apple juice, an apple, Craisins or similar fruit (basically, something sugary).
While having the students eat breakfast in the classroom isn’t something that happened in my school days, starting the day off with these fatty and sugary foods isn’t a recipe for focus because the foods served are sometimes too rich to start the day. The school should start the day with fresher whole ingredients that satisfy student hunger better with less emphasis on sausage egg biscuits, dried sugary fruits, breakfast bars and apple juice. You can serve these kinds of rich foods once a week, but not every single day. Serving these as “treat” foods gives the students something to look forward to… or better, offer the students a menu and let the parents and/or student pick their morning breakfast in advance. If the student fails to choose their breakfast, then serve them the ‘selected’ entree of the school’s choice. Letting the parent decide what their child eats at school allows the parent to head off health problems with their child.
HISD also claims to be helping students learn about food and nutrition. Here’s an excerpt from HISD’s web site about its nutrition education program:
Houston ISD is committed to teaching food literacy and food inclusion through a nutrition-focused curriculum. Food literacy starts with understanding where food comes from. It then expands to understanding relationships with food. This begins at a personal level; how different foods can be beneficial to the body and how some foods do not have any benefits for the body. This includes an openness to trying new foods and seeking out exposure to new foods. The relationship with food expands to cultural preference with foods, understanding both personal culture and others’ cultures and how that impacts food choice and why preferences vary between cultures. Expanding even further, food literacy includes the relationship with food/agriculture on a global, environmental, and economical scale. Food inclusion promotes a pattern of healthy choices that are flexible enough to fit into many cultural preferences and promote balance, variety and moderation. Overall, this means making delicious choices that benefit your body. The message of health should promote a positive relationship with food, avoiding messaging that use fear instead of facts. Nutrition Services aims to educate our students in the classroom, in the garden and in the cafeteria.
Unfortunately, I can’t find any information on HISD’s web site that discusses its class offerings, its class content, how or when the students can take these classes (i.e., are they electives?, are all grade levels required to learn this?, etc), or even if this curriculum is required by the students. It’s good that HISD has itself learned the effect that food has on students in focus, but I’m not sure that what’s being served to the students and what is taught encourages students to eat healthy meals and understand why some foods are to be considered ‘good’ and some are considered ‘bad’. It seems most of what HISD has implemented is more being driven by bad press against the school district and keeping up with competing school districts than actual commitment to the importance of food.
What HISD has done so far is definitely a step in the right direction. However, it’s nowhere near getting the importance that it needs in the classroom. Food and nutrition is equally important to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses. Food and nutrition clearly falls under science, but it is almost never treated with the same level of importance as a biology, physics, chemistry and others. Teaching the students the importance of food in the world may lead one of these students into a food breakthrough that helps out the world. That can’t happen when students aren’t properly exposed to the importance and role of food in everyday human life.
Sure, we must eat food to live. That’s the very basics of food. Food science goes well beyond that by enabling students to become productive adults who might create a food invention that can feed the hungry of the world. Yes, food keeps our own bodies fueled, but food science education can bring about positive food changes in the world. Only these new fresh eyes can see what adults cannot.
Other ISDs
In researching this article, I’ve found many larger ISDs also offering Breakfast in the Classroom programs. For example, New York and Los Angeles both have BIC programs. In the case of LA Unified, the students basically do all of the work from retrieving the food in a cart, to serving themselves, to cleaning up and returning the cart. Here’s a video that describes Los Angeles Unified School District’s program:
Of course, this doesn’t mean every school district offers a BIC program yet. Many still do not. They may offer breakfast in a cafeteria, but apparently participation in cafeteria breakfasts is as low as 30%. It makes sense, arrive at school early to eat breakfast or sleep in longer? I’d say that one is a no-brainer. No student wants to get to school any earlier than they absolutely have to. However, serving breakfast in the classroom is a smarter approach because it means students don’t have to show up early to eat breakfast. Students are already be in their first class by a certain time anyway and eating breakfast during that dead 10-15 minutes while the teacher is performing morning attendance, making announcements and getting their daily plans together is a smarter way to use that time. Though, it is also costlier because someone needs to pay for the meals. I would hope that students could bring their own meals from home and are allowed to eat those instead of eating the supplied food if they so choose.
