Though I'm not really sure this is all that well-meaning, frankly. As I was cooking dinner tonight, I heard, from the other room, the local news telling me that schools in Massachusetts will now be required to give out BMI report cards to their students. (You can imagine me getting rageful already, right?)
First of all, the BMI is meaningless bullshit. For many reasons. But let's just take me, for one example. I was sitting in one of the many medical visits I've had recently, waiting, and I was perusing a BMI chart. And I was sorta surprised to see that I am about three pounds away from a BMI of 25 and that 25 is "overweight." (I'd thought that anything over 25 was classified overweight, meaning 26 and up, when actually it's anything 25 and up.) Well, I'm very sorry, but despite my bitching about my bulgy Polish catcher's thighs and my middle-aged no-longer-flat belly, I am only cosmetically fat. There is no way in fucking hell that I am three pounds away from omg! obesity epidemic! health-problem! fat. And I am a woman, and small-boned--if pretty muscular and as you all know big-boobed--so that a man or a larger-boned woman my height could be considered hovering on the cusp of OVERWEIGHT! FAT AMERICAN! is even more ridiculous. But it points up yet another point in how ridiculous using the BMI is: in 1998, they changed it, lowering the criteria for "overweight" from 27 to 25, and overnight, 25 million Americans (I looked it up)became officially overweight overnight. That's some crazy shit right there.
Second of all, even if they were using a measure of overweight for these poor schoolchildren that *was* valid, how exactly is giving them a report card about it supposed to change their weight in any way? How is it supposed to be anything but humiliating for the kids who "fail"? And how is it the business of the schools to "mark" children on anything other than their schoolwork and their effort towards their schoolwork? (Okay, I'll admit I personally am still traumatized by the fact that *I* got a bad grade on my report card in second grade for having a messy desk. Talk about humiliating. That messy desk did not impede my ability to get my work done, thankyouverymuch. Fuckers! Ha!) And do we think any of the little fat kids' parents can't look at them and *see* that they're overweight? And do we think that these children do not have PCPs who weigh and measure them at every visit and keep those handy-dandy growth charts in their files, and discuss what percentiles they are in with their parents? This is some more crazy shit right there.
How about instead of worrying about these kids' weights, we instead worry about their fitness? How about this? How about we mandate that they take 45 minutes out of every school day that it isn't pouring rain or snowing--they can give up 45 minutes of MCAS prep, because frankly the children of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ain't gonna end up smarter than those little Chinese kids across the globe, no matter how much standardized testing we torture them with, so we may as well give it up--and take those elementary school kids out of the school building for a nice forty minute walk. Rope 'em together, like the lil daycare kids, if you're worried about them wandering off or getting abducted.
Oh, that won't fly. Why? Well, for one reason, it would require the teachers and teaching assistants to take a daily 40 minute walk. Some of them would be happy to, yeah, of course. But the lazy-ass others? On the phone to the union, baby!
The other day Mr Indemnity forwarded the following link to me:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13kids.html
thinking it might be something I'd like to blog about. Well, can I tell you the thing about it that horrified me the most? The little story at the end about the woman who allowed her child to walk five houses down the street to visit a friend, and then was nonplussed and kind of worried about her own perceived parenting judgment when the playmate's parent drove her kid back, worrying about the child's safety walking for those five house lengths. No, nothing to do with the actual point of the article: the fact that the other mother *drove* five fucking houses. Are you serious? What.the.fuck.is.wrong.with.people? Who is so very lazy they need to drive the length of a block? A BMI report card ain't gonna help in a society where anyone thinks that's a reasonable thing to do, I'll tell you what.
xoxo
2 comments:
I'll point out that, IIRC, BMI was devised to judge the lack of nutrition in poor countries, and it was based on the bodies of 18-year-old males, not post-stripper-age well-fed American females.
Also,studies have shown that those who the BMI standard labels as "overweight" live longer than those who are classified as "normal". This thus raises the question of just what the hell is so "overweight" about overweight, if you live longer with the extra mass. Should "normal" now be labeled "underweight"?
On the other hand, if I lived in your neighborhood, I'd drive my kid five doors too. ;-) Or in Weston, for that matter, where five doors is a mile and a half. Apparently, though, there's a huge difference in health between sitting on your butt all day and walking normally half an hour five days a week... maybe we really ought to be encouraging people of all ages to get out and walk more. Either raise gas to five dollars a gallon and/or assign large muscled but low intelligent bullies to each neighborhood to encourage rapid running, just like in my childhood.
I keep telling you, my neighborhood is so nice, my snooty neighbors keep deluding themselves they live in the suburbs :-P And who are you calling post-stripper-age? hahahaha
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