Food, Educational Food!
Food education, educational food
If you visit any nursery or primary school, in any deprived area, you will find kids who have not had breakfast before they go to school. The teachers don’t even have to be particularly insightful to see how this affects the performance of these children at school. To deal with this issue, many schools run breakfast clubs. Indeed, even at the very posh and expensive end of the spectrum, the sort of nursery that looks after children while their parents work often provide breakfast when the children arrive. But what’s for breakfast?
What is provided for these breakfasts is almost exclusively carbohydrate: cereals, toast, even fruit.[1] There is absolutely no doubt that such food gives the youngsters a sugar high which will be followed by a sugar crash. This gives rise to exactly the mood cycles and “behaviour problems” that schools often spend all their time managing. Children need to snack by mid-morning and the snacks are more of the same, starting the next cycle. What children actually need to keep their mood stable and their brains growing are high fat foods — eggs for example.
If you want to focus on just how big the gap is here, think about bacon. Steaky bacon is a high fat food that people find tasty. It is highly suitable for growing kids. But how many parents have bought into the propaganda that it is harmful — nitrates and nitrites? A school would struggle to provide it, and even if they did, it would be in the form of bacon sandwiches and baps — taking us right back to high carbohydrate. And when the kids got fat, the bacon would be blamed, not the bread!
False separation (again)
All that educational theory about how children learn, about bright, stimulating classrooms and catering to different learning styles is as nothing — nothing! — beside a malnourished child suffering sugar highs and lows. And malnourishment affects more than half the population. Educational and health authorities worry about children getting obese, but they still blame them and their parents for behaviour problems. And they still recommend more exercise rather than looking for deeper causes. This is an educational deficit on the part of the authorities that amounts to deep, culpable ignorance. They are failing to observe what is in front of their eyes. Malnourishment is highly correlated with obesity in children: when children are overweight it means they are not getting enough nutrients in their diet.
Real teaching, of course, comes from environment and peoples’ actions, not from what is said. Kids from the age of six months are being taught addictive food habits that we know are really difficult to shake off. What percentage of babies are fed pap as they are weaned? The messages are that food is a commodity convenience that is cheap and available. It comes in a box that sometimes says things like “healthy” and “keep hunger locked up until lunchtime”. If as a kid you don’t want to eat it, you will be encouraged to eat up.[2] The adult pressure is directly in line with the advertising. If you get fat you may well be bullied or ostracised.
Just think for a minute about the notion of separating health and nutrition from education. Education is stupid because it does not know about nutrition and nutrition is stupid because it does not understand education. We will deal shortly with the implications of severe miseducation in nutrition for the rest of education. But the notion that kids are not aware at some deep level out of awareness that they are being sold down the river is ridiculous
This is an edgy story for me. I have a colleague who told me that she didn’t do Father Christmas with her young children because she had a concern. She worried that when the children found out that Father Christmas was not real, they would think Jesus wasn’t real either.[3] And that mattered to her. I think this is really how deeper education works: people make leaps. They generalise their lessons.
Enough people are turning to low carb lifestyles that bread sales are down and Weightwatchers may go out of business. These millions of people have discovered for themselves, as I did, that the official dietary guidelines and the way they were brought up (along the lines of eat-your-five-a-day) were wrong, and were wrong in a systematic way that suited industry needs and destroyed their health. Why would all these people not generalise that lesson and become deeply sceptical about what they are told?
Addiction
The sugar highs and lows that result from eating processed carbohydrates are a classic addiction. The only way for people to deal with a sugar low is to snack and the snacks they crave are processed carbs. Let me break that down a bit. There has been an industry push to get us to believe that wholegrain products are healthy. If wholegrain is taken to mean grains that are still whole, this is tolerably true compared to processed grains. But the definition of wholegrain has been changed to mean simply that all parts of the grain are present in the product, and industry bangs on about the importance of the fibre that otherwise goes missing.[4]
If you grind the grains finely then, when ingested, the carbohydrate gets immediately broken down into glucose. When I say immediately, I mean the instant that the product mixes with saliva in your mouth. A typical wholegrain bread ferments in seconds to glucose in your mouth. You get a huge sugar spike and your teeth rot as a result of the sugars feeding the bacteria in your mouth. You are being sold and hooked on the literal sweetness of that experience.
The purpose of a system is what it does — POSIWID. Our school system turns out obese young people who cannot think for themselves about the one thing that matters most in their lives. They are addicts and they don’t know they are addicts. Their addiction easily extends to many aspects of the consumer lifestyle. They have in effect been groomed to be consumers for life. It is inescapable for me that this is the purpose of our “education” system, that neither teachers nor pupils nor governors can think adequately about what matters most.
How would you know if you are addicted? Well it’s simple: you crave the thing that makes your cravings worse over time. The confusion with hunger, and the “need” to eat is the problem. As well as craving starchy foods, we are NOT paying attention to body messages asking of the nutrients it needs.
