Pressures

I think the thing people forget when they push all the blame on parents is a point that one kid in our class illustrated quite well before we finished class today. He pointed out that to be a parent is very exhausting, and being a single parent who works full time is doubly difficult.

The most important thing to remember here is that it’s easy to go ‘Parents are dumb, buying fast food with their kids when they have other choices.’ However, even looking at the grocery store and buying all your meals at once and not giving into an ounce of nagging can often result in bad diets for kids. Try buying a healthy diet on a budget. Then try finding time to home cook all of it. If you go the low sodium, no additives, no preservatives route, you may be SOL. Here’s an article that addresses this common knowledge if you don’t know about it:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-healthy-food/

“Healthy eating really does cost more That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, may help explain why the highest rates of obesity are seen among people in lower-income groups. “

I experienced this firsthand when I got married and suddenly my personal income plummeted. I was a vegetarian Freshman and Sophmore year. Now, I’m not a nutritionist, and I found with everything else in my life it was too difficult to balance my diet without the hyper effective protein sources of meat, eggs, and fish. Most parents, too, don’t have time to sit down and make complex dietary plans for all their kids. Even if they wanted too, they might not be able to afford the diet their kids need. Add in the fact advertisers make it so kids don’t even consider healthy foods an option, it leads to the double whammy of economic and social pressure. Convenience becomes a third factor. Why do we blame the parents for acting in a natural way instead of the admittedly abstract nutritional pyramid when all immediate physical factors push the culture towards indulging in fast, unhealthy, but affordable and socially desirable foods? This is a prime example of expecting people to behave in an unnatural way, and to a certain extent blaming the individual. Of course, if they got rid of the high calorie foods, that doesn’t necessarily mean that healthier ones would fall into the budget of the single parent. No one can predict what would happen if there was legislation in nutition. My point is that with all these pressures, and even the government changing their policies to shift the blame to the individual with the new exercise orients MyPyramid system, things are a lot harder for parents than people seem to want to admit. Take time out to consider a situation where your loved ones, your media, and even your schedule were telling you to do something. Did you oppose all of them? Could you imagine doing it everyday of your life for eighteen years?