Category: Culture

In defense of “natural”

Posted on by Suki

Yesterday I ranted about the misuse of the word “natural,” so today I must, in the great Socratic tradition, take the other side.

We just returned from a long trip to the East Coast. We went to visit family and to soak up culture that we are largely lacking on this coast. In both respects, it was a great success.

But one of the things about travel is that it puts your usual life in stark relief. It can be a useful time for reflection on what you love about your life and the place you have chosen to live, and what you want to change. My husband and I both toy with the idea of living in a big city, because we love so much of what cities have to offer, but we keep returning to the Republic of Santa Cruz. Why?

Well, first of all, there’s the food. At times I felt like we were awash in a sea of high fructose corn syrup. Feeding my kids anything like a healthy diet was nearly impossible. Stores with healthy offerings, available pretty much anywhere where we live, are hidden in out of the way corners. Certainly, if we’d settled into a normal life, we probably would have found those little corners where we could feed ourselves healthily. But as travelers, we were constantly thwarted, and I was constantly giving in to foods I’d never consider in our daily life.

We spent two weeks in New Jersey, not far from New York City. We spent most of the first week traveling into the city every day: We saw The Lion King (fabulous and worth every one of those many pennies we had to haul from the bank to buy tickets). We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We went to the MoMA. We went to the really amazing Tenement Museum to learn how my kids’ forbears lived when they first came to this country. It was all great.

But live long enough almost anywhere in California, and you feel a huge nature deficit when you’re in the east. Not only is there very little nature (most of it is manicured parks, which don’t count!), but people don’t seem terribly interested in it. We spent a fun morning at a play structure in New Jersey, watching with awe as a family of muskrats played nearby. Not another person noticed them. The kids and I watched two birds busily making their nest high up in the roof of part of the play structure. It was better than anything you can see on TV, watching Daddybird and Mommybird flying in with bits of grass and a ribbon from some child’s birthday party.

Only one other child noticed. He looked up at the nest and the busy activity, picked up a rock, and threw it.

Luckily, the nest was high and his aim was bad.

Look at a map of almost any sort of lifestyle data, and you’ll see nature and health dominate the West Coast and turn up in tiny, isolated spots elsewhere. For example, it’s the unusual Santa Cruz mom who doesn’t breastfeed. I even know an adoptive mom who convinced her body to make some milk for her baby. But the map of breastfeeding rates in this country tells the story pretty clearly:

CDC breastfeeding mapWe left-coasters have a significantly different attitude toward life — we choose the natural route whenever possible.

In a way, these differences are comforting. I remember when I was in college and a linguistics professor lamented to me that our country was becoming so homogenized, that we were losing our regional accents along with regional food and other markers of local culture. I think we did go through a period of homogenization with the increased speed of communication, but it seems to have leveled out.

70 years after TV started to make us all the same, Santa Cruz is very different from similar towns near New York City. And this is not a bad thing.

The last day of our trip, I found myself in a Florida supermarket, speaking to my daughter in exasperation.

“For god’s sake, we’re in Florida,” I told her. “And I can’t just find a bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice!”

Awash in a sea of high fructose corn syrup, we finally found a display of juices. Overpowered by the huge display of Simply Orange, processed and packaged by the Coca-Cola Company, I found a few bottles of locally produced orange juice. Apparently, Floridians prefer to drink the same orange juice they drink in New York City. Despite our differences, most of us try to be as much the same as possible.

Me, I’ll take the local variety any day. Hurray for nature, muskrats playing in the grass, birds in love, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and babies, whether they breastfeed or not.

7 surprising things to consider about “natural” products

Posted on by Suki

One thing that really gets my goat is how people who don’t understand chemistry and biology in the least like to make grand claims about “natural” ingredients. The latest is this article about sunscreen from Natural News, 7 surprising things you’re not supposed to know about sunscreen and sunlight exposure, which takes as its premise that anything natural is necessarily good for you. Reading this piece is like a lesson in shoddy argumentation techniques, but it provides a useful lesson in how to cast a skeptical eye when manufacturers use the word “natural.”

#1) The FDA refuses to allow natural sunscreen ingredients to be used in sunblock / sunscreen products

Note the inflammatory verb: refuses. Actually, the FDA provides a process to file claims that any natural product has medical properties, but someone has to do the research. That means someone has to pay for the research. And supplement companies are very happy to take in your money, but not so happy to have to prove that their claims are true. I’d like to see the multi-billion dollar supplement industry start to prove their claims rigorously, because that’s the way to prove that you’re not just selling snake oil.

Also, one of the problems of so-called “natural” products is that they are not stable — they change over time. One of the most important properties of a packaged sunscreen is that it be shelf-stable and, very importantly, stable enough in your hot car and sitting in a drawer. Most natural products won’t pass this test (which is a very good reason not to put money into testing them). For example, I read a claim that green tea provides some sunscreen protection. Have you ever brewed years-old tea? Yuck! It degrades, as all natural things do. (Of course, chemical compounds of all sorts break down, which is why you should be careful to replace old sunscreen regularly.)

#2) Nearly all conventional sunscreen products contain cancer-causing chemicals

I could counter this with the same claim: nearly all natural compounds contain cancer-causing chemicals. Go ahead, try to prove me wrong. This is a broad, unprovable statement. Yes, many compounds, natural and synthetic, cause cancer when you force-feed them to lab animals. Whether they are causing cancer when used correctly by a large population of people is something much harder to study. If people using sunscreen are getting cancer from the sunscreen, that data can be gathered and analyzed, and should be.

#3) In a nation where over 70% of the population is vitamin D deficiency, sunscreen actually blocks vitamin D production

First of all, the 70% is highly debatable. New studies have come out showing what seems to be vitamin D deficiency in a large percentage of people studied, but those studies also point out that they are really not sure how much vitamin D we need.

Also, you need to look further past this statement. Up to 80% of Americans are considered overweight. Overweight people have a layer of fat under their skin, which absorbs the vitamin D and keeps it from being distributed in the body. How much of the vitamin D deficiency is actually just a by-product of the obesity epidemic? Furthermore, now that close to 50% of Americans have dark skin, fewer of us actually use the sun to manufacture vitamin D in our bodies.

Finally, how much sun exposure is necessary for proper vitamin D manufacture? My Northern European ancestors spent months in cold and dark, with their skin covered by thick clothing. They clearly weren’t making any vitamin D at that time. Their descendent is now living in California, where the native population had dark brown skin. I clearly don’t need to spend very much time outside my house getting sun exposure equal to what my ancestors got in a year.

#4) You can boost your internal sun resistance by changing what you eat

It’s likely that there’s some truth to this, but it’s hardly a substitute for other sun protection: No one with my skin is going to suddenly start manufacturing more melanin by eating fresh vegetables. If I ate the absolute perfect skin-protecting diet for a year, do you really think I’d be able to go out in California sunshine and not get burned to a crisp? If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you! Arguments like this simply assume that we are stupid.

#5) UV exposure alone does not cause skin cancer

Cancer is complex. Nutrition is complex. Life is complex. So yes, this statement is technically correct. But we do have enough data to know that people who get skin cancer have certain things in common. The highest correlation is with getting blistering sunburns. Avoiding blistering sunburns is the number one way to take yourself out of the pool of possible skin cancer sufferers. Of course, I’m sure if you found a large group of people who had never gotten any UV exposure, you’d find that some percentage of them would get skin cancer. But that doesn’t mean that you should just throw out the sunscreen and let yourself burn.

#6) Not all “natural” sunscreen products are really natural

I appreciate this point. The word “natural” is not regulated and can be applied to any box or bottle no matter what it contains. But I take issue with what the writer thinks is natural. So anything starting with the prefixes methyl, propyl, butyl, etc. is unnatural? But micronized zinc oxide is natural? What exactly is natural about taking a mineral from the ground and processing it till you make it into a clear cream?

This argument also rests on the supposition that natural is equivalent to “good” or “healthy.” But if everything “natural” is “better,” then should we start adding peach pits to our smoothies? Yum, cyanide! How about munching on rhubarb leaves? And let’s start giving our babies soft lead toys to suck on. Socrates really loved that hemlock shake, and I’m sure it was the added chemicals that really killed him!

Reasonable people know that “natural” is basically an empty term. What we need to know is whether something is safe, and safe is much harder to prove than natural. The longer we study things, the more we learn. So something that might look safe now might be proven to be unsafe in the future. That doesn’t mean that the scientists of today are somehow trying to hurt you. It means that we learn as we grow, which is… natural!

#7) Many “chemical free” sunscreens are loaded with chemicals

Here’s a fact that any educated person should know: all of life is made of chemicals. Chemical names can be given to any natural compound. Just because I call it dihydrogen oxide doesn’t mean drinking it will give me cancer. In fact, I bet you’ve ingested it today and assumed it was healthy because it was “natural.” The natural outputs of fermenting fruit and other natural compounds have many of the scary prefixes the writer mentions (ethyl! propyl! butyl!) and are as natural as nature can provide.

***

Let’s face it: The data on sun exposure and sunscreen is not all in yet. Our understanding has changed radically in the last thirty years, and will continue to change radically as more research is done. Many of the things the writer of this article claims may turn out to be true, but that doesn’t mean that they are proven true now. What we now know about skin cancer is pretty straightforward:

1) If you get blistering sunburns in childhood, you are much more likely to get skin cancer. Therefore, do whatever you can to keep your kids from getting blistering sunburns. As of yet, no other strong correlations have been proven.

2) Some amount of sun exposure is fine and probably healthy, but that doesn’t mean that any amount of sun exposure is healthy. Look at your body, your family history, and your reactions to sun exposure, and make healthy decisions.

3) The easiest way to lessen risk is to avoid it. If you want a 0% chance of dying in a car accident (a much higher risk to all of us than skin cancer, by the way), don’t leave home. If you are in a high risk skin cancer group, and you want to lessen your risk of skin cancer, use whatever methods you can to avoid too much sun exposure. Get your kids long-sleeved swim shirts, make them wear hats on the playground, wear long sleeves and hats on sunny hikes, and use sunscreen appropriately.

4) All cancers are best treated through early detection. Learn what risk group you and your kids are in. Learn what sorts of changes to watch for. And consult a medical professional (not your health food store employee) if you are concerned about any change in your skin.

We should all support dedicating money to studying the causes of skin cancer and studying new and less dangerous ways to lessen our risks. But in the process, don’t let the word “natural” turn you into a thoughtless consumer of so-called “natural” products. Mother Nature invented tigers, cobras, and black widow spiders. She’s not out to protect your children.

That’s your job.

Follow-up article: In Defense of “Natural”

Enter the scowlers, start up the bad behavior

Posted on by Suki

Visiting my kids’ grandma in Florida is a cultural experience. She lives in a mature adult community, as many in Florida do. The streets are orderly, and no one draws on the sidewalk. I find the range of reactions to kids here pretty interesting.

His and hers IV bags!
It's hard to see in the photo, but this is a car that passed us with two IV bags hanging in the back. That gives a new meaning to his and hers accessories!

There are the people who think that anyone younger than eighteen is
a) a baby
b) stupid
c) someone whose physical space they can intrude anytime

My kids hate these people, of course. I can see it almost immediately that they can sense the vibes. The person comes up to them and addresses them in a too-loud, babyspeak voice, and I see the kids start to shrink away. In fact, I remember this from my childhood, especially the adults (always men) who thought it was fun to tickle a girl till she cried.

Then there are the scowlers. These are the adults who came to an adult community to get away from noisy, uncontrollable, boisterous, ill-behaved humans. Unfortunately for them, kids don’t own the market in that set of behaviors, but at least there are fewer of them in an adult community.

The scowlers are sort of like those people who don’t like cats and think that if they ignore the cat, the cat will just go away. My cats, unfortunately for those people, are always fascinated by people who ignore them. As soon as there’s someone in the room pretending they aren’t there, the cat jumps on their lap.

That approach doesn’t work with kids, either. So the scowlers usually just glower at the kids. Occasionally, they get a bit more verbal. We’ve had people swear at our kids, lecture them, and tell them they aren’t welcome. Well, unfortunately, we’re here to visit grandma, and we aren’t going away!

Finally, there are the people who are thrilled to see youth around them. They’ve moved to an adult community for the services, the social life, and the warm pools, not to get away from the full variety of life.

It’s heartening to see these people not only enjoying watching our kids be kids, but inspiring them to be wonderfully behaved, polite kids. Because the intrusive people and the scowlers don’t get it that kids sense their attitudes just like cats do. There’s no easier way to get kids to misbehave than to expect them to misbehave.

These older adults who bring out the best in our kids remind me that kids respond so well to being addressed respectfully, getting looked in the eye, and being listened to. They show genuine interest in kids’ interests and ideas. And in return, the kids usually offer back the best of themselves.

I coulda tole you that for twenny bucks!

Posted on by Suki

So the jury has come back and presented their decision. No one’s going to be surprised on this one:

Making kids take lots of standardized tests doesn’t make them become any better educated. Read about it here.

I wonder if anyone really knows — or wants to know — how much money has been spent on this testing bonanza in the last ten years. I wish they’d given that money to me: I could have told them the outcome. Yet our federal government keeps giving states more and more money to apply to a losing proposition.

Part of this travesty is due directly to the fact that we have education policy made by non-educators. Bush’s Secretary of Education was not an educator. But she sure did know how to torture schools and demonize teachers. I have to say I’m not much more fond of Obama’s Secretary of Ed, who thinks that if a school is “failing,” he just needs to fire everyone to make it work right.

Yeah, kids really respond real well to turning up and finding a bunch of strangers at their school. That will make them learn!

I keep turning to a thought-provoking book I am reading called The Book of Learning and Forgetting. The author points out that we have known for a long time how kids learn, and it’s only recently that we’ve paid high salaries to bureaucrats to make up another story.

Kids learn because something is important to them. They learn because the person teaching them is important to them. They learn because they need to.

They don’t learn because someone threatens them (in fact, threats pretty much stop learning cold). They don’t learn because someone’s testing them. They don’t learn because they know that one day, if they and all their friends don’t do well on tests, some really nice guy living in Washington DC is going to fire their beloved teachers and the principal who is guiding them and install some strangers who will read from a script and force that learning into their brain!

Let’s get back to reality: Standardized tests have their place. It’s fine to give them a few times in a kid’s education to make sure that they didn’t miss something important or to see what a child’s strengths might be. And even to make sure that our schools are not missing something important. But the tests themselves are not important. They are not the point of education.

Yes, our schools are failing. But standardized tests were never the solution. We have made them the problem — luckily, an easy problem to get rid of.

Just Say No To Tests. A simple message for a complex age.

Alternatives to “college for everyone”

Posted on by Suki

Last week I wrote about how I thought the question of why our colleges are turning out less-educated people was pretty self-evident: When we create a society in which everyone has to go to college to get a job, we have a lot of people in college who don’t actually want to be learning.

But what is the alternative to this approach? And why would someone like me, who loves learning and who could actually be happy doing consecutive PhD’s for the rest of my life, advocate that not everyone go to college immediately after high school…or ever?

The simple fact of education is that people learn when they want to. I am reading a thought-provoking book called The Book of Learning and Forgetting. So far, the book is a sort of cultural history of learning. What did we used to think learning was? Why did our ideas of learning change? What do we believe learning is now?

The book’s main thesis is that real learning happens in a meaningful context, within a social group, and is inspired by real, concrete goals. I know that this book has had an immediate effect on me: I have been desperately trying to learn Hiragana, the “simplest” of the three writing systems used in Japan. This is the writing system that every schoolkid learns. Yet there I was with my Android app, trying to slam those darn characters into my head. I gave them names. I made up rhymes about them. Yet somehow, testing myself only on the first four rows (way fewer than half the characters), I was stuck at 54%. It was humiliating and demoralizing. I’d always been a good student. Why couldn’t I learn this?

The Book of Learning and Forgetting inspired me to take a second look at what I was doing. Did I have a social group that was integral to my desire to learn this? No. Was I trying to learn the characters in a meaningful context? I would not say the Android app was terribly meaningful, no. Was it inspired by an immediate, concrete goal? Nope, just a nebulous desire to be able to use a Japanese dictionary when we were lost in Kyoto and needed help.

So I retooled my approach. My social group, like it or not, is my kids. A context that is meaningful to them is reading aloud. And I could think of one immediate goal: I’d translate a Japanese children’s book and read it to them. This week, my Japanese tutor came back to find that I had “translated” the first few pages of a classic children’s story, and was recognizing almost all of the basic set of Hiragana characters.

That long digression has a purpose here: When we send students off to college without a strong social group with a shared interest, a meaningful context for what they’re learning, and concrete, immediate goals for their learning, we just can’t expect that they will learn.

How will they learn, then? Here’s my plan to reshape American education: Get rid of all the hoops and let everyone do what inspires them.

Oh, no! Chaos! Anarchy!

Well, not quite. We wouldn’t have to throw everything out the window. We have a meaningful goal as a nation to have a literate population that can do math enough not to get themselves underwater with their mortgages, understand history and social studies well enough to vote with understanding rather than vote for the guy with the flashiest commercials, and think critically about whatever challenges come their way.

Past that, what we have are lots of people with very different personalities, social groups, skills, and goals. Our education bureaucrats seemed hell-bent on the idea that you must force everyone onto the same path. But we know that a one-size-fits-all educational model will never, ever work.

Instead of “college for everyone,” I suggest the goal of “meaningful education for everyone.” There are those people — probably a good, solid core of our population — whose needs are fulfilled by following the standard model. But for all of us whose needs aren’t filled, it can be disastrous.

Instead of college for everyone, let’s have meaningful training programs in high school for those who want to go and work first. Instead of favoring students who took the traditional path, let’s get rid of all the impediments to students who have gotten to their college application in a less standard way. Instead of making a college education a pipe dream for someone who has just realized at the age of thirty what she wants to do, let’s make it a priority to offer educational opportunities to that newly energized student.

As a college English teacher, I had some fine students who took the traditional path. But without fail, my very best students, the most committed, hardest-working students, had come to college because they desperately wanted to. Of course I worked very hard to inspire the other students, but it was my most committed students who inspired me back. Teaching is really hard work, and the inspiration of dedicated students is the payback teachers need.

Instead of college for everyone, let’s have college for everyone who wants to.

ps: And, as the commenter on my last post just pointed out, let’s not forget that education is expensive and our public universities need to be fully funded, but that’s a rant for another day!

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