Health: Teach Your Children Well

As our soil gets ever more depleted and our food more adulterated, we're faced with a rapid increase in obesity worldwide. Undernourished yet fat, we struggle against our weight without a clear sense of what we're fighting. Is it corn syrup? Refined foods? A harried lifestyle that results in eating highly processed food because we don't have time to shop and cook sensibly? A viral infection?

Who knows. Everyone of these things has been blamed at one time or another for obesity. We have questions, not answers.

The French are taking the lead in the battle against obesity without sacrificing good taste. You can eat, and eat good, and eat well, and enjoy your food and still control your weight, they believe.

Salient quotes:

The aim of the exercise is to encourage children to eat something in the morning and to ensure it is a balanced meal.

[...]

Of course moderation is another key message.

Lunch in the canteen was three courses, but the portions were small.

The children started with vegetable soup and bread, followed by pasta in sauce with vegetables, and then fruit.

From an early age the children are taught about food groups.

It would appear, from the article, that the children are given a wide variety of foods in small portions, and that the menu is largely vegetarian.

While we at Casa de Los Gatos are not vegetarian (los gatos are obligate carnivores - without their daily portion of MEAT!! they would fall ill and die), the human members of the household eat a diet that is mostly grains, beans/legumes, and vegetables.

Raising animals for meat on the scale that is currently practised is endangering health worldwide. Vast tracts of ecologically necessary wilderness are cleared to create feedlots and chicken batteries, and the animals housed therein are fed a revolting diet of each others' bodies and brains, newsprint, and antibiotics to prevent the disease inevitable in such crowded conditions. It is time for the world at large to stop these revolting practices. The nitrogen runoff endangers our oceans, the waste endangers our farm produce, and the suffering of the animals endangers our very humanity.

Not everyone can, or wants to, stop eating meat. But we can each do our part by consuming it in small quantities - as the occasional treat rather than the mainstay of our diet. We can buy local, humanely raised and slaughtered animals, and keep our consumption down to under two pounds a week of meat, fish, chicken, and all other animal products combined. Our planet - and our bodies - will thank us.

This has been your weekly preach. We are getting off our high horse now.

Stumble It!