You know you have it somewhere in your head: a short list of stuff you’re just too bad at to even attempt, at least not in public. For some of us, it’s dancing. For others, it’s golf (my own congenital incompetence at golf has saved me countless hours and dollars, not to mention the confusion that ensues when someone leaves their clubs at the club so they can go to the clubhouse for a club). Tragically, my list includes gardening. If you ever hear someone say that I have a “green thumb,” get me on IV antibiotics stat, because that’s a nasty infection!
What’s saddest is how much my gardening ambition outstrips my skill. Last year, for example, everyone in the family agreed that our tomato was among the better ones they had ever eaten a small bite of. Worse yet, I now have a neighbor with a back yard dominated by a professionally installed network of raised beds already producing enough organic microgreens to fill a green minivan. I’m hoping to barter with her once our vegetables come in. Perhaps I’ll offer her this year’s tomato.
iStockSame time next year?
All over down under
Can we all just agree to stop trying to disprove conspiracy theories? I mean, has your crazy great-uncle ever said, “You know, I watched the Zapruder film one more time, and actually there really was just a lone gunman.” I don’t think so. Likewise, let’s accept that for the next 100 years, vaccine-hesitant parents are going to insist that the link between vaccines and autism just hasn’t been adequately studied, just like climate change, evolution, and why celebrities give their children weird names.
Now that Sydney Medical School Associate Professor Guy Eslick has published the ultimate meta-analysis of vaccines and autism, I vote that we never, ever spend another nickel researching this topic. Eslick’s team of Aussies aggregated data from five cohort studies and five case-control studies, to include a total of more than1.25 million children, comparing autism rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. You already know the results, even if you haven’t read the study, because you know that autism spectrum disorders don’t result from postnatal insults: zero correlation between vaccines and autism.
In the words of the Melbourne Herald Sun, this study should have “settled the debate,” especially since Dr. Eslick has no grants from or ties to vaccine manufacturers. But what about the Trilateral Commission? Agenda 21? The Rothschilds? We only know one thing for sure: What you don’t know can hurt you.
Green gobbling
Did you, too, have that grandmother who told you carrots would give you night vision? I remember gorging on the orange vegetables and then stumbling around the yard in the dark, twisting my ankle on mole tunnels. It’s possible that I was also hoping for laser vision: “A B-minus on my spelling test?! Take that, Mrs. Mulherin!”
A new study out of Chicago, however, suggests that not all kids are as gullible as I was which, I suppose, will cut down on the rates of ankle sprains. According to author Dr. Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, the absolute worst way to get kids to eat any food is to tell them it will make them “healthy,” which includes taller, stronger, smarter, or less constipated. Ironically, the same logic works brilliantly to sell young men overpriced plastic barrels of powdered protein.
Among the 270 3- to 5-year-old children studied, the more adults emphasized the health benefits of a given food, the less of it the kids ate. They apparently subscribed to a “zero sum game” theory of food: The positive health properties of any given food must be subtracted proportionately from its taste. The implication for parents is clear: We must immediately band together to convince children that broccoli will give them cavities and gummy worms improve eyesight. Just don’t forget to stock up on Ace bandages.
The young and the restless
What parent of a preschooler hasn’t occasionally wished there was something you could give them to make them behave? Actually, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are around 10,000 young children in the US whose parents have stopped wishing. That’s the estimated number of 2- to 3-year-old children who are being prescribed stimulant medications for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). CDC officials and other child behavior experts suggest that the doctors prescribing these meds be put in time out.
Aside from the little issue that stimulant medications have never been tested for safety and efficacy in young children, there’s the problem of diagnosing ADHD in preschoolers. After all, the definition of ADHD can be boiled down to, “has the attention span of a 3-year-old,” a problem that’s nearly universal among 3-year-olds. I’ll come out and say that I think the docs prescribing these meds to young children deserve a rotten tomato, and that’s the one thing I know how to grow.