What our bodies know
I want to posit something that might seem to contradict the preceding section, but that I think confirms it fully. Many people who have been overweight and ill, with a wide range of complaints for most of their lives, turn to low carb diets and find them miraculous. For the purposes of this argument, the low carb diet can be characterised as high fat. It is fat in the diet that controls hunger and, once hunger is controlled, the compulsion that drives the food addiction no longer works. The miracle is to be freed from a damaging compulsion.
We noticed that schoolchildren experience the spread of their food addictions into other areas of life. It seems also to be the case that once food addictions disappear then these other addictions fade away too. (That’s worth reading twice — the presence of food addiction enables other addictive cycles.) Things are no longer compulsive, and the consumer behaviour that is so driven in so many people just seems naïve and unattractive. This very effect should tell us how hard the corporations that control the majority of the population in this way will strive to prevent people discovering the way out. Of course, the history of health professionals who have tried to help their patients in this way is full of corpses: you get virulently abused and suppressed, professionally barred and ridiculed if you try to help your patients.
It is our bodies that know how to live. Our conscious minds get bent to the purposes of others, but our bodies still know what to eat, what to do, and who has their interests at heart.[5] This is absolutely not a matter of externalised knowledge validated by experts (although plenty of this exists). It is about getting back in touch with what we knew before we were schooled. What a shameful thing to have to say.
We need to eat right in order to know right. We can see via the addiction model why this might be so. Addiction throws us of balance and causes us to argue that black is white merely to service the needs of the addiction itself. Once we allow ourselves to be educated by our own bodies, we will see much expert opinion for what it is: sheer cant. Experts are paid mainly to delude us and the people spending the money don’t care if we live or die, no matter what they say. The purpose of the system is what it does.
We need to be nourished by our food in order to be educated by our bodies. And we need to be educated in order to seek out food that is actually nourishing. The vicious, lying campaigns across the world to persuade people otherwise are campaigns to continue slavery and ignorance. Once you can see that it is fascinating to see who lines up behind, for instance, EAT/Lancet and how few people and institutions manage to distance themselves.[6]
And we need to know positively in order to act in the world. A cynical stance that everyone is lying in their own interests is a partial liberation but misses out on the joy of actually sallying forth.
Intertwining Roots (again)
There is a chapter in Gregory Bateson’s Towards an Ecology of Mind about anthropology, and in particular the description of societies that have not encountered people from the West before. His beef is that you cannot use our labels and silos like “economic activity” to say anything useful about them. The label and its meaning are from our world not theirs.
I am asking you to do something quite as difficult. If we hadn’t thought that what children eat and what they learn were separable concerns, we would not have made the hugely damaging mistakes described here. The roots of understanding children’s nutritional needs and their needs to learn about the world, these roots clearly need to intertwine and communicate at a level we cannot see.
This is about understanding how environments support growth and how growth supports environment. If we say in institutional manner: children should eat this and not that we are reinforcing a damaging separation no matter what the content of our advice. The question of how children learn how to nourish themselves is a classic body and mind, bodymind, question where any separation between the two leads to lies and damage. Gregory Bateson’s point would be that the previously uncontacted tribe may not have made this mistake and to ask about how they educate their children may lead to equally gross errors in description.
In Jay Griffiths’ wonderful book Kith, she shows how in other societies children go ‘round in bands or gangs where they learn the world together. These children are more mature and dependable at an earlier age than our own children. They necessarily learn what matters, not what some adult wants to teach them. There is quite a gap between those positions.
When people challenge me about what is wrong with healthcare or the NHS, or what is wrong with schools, or what is wrong with the law I struggle to articulate my concerns.[7] That is because the separation of subjects embedded in our language is so unhelpful in that Gregory Bateson way.
We would be better off if we did not think that healthcare was one thing, education another and nutrition another. This false separation means that tinkering with reform all too readily reinforces the thinking patterns that are driving the problems. We need to understand the invisible roots.
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[1] We’ve been conditioned to think of fruit as healthy, but forces conspire to make it not so. Deliberate husbanding and cross-breeding has made for sweeter varieties and the near absence of old-fashioned ‘cooking’ varieties that you’d never just pick up and take a bite out of. Worse, we then juice these fruits, concentrating that sugar content.
[2] The ‘clean plate club’, anyone? In my father’s day it was the mantra that if you don’t eat it for dinner, it’ll be waiting for you at breakfast…
[3] Santa Claus, of course, is part of a genuine global conspiracy in which one group deliberately generates misinformation, in the form of fake news and falsified evidence, in order to keep the truth from another group.
[4] To this day, my mother believes that “60% whole wheat” bread is good for her, despite a lifetime of ill health and worsening diabetes.
[5] Babies and rats will eat an unconventional but ‘balanced’ diet if given the choice, until sugar is introduced to disrupt their instincts.
[6] For what it is worth, with a little help from people on Twitter, Aidan saw through the hype straight away and then it was easy to see through the pseudoscience.
[7] As consultants, we increasingly value inarticulate descriptions of the world, because the smooth and consistent stories, confidently expressed, always turn out to be just stories.
