Renovate At Your Children’s Peril

Someone please think of the children!!!

It must be a difficult job to be a parent. Not only do you have to raise your child as best you can, you also have to put up with all manner of studies, reports, advice, trends and media coverage which all tell you what a terrible job you’re doing.

And each report is more convoluted and obscure that the last. The latest to come out is that home renovations make your kid dumb. So forget about adding that new bedroom, seems your kid is better off sleeping in a tent out the back garden. 100 thousand kids are stupid they say, thanks to lead poisoning. Want a bigger house? Pity it'll make the kids as dumb as the very bricks supporting their new bedroom.

No heating, but your kids will be smart

There is no question that lead is toxic, but what is this study saying? What should the parents be doing? Don't renovate the house? Don't live in the city? Don't live in a house at all? Sounds like some more scaremongering, with no new information, no solutions, and no real point. Just like the toxic sugar crisis back in February (I still don't know how we survived that one), living your life is a dangerous and deadly activity!

In trying to make sense of the study, its apparent that its just statistics from the USA, overlaid onto the Australian population. No tests done on Australian kids, whether or not they live in a renovated house, with or without lead. Maybe I've been exposed to too much lead when I was a kid, but to use that classic 3rd grade kid comment, "I don't get it". By the same stats, if you said that if 50% of Americans are overweight, does that then mean 11 million Aussies are overweight? What about if 10% of Americans speak Spanish, can we then say 2.2 million Aussies also hablan español?

And what does any of it have to do with home renovations?

Further on in the article  its also mentioned that "A million kids losing a million IQ points - that's a lot of IQ down the drain". Now I'm not sure how scientific these figures are – but is one IQ point really that much for an individual? Wouldn't there be a deviation, depending on what the kid had for breakfast, or whether a distracting bird flew past the window during the test? And how did we go from 100 thousand kids to 1 million kids in the in the space of nine sentences? To make it even more confusing, at the end of the article, its said "We can only guess how many children and adults are suffering from high blood-lead levels that are impacting on their health". What? How did I get so lost? How many kids are there – first 100 thousand, then 1 million, and now you're saying you don't know? Must be that lead messing with my brain smarts again, God dang it.

Of course none of this has anything at all to do with home renovations. In fact, by the 2nd sentence of the article, the whole 'home renovation' angle of this story is completely forgotten. I guess they have to hype up the story - lead being toxic isn't exactly breaking news. And what better way to whip up a bit of a frenzy than an alarmist headline that has found yet another reason that parents are screwing up their kids!

Scared to a Sweet Sugary Death

Step aside Howard Florey. Your discovery of Penicillin has got nothing on these Scientists' discovery:

...Sugar is as toxic as tobacco and and alcohol. 

http://health.ninemsn.com.au/healthnews/8412778/sugar-more-toxic-than-alcohol-scientists-claim

So here we go again. Some so-called experts with over-inflated egos are trying to scare everyone by claiming that sugar is the next big toxic killer. Hide your children, the killer sugar cube is coming your way.

Armed and dangerous.
Known to attack children with chocolate and lemonade. 

What have these scientists done with their academic lives? Rather that studying for years and getting PhDs to figure out that too much sugar is unhealthy, they could have just listened to their Mums when told too much sugar will make them fat. Even the Cookie Monster knows that cookies are a "sometimes food". He doesn't need a University degree! The rest of us had it figured before we hit double figures, why did these guys need PhDs to learn this bleeding obvious stuff? A bit of common sense would have done.

Realising that their groundbreaking discovery was not enough to justify their next Government grant, the Scientists thought they'd kick it up a notch and throw in some alarmist fear and yell from the rooftops that not only is sugar bad for you, its the spawn of Satan, its toxic and its out to kill you, and a single donut is akin to playing Russian Roulette with a rocket propelled grenade. Repent you chocoholics, repent.

Some of their quotes are as toxic as they claim sugar to be:

[The Scientists] call for restrictions and controls on sugar that mirror those on tobacco and alcohol.

I look forward to the day that some underagers bail me up outside 7-Eleven to buy them a pack of sugar. "Aw come on man, Grandmas coming over, and she has half a sugar with her tea. Mums gonna be pissed if I don't score some tonight"

They point out that, at the levels consumed in the West, sugar altered metabolism, raised blood pressure, disrupted hormone signalling and caused significant damage to the liver that was still not fully understood.

Whats not understood? That too much sugar is bad for you? I've known that since I first saw a fat person dominating 6 donuts for desert after eating a bucket of fried chicken.

The health hazards were similar to the effects of drinking too much alcohol — which was, in any event, manufactured from the distillation of sugar.

Similar to the effects of alcohol? What sugar are they eating? I'll take two! The next round of sugars are on me!

Alcohol is made from sugar. Ok. Penicillin is made from mould - is this bad for you? Vodka is made from potatoes - mash and gravy shooters? Yes please!

As long as the public thinks that sugar is just 'empty calories', we have no chance in solving this.

Who thinks this? Who has even heard of "empty" calories? What will you solve? Fat?

In their commentary, the experts propose adding taxes to processed foods that contain any form of added sugar. These would include carbonated drinks, other sugar-sweetened beverages such as juice and chocolate milk, and sugared cereals.

Yes tax everything that anyone could possibly eat. Raising the cost of living always helps promote a happy and healthy society. There's no downside.

Other strategies included controlling access with measures such as age limits for the purchase of sugary drinks, and tightening controls on vending machines and snack bars in schools and workplaces.

Let me be clear. If ANYONE tries to stop me from buying a Snickers during a sh!t day at work, they'd better be armed with more than facts and studies!

However, the scientists stressed that to achieve a societal shift away from high sugar consumption, the public had to be better informed about the emerging science behind sugar.

'Emerging' science? Is sugar a new phenomenon? Has Sovereign Hill's ye olde boiled lolly shop been lying to us all these years?

The experts concluded in their article: "Regulating sugar will not be easy — particularly in the 'emerging markets' of developing countries where soft drinks are often cheaper than potable water or milk.

Developing countries? The Scientists want to restrict food in Ethiopia for fear that the people there are eating too much and getting fat????????? Consider the Nobel Prize for Science awarded!

When will the danger end? If you listen to this and all the other scare mongering that goes on, then everything you could possibly eat, drink, breathe, hear, see, smell or do is bringing you one step closer to a gruesome death. Your only salvation is to never leave your house again and not do anything that remotely resembles living your life!    

...Alternatively you could just grab a coffee and a muffin and get on with your life.

Toxic as tobacco and alcohol?
In that case I'll take two boxes, a bottle of Tequila and fat Cuban cigar to go.
I'll see you all at the cemetery.

Any anyway, there's plenty more things out there that are more scary than sugar...