Rodney

Ah, but you will. If it's as bad as it sounds, right or wrong, there's no way around it. If someday 25 or 30 percent of the families in America have diabetes sufferers in them, the politicians will fall all over themselves to pander to the voters. Because this problem is definitely not limited to NYC, and not to Democrats or Republicans.

I originally posted the article because I found it shocking that the problem was so bad in New York. But not because the problem was strange to me. I spent some time in the wonderful world of education recently, working in schools in some pretty poor districts. In those schools it's more common to see a chubby kid than a "normal" one, more common to see a fat kid than a lean one, and more common to see an obese kid than an athletic one.

The parents usually have little or no education; both parents are working, or it's a single-parent unit that's sharing housing with relatives. All the adults are working, it's hazardous or dangerous to play outside (either there are no parks nearby, or gangs), and so the kids stay home after school as latchkeys or under the supervision of an older kid. They sit there and play video games, and eat snack food. The snack food is there because the adults aren't cooking. The kids even eat junk food for breakfast. The parents really don't know about it -- they have very little education, know little about health and nutrition, have little time to cook, and hell, the kids like it. The parents are pretty hefty, too, but because they're usually busy humping boxes, cleaning offices, or working in the fields for a living, the problem's not as bad.

The kids don't eat their healthy school lunches because they're too full on the snack food -- did I mention they bring it to school and eat it at recess? I talked a couple of parents about this, and it comes down to this: 1) it's cheap, 2) the kids like it and ask for it, and 3) they want to kids to have things they like, if they can afford to give it to them. And snack food is cheap.

(I worked at a school for homeless kids for a while, and _those_ kids were in better shape than the low-income kids with housing, because we made sure that they got two balanced meals a day, five days a week, plus apple slices only for snacks. And soup kitchens tend to serve nutritionally balanced meals, at least out here. And you don't tend to sit in the living room all day when you don't have a living room to sit in; of course, who says a vacant lot full of broken glass and used needles is any better?)

There is a problem in places like NYC, apparently, where low-income people don't have transport or convenient access to healthy foods. In the SF Bay Area, which I live near, some community and senior citizens in inner cities are beginning to address that by holding "farmer's markets:" essentially, the staff goes to a wholesaler every week, buys a bunch of greens, brings it back to the neighborhoods and sells it at cost. More like this needs to be done; if you make it easy to get bad food and harder to get good food, what's going to happen?

So one answer is better access to good food, in some urban areas. But the main point is education. Ust, maybe you just don't understand how many people in this country don't have a clue. The schools I worked with were trying to do what they could; but when one principal tried to ban bringing snack food to schools, the parents rose up in wrath, because she was being "mean" to their kids. They haven't a clue. They need to get one. A national campaign might help, targeted at the people who know the least and are the most outside the mainstream. You can't just say, help the kids and not the adults; because the adults who don't know are raising the kids to be diabetic.

Would you pay for education? I hope, yes, because otherwise you're helping to foot the tab for this trainwreck, whether you like it or not. Gawd bless democracy.