Link: AP: Nutrition education ineffective - USATODAY.com.
Hmmmm ... why do I have the distinct feeling that a bunch of these nutrition education programs have a lot in common with similar government programs designed to deal with drug use ("Just Say No!") and sexual activity/teen pregnancy (abstinence only)? In other words, lots of nice friendly helpful information that totally misses the real point, not even addressing the deep-seated psychological, behavioral, familial, socioeconomic, and media/cultural issues behind the problem?
Particularly when dealing with weight, my experience is that without engaging the behavior-modification component, only a very few of these students will ever actualize all that nutritional education. As I've said before, the mighty Lizard Brain doesn't give a good goddamn about your fancy book-learnin' -- it just wants to chow down, and attempting to reason with it will only get your head bitten off as a snack. You have to treat your Lizard Brain the way the Dog Whisperer on TV trains dogs--he doesn't reason with them, he cuts to the chase by assuming the alpha dog role and initiating behavior modification.
Whether the gummint has the skills, will, wisdom, and sensitivity to create a program that does what the Dog Whisperer does, without screwing it up royally and turning it into something genuinely harmful, is a whole other issue. Frankly, especially given the current Neanderthal political regime, I don't even want them to try. Way too scary a 1984 scenario.
So I guess I'm saying I'd rather see this administration waste taxpayer money on an ineffective program, than waste a few orders of magnitude more taxpayer money coming up with a frightening and dangerous program. Sad, huh?
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