If I could have eaten food during the first 15 minutes of my first class, I certainly would have taken advantage. However, at the time, my school had a strict no-eating-in-the-classroom policy. Though, some of us did sneak eat when we had the chance. We didn’t do it often because the penalties were pretty severe if caught. It also meant less food to eat at lunch.
While I’m all for the Breakfast in the Classroom program idea, the way it’s currently implemented is a bit lacking both from a nutrition perspective and definitely from a tailored nutrition perspective. In the case of food, one size does not fit all.
Health begins in the Kitchen
While performing exercise improves the body’s conditioning, it doesn’t always help with weight loss. There are many people who exercise every day and never lose any weight. Why? Because their nutrition is wrong. Many people mistakenly believe that exercising equals weight loss. That’s not true. Weight loss begins in the kitchen, not at the gym. To lose weight, you have to eat smart. Eating smart means understanding your body’s energy requirements for the day. In fact, you can lose weight simply by changing your food lifestyle.
I write, “food lifestyle” instead of “diet” because the word “diet” has negative connotations. It also has connotations to mean “temporary”. Meaning, you do it for a short time, lose the weight and then go back to “regular eating”. That doesn’t work. That’s also a recipe for the Yo-Yo problem. Weight goes down, then weight goes back up. In fact, the Yo-Yo problem is actually worse on health than staying at a consistent weight, even if somewhat overweight.
To lose weight, you need to change your thinking about food from “dieting” to making food lifestyle choices. What “lifestyle choices” means is changing the way you think about and eat on a permanent daily basis. For example, drop the candies, cakes and sugary foods from your diet entirely and adopt a cheat day system. Make the healthy foods your primary goto foods. If you want to snack, grab carrots, celery, broccoli and cherry tomatoes instead of a granola bar, a breakfast bar, chips or even cereal.
Adopt a don’t buy it attitude. If you keep the “bad” foods at a minimum around the house, you can’t cheat on them. No ice cream in the freezer? You can’t eat it. No cookies? You can’t eat them. And so on. This is a healthy food lifestyle. Instead, keep carrots, broccoli, cauliflower and cherry tomatoes around. Keep oranges, apples and bananas around. If you have these around the house, then you’ll eat them if you really want a snack.
Better, don’t snack and wait until your next full meal. Sometimes it’s only an hour away. In fact, if you’re an hour or less away from your next meal, get some water and wait for that. In fact, water is a good quencher. If you think you’re hungry, go get some water and drink it first. You might find that that satisfies your hunger for long enough to get you to your next meal. If you do find that you really do need a snack, grab something fresh (fruits and vegetables) over something packaged (chips, granola, breakfast bars, cereal).
For the cheat day, you can eat out, eat ice cream or basically eat anything you want, though I always recommend eating in moderation. Don’t stuff yourself to the point of being sick or uncomfortable. Eat until you’re no longer hungry, not until you are “full”… there is a difference. This allows you to partake in holiday meals, birthday meals and other special occasions. Leave these decadent foods to the special occasions, not your regular meals. Also, don’t skip meals because you’re “not hungry”. Eat something anyway… it doesn’t have to be a lot, it just needs to be enough to keep your body regular. If you want to eat a cookie or a piece of cake occasionally, that’s fine. It shouldn’t be everyday. If you’re single eating alone, don’t buy a gallon of ice cream or full sized pie. Buy smaller portions and individual sizes.
