I was looking at superimposing maps, e.g., politics and cancer, things like that when I stumbled onto this site.
It shows the distribution in the US of Type II Diabetes in 2004:
Now just be looking at this you might believe that in the last five years the southern US has been swept by, er, well what?
Hmmm...
Looking a bit more closely at the maps themselves (as opposed to the web site containing them) we see that the label on the maps reads "Behavioral Risk Factor...".
What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it does not mean that Type II diabetes has been diagnosed or identified.
Does it mean that the southerners have been eating a lot more Twinkies and drinking a lot more Jack Daniels in the last five years?
Er, no...
It seems instead that the maps really show an increase in diabetes related risk.
As I have written before risk does not correlate with action. One thing, at least from this site, is that its quite possible that the CDC (creators of the chart) have changed the meaning of "risk" in the five years between 2004 and 2009. (My thoughts on these
I used to be a normal person - with a normal 120/80 blood pressure - and a normal BMI.
Now I haven't changed much in the last decade but now I am at high risk and over weight.
What happened?
Well - for me - nothing - I haven't changed. But for those busy folks at the CDC it seems that the new normal is high risk.
And hence, I think, these maps.
Now don't get me wrong - there is much not to like about diet in the USA - which I have covered extensively elsewhere (for example see this on "High Fructose Corn Syrup").
No, what's happen here is a war. A war between the "do gooders" and the "do badders". Places like the CDC feel that things like increasing Type II diabetes rates are "bad" and must be stopped (the "do gooders"). The Corn Sugar folks (see http://www.cornsugar.com/) think that their products aren't the problem but instead its the people that abuse them, i.e., eat too much.
Now, my old pal Fred the
"If you can't handle it don't do it."
The problem is that if you are not responsible for the results of your own actions, as in eating too much and drinking too much, then who is?
Me?
I don't think so... I didn't force that Twinkie into your mouth so why should I have to pay for you to get healthy?
No indeed. The problem is that when someone does drugs (and food addictions and sugar are actually worse than drugs in terms of brain response) we must hold the "doer" responsible - not the provider.
Society has made everyone responsible for bad personal decisions.
And I am sure the CornSugar.com folks feel the same way.
Take the case of pool drains... Everyone hears the stories about how some little kid was sucked down into a pool drain and their guts were pulled out - leaving the toddler to die a horrible death.
They don't say that maybe one death per year (out of 330 million people) happens this way.
They don't say "Where was mom and dad while little Suzy three year old was swimming in the deep water..."
They don't say "Why was little Suzy unattended in the pool for this to happen?" (because certainly had mommy and daddy been standing by one or the other would have thought to notice little Suzy on the bottom of the deep end - what, no one noticed here down there at the bottom of the deep end?).
No, the consumer product safety nanny's want the makers of pool drains to pay for this.
As many as fifty times as many people die per year from lightning deaths as pool drain depths - yet no one is marching on weather central with torches and pitch forks demanding justice for bad forecasts.
No, when my kids swam in the pool I was responsible for them - if storms and lightning came - they had to get out.
I watched them and, if I could not, I took the responsibility for making sure some else did.
If I could not do that, then my kids did not go.
Ditto for Twinkies - I don't eat them because I think they are bad for my health.
If I did eat them then any resulting health issues would be my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment