So a friend of mine that was on campus at the university here today sent me a text message that perfectly sum’s up how screwed up and hypocritical our society is when it comes to nutrition ‘education’ vs ‘application’
This is the message she sent me:
“The student nutrition awareness program is giving away candy treat bags for correctly answering nutrition trivia questions…Oh the irony”
This is a perfect example of the big problem with ‘nutrition’ and ‘nutritionism’ information/education.
You and I can read all we want about nutrition, but putting it into practice is a whole different ball of wax. Most people don’t even follow their own advice when it comes to nutrition.
As if the “Student Nutrition Awareness Program” was giving away bags of candy to reward students for knowing something about nutrition. Am I the only person that finds this wholly ironic and completely hypocritical?
As far as I can tell they are missing the whole point of their purpose by doing this.
The only lesson they are teaching here is that an indulgent overly processed lump of sugar and fat is a great tool for a reward mechanism.
This also reminds me of how backwards it is when parents use dessert as a reward mechanism to force their children to eat their whole dinner plate of food first. In this case the parent is reinforcing overeating with overeating.
In other words, the parent is telling the kid to eat more of the food they don’t like and then they will be rewarded with even more food that tastes better…no wonder there is a childhood obesity epidemic.
[I swear some people should need to pass a licensing exam to raise children…but that’s for another post…or dozen]
Anyway, this is your friendly and ironic pre-halloween reminder about our messed up societal relationship with food is. If you’re gonna eat Halloween candy, go for it and enjoy it. Then get back to sensible eating on Monday.
Enjoy Halloween, and I’ll be back on Monday.
John