Food Combinations
Without getting into a ton of nutrition detail here, eating certain foods together is more likely to encourage weight gain than eating these foods an hour apart. For example, drinking milk together with cereal is a great way to gain weight. There’s fat (and sugar) in the milk and sugar in the cereal. The sugar in the cereal and milk act on the body to release insulin which then prompts the body to uptake the fat in the milk into storage via adipose tissue. This is especially true when you consider what other foods you might have already eaten that day. You don’t want to encourage the body to store fat. You want the encourage the body to use the fat stores that are already there, this reducing weight.
There are many food combinations that can lead to fat gain. There are also food combinations that lead to fat loss simply by eating certain foods together or eating certain foods far apart (or not at all).
Of course, calories also matter. Calories are a unit of energy consumed versus expended. Unless your body is in a near constant calorie deficit, you could gain weight by consuming the wrong foods together.
There are two ways to get into a calorie deficit. The first is obvious… exercise. The second is through food choices. Exercise doesn’t guarantee a calorie deficit because you can still consume more calories than you have expended. For this reason, exercise doesn’t guarantee weight loss… only a calorie deficit does, and that is achieved in the kitchen, not in the gym.
Kids, Food and Obesity
Armed with that information, let’s bring it full circle. Food isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. Offering the same Breakfast in the Classroom meal to all students may not be the smartest nutrition approach for every student and may still lead to obesity in some students. For example, if a student already ate a huge breakfast before coming to school, they may still consume the BIC food simply because it’s there. This encourages overeating. The BIC program in no way polices the student to find out if they have already eaten a meal for the day. It simply assumes that every student hasn’t eaten before coming to school. Many haven’t, but some have.
This is a lax approach to nutrition for the students. If the school wants to be responsible for maintaining a healthy student weight, then they should be responsible for all of the meals for the student during their charge. The parents should refrain from serving the student any food other than dinner… and even then, the school should provide a nutrition plan for the student so that the parent knows what and how much to serve the student at the end of the day as a guide. Of course, the parent is free to do whatever they want, but that encourages obesity if they do.
When creating exercise programs for the students, the school should take into account the nutrition being fed to the students and offer exercise programs that work in concert with the amount of food being served. This means that the students will receive a balanced amount of exercise against food intake and lead the student to maintain their body weight.
If a student is overweight or obese, the school needs to have a nutrition counselor on staff who can tailor a meal program to help the student get back into a healthy weight by tailoring their meals to lead to that outcome. This means a tailored breakfast and lunch program. Once the student is back at their correct body weight, put the student onto the balanced nutrition program to maintain that weight.
Right now, the schools are simply throwing standardized food at the students to help maintain attendance (primary goal) and keep the students awake and focused (secondary goal). Those goals, while commendable, don’t aid the student into a healthy body weight. The schools aren’t taking a holistic approach to food, exercise and nutrition to not only keep students focused, but also to help the students maintain a healthy body weight for their height. A holistic approach is a smartest approach for the students health and well-being. School districts are still no where near this level of holistic understanding of food and nutrition for students. If the schools were to tailor food programs to an individual student’s needs, healthy body weight can be achieved and maintained giving bully students one less piece of ammo against fellow students. More than the bullying, it teaches the student how to maintain a healthy body weight going into adulthood (the most important aspect). Empowering students with understanding of proper nutrition and how to manage their own bodies will give them a huge edge when getting a job.
Being overweight or obese can affect your chances at landing a job. Being at a healthy body weight gives you that extra first impression you need when interviewing for a job. Don’t think for a moment that being overweight isn’t considered by a hiring manager. If a specific job requires a certain level of mobility, movement and carrying capacity, a hiring manager might not consider someone who is overweight or who appears overall unhealthy. Weight discrimination is real in the job market. Learning how to manage weight early in childhood and in the teens goes a long way to maintaining that weight into adulthood. Children who fail to be taught this are at a disadvantage when becoming an adult.
Schools need to consider a holistic and individualistic approach to food and nutrition when putting together their food and exercise programs for students. One size definitely does not fit all when it comes to nutrition and exercise.
↩︎
Random Thoughts - Randocity! 
2 comments