So hopefully everyone out there in blogo-land is having a great recovery day following American Thanksgiving, or as we call it here in Canada, “Thursday with Godfather marathons and daytime football.” If you’re out trying to get some Black Friday deals, remember I like active wear and take a size 12 shoe. I spent the day working from home, writing a dozen programs, working on a presentation, and doing copious amounts of laundry and dishes. In between all this, I also managed to get in my first weight workout since I tweaked my back last Friday, and had a great bench workout, moving 275 for the first time in a decade, and finished with some modified glute ham raises and partial deadlifts seeing as how I still have a hamstring tighter than Keef Richards’ guitar strings.

In all this day-off-fun-festivities, I came across an article that continued to prove to me that our elected officials are completely useless. The article, cited HERE, threw out the fresh and clean claim that obesity, specifically childhood obesity, could potentially be the next epidemic for our health care system.

In related news,  dinosaurs are now extinct, the sun apparently sets in the evening only to rise again the following morning, and computers are now used for more than just downloading porn.

Seriously?? It took this long for the government to realise there’s a problem with obesity in the nation right now? What was the tipping point? When they were stopped at a school crossing sign and had to wait fifteen minutes for the fourth grader to cross the street after needing to taking a knee on the yellow line to catch his breath? Maybe it was the time they were walking through their local McDonalds and saw the minimum wage donkeys trying to pry a kid out of the ball pit slide with a broom handle. For the fourth time. That day. Maybe they came out of the doctor’s office one day and junior was getting the same beta blockers for his hypertension that the health minister is (probably) taking. Don’t believe me? Check out THIS ARTICLE that talks about the increase in childhood obesity being linked to an increase in childhood hypertension rates. That’s right, kids as young as 13 are now getting diagnosed and medicated for high blood pressure. This is the first time in history where the current generation won’t outlive their parents.

I’ll applaud the government for actually taking a step in the right direction and saying there’s a growing health problem, even going so far as to say they need some measures to cut down sodium intake. Really? That’s it? Well, as long as they don’t follow suit with the US and allow congress to pass a bill stating that pizza is now considered a vegetable if it contains 2 tablespoons of tomato paste or more on each slice. Sure, a giant greasy slice of cheese and dough can be considered a vegetable as long as it’s smeared with fruit paste. I guess cheesy bread sticks are the same thing as long as you dip them in the tomato sauce instead of the cool ranch, because hey, you have to cut back somewhere, right?

I’m looking for the day when governments start to take either more action towards ending obesity and getting some level of ownership passed on to the children and parents of obese children and to the schools that serve up the crap-tastic foods in the school system, or when they finally step back and say “figure it out for yourselves” and stop providing useless information that no one uses or understands at all. The whole Food Guide idea could be summed up nicely as something like this:

I would also love to see a politician grow a set and approach the podium like a boss, and drop some honesty on everybody.

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Wouldn’t that be just plain awesome??

That being said, the government whiz kids can also get a little out of control, like they did in the European Union this past week (wow, what’s with everyone going bat-shit crazy this week for nutrition??), when they decided to ban the claim that water prevents dehydration.

What the WHAT??