In February, Kimberly-Clark began airing ads with a female voiceover telling viewers, "To prove Huggies diapers and wipes can handle anything, we put them to the toughest test imaginable: Dads." The ads -- trodding out a tired "dumb dad" stereotype more reflective of Fox's Sunday night lineup than of reality -- suggest that dads can't handle diaper duty. One spot featured fathers neglecting their babies in favor of watching television. This was supposed to convince viewers of how great Huggies diapers were. Not unpredictably, real-world fathers were up in arms

My son does 90% of the diapers in his home. Even this grandfather is a dab hand.

What are the diaper duties in your home?

<blockquote class='posterous_long_quote'><p>About 250,000 Canadians come down with life-threatening infections while in hospitals every year. That’s the highest rate in the developed world. As many as 12,000 people a year die.</p> </blockquote>

Before antibiotics a clean hospital was the ONLY defence against infection. With anti biotic resistance - a clean hospital is once agan the ONLY defence.

This is not a cost issue nor is it about the cleaning staff - keeping everything immaculate was the core of nursing as it still should be.

And if not - then hospitals become death traps as they were before Florence Nightingale

A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics debunks all of those myths, and adds disturbingly blunt numbers about our children’s sugar consumption: boys get an average of 16.3 percent of their calories from added sugars, girls 15.5 percent. Younger children do better, with less then 14 percent, and it’s downhill from there: adolescent boys consume 17.5 percent of their diet as added sugar.

That’s a lot of sugar — and all of these children are consuming most of it in the comfort of their own homes, not at school or elsewhere, and not mostly in the form of much maligned soda, either. Sixty percent of the sugar they’re consuming comes from other sources. (Perhaps that bowl of breakfast cereal?) Although that does suggest that eliminating liquid sugar would help — 40 percent less sugar would be a fairly dramatic improvement.

Statistically, family income makes no difference to sugar intake, in spite of the prevalent trope of the upper-middle-class parent who never lets sugar into the house. And we can add sugar to the list of “things white people like,” too: non-Hispanic white boys lead the sugar consumption race to the husky department.

Sugar overload is everyone’s problem. I’m not on the sugar-should-be-a-controlled-substance bandwagon, but I don’t believe it needs to make up 15-plus percent of anyone’s diet, either.

The busting of that second myth points a finger squarely in our direction as parents, and as the wielders of the grocery budget. We can try to tag vending machines and food processors and advertisers, but if most of those sugar calories are consumed at home, that suggests that other than the limited subset of adolescents who do the family grocery shopping, we’re at the very least fully aware of what’s going into the cart, and into our children. That makes us the best people to do something about it.

I spend a lot of time this week on public transit with my gran daughter. All around us are parents stuffing the children with sugar. And the children! Whining, unhappy, wired, noses and eyes streaming. We were at the ROM today. Filled with animals aka human children. All rushing around screaming and paying no attention to anything. Incapable of seeing anything or anything.

This is not an income related problem but a societal problem. How did we all miss this?

This is in our control.

It's our choice. What do you want for your kids?

As I thought further about my friend's comment about a quiet life, I realized that this is also a way in traditional societies that elders served their communities. The elder men stayed in camp while the younger men went out to hunt; the elder women tended fires and young children while the younger women went out to forage. Their stay-at-homeness was not idleness; it was a linchpin for the stability of the community. When the younger adults needed advice, solace, or calm companionship, the elders were always there. When the children needed a grandparent or grand-uncle or grand-aunt to console them from a scolding parent, they knew where to find those elders.

Just what I am doing this week and I want to do more of this. BTW Sophia and I are off to Riverdale Farm tomorrow. We just got back from the ROM today. She liked the tropical fish the best.

Alfie took 4 more steps. The parents will be back tomorrow night and I will go back to an even quieter life on PEI

And in many ways pink slime is the perfect embodiment of a food industry gone off the rails.

In short, they took meat that was too dangerous to feed to humans, disinfected it so thoroughly that a block of the stuff will make your eyes water, and then celebrated the fact that they’d created a two-fer (it’s a food! it’s a disinfectant!).  The industry embraced their creation so completely that around 70 percent of all supermarket ground beef now contains the stuff. But this goes way beyond hamburger. As Tom Philpott points out, pink slime is used in a huge variety of products including “hot dogs, lunch meats, chili, sausages, pepperoni, retail frozen entrees, roast beef, and canned foods.” By industry standards, it is nothing short of a food “intervention” success story.

The irony, of course, is that the 2010 debate over pink slime brought to light evidence that this treated meat product is not nearly as reliable a disinfecting agent as its maker asserted. It was likely those indications that led the fast food industry, in most ways farther ahead of the food safety curve than supermarkets or school food providers, to abandon the ingredient late last year. And now that the mainstream media has taken notice of pink slime, even the USDA has had to back off its wholehearted endorsement for it in school lunch.

But don’t let the appearance of a back-and-forth debate fool you. Pink slime is truly worse than other forms of disinfected treated meat since the trimmings used in pink slime are known to harbor pathogens at high levels before treatment. Should it disappear from store shelves, however, we can rest assured the meat that remains will continue to be treated with other industrial chemicals. Because that’s — pure and simple — the only way the industrial meat industry can prevent its products from making people sick.

Watch this space - soon we offer a CSA for Pasture raised chicken, pork and beef on PEI. What do you want to feed your family?

When I give talks... one of the first things that I do is I hold up a $100 bill, and I say to the audience, whether it's conventional doctors, lay people, or alternative doctors: "If you can name one synthetic petrochemical pharmaceutical that cures any disease... then I'll turn over this $100 bill for you." No one to date has been able to claim the bill. Let's look at what we call orthodox medicine. Most of the drugs are classified into anti's: antihypertensive, anti-acid, anti-pain, analgesic, and immune suppressive which is anti-immune. They're anti's.

... Did God make us with a deficiency of any synthetic chemical anti? I don't think so. To me, the whole foundation of health and treatment of problems revolves around three basic things:

(1) nutrition or malnutrition, in other words getting the building blocks into your body that the body requires to stay healthy and to repair;

(2) elimination of toxins – it's the toxins that are inhibiting their body from repairing, so get them out; and

(3) stress"

But what about genetics? Genetics is actually typically NOT a major part of health and disease, unless you have something like Down Syndrome, for example. But for most other diseases, science now tells us that the environment, and that includes the environment inside your body, has everything to do with genetic expression. And that's the key. The hypothesis that genes are the master controllers has been proven false.

"We're finding out now that malnutrition, toxins, and stress play epigenetic roles on your genes," Dr. Rowen says. "Genes play much lesser role than we previously thought. It's nutrition, toxins, and stress that are playing [influencing] your genes. It's the three that I pay most attention to. There's not one of those three that synthetic petrochemical pharmaceutical satisfactorily addresses."

Most of us believe that our health depends on Dr's and Drugs. But does our health depend on them really?

We take drugs AFTER we are ill. Does your diabetes go away? How about your heart disease? Does your arthritis?

I ask this question because we are reaching a critical moment. The costs of health care - that does not prevent us from getting chronic disease and does not cure any of them - are about to squeeze our ALL other spending.

What stands in the way is our fear that if we don't have all these drugs we will die. So we have to ask our selves - do they make us well? Do they keep us well? if not what will?

The answer is that if we take charge of our lives and eat properly and are active we will keep our health and get our health back.

Of course we need medicine if we are in a car accident. But it does not help us be well or get well. Only we can do that.

This is quite a revolution.

Badvertising: What's in Nesquick?

Do you have kids?

Tell me, can you fathom this scenario ever playing out?

Kid (with whiny voice): "Mo-om, I don't like milk!"
Mom: "Ok honey. How about I make it taste better?"
Kid: "What do you mean?"
Mom: "Watch"

Mom then measures out 3 teaspoons of sugar, dumps them one by one into the milk and stirs.

Kid: "Awesome!"

Sounds crazy, no?

And yet it's happening in kitchens the world over due to the combination of great marketing from the folks at Nesquick (who have currently partnered up with Disney and have licensed their Phineas and Ferb characters to sell chocolate syrup) along with the belief that there's a milk/calcium emergency out there that's so bad that it's wiser to add 3 teaspoons of sugar to every glass of your kids' milk (the amount in a serving of Nesquick syrup) than to have them drink less of it.

It's the they don't like fruit so we'd better feed them pie phenomenon.

Please don't put sugar in your kids' milk.

And Cheerios are a health food too - Come on parents - WAKE UP!

Moving to Open Source Housing!

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has weighed in on the use of so-called "pink slime" in beef served in the government's free and reduced school lunch program.

Today the agency confirmed that it believes the beef product — known in the industry as "Lean Finely Textured Beef" — is safe. Nonetheless, it announced that due to "customer demand" it will give school food administrators that receive meat through the program the option to order beef without it in the next school year.

The de-fatted beef trimmings that are processed into what critics call "pink slime" also end up in much of the ground beef sold in grocery stores. But it's impossible for consumers to know that since USDA doesn't require meat companies to label whether ground beef includes trimmings.

USDA said today that all food purchased for the National School Lunch Program undergoes safety testing, including the Lean Finely Textured Beef. One way the industry says it kills harmful bacteria is by spraying ammonia gas on the meat long before it is served.

USDA's decision comes two months after McDonald's, Burger King and Taco Bell said they would stop using Lean Finely Textured Beef in their ground beef dishes. In the last few weeks, thousands pf people added their name to petitions asking the government stop buying this product.

At last!

We can all do this. I have a dog and always intend to have one. So I am off to a good start. I have a standing desk - I sit now for maybe 3 - 4 hours a day versus 12 - 14.

What can you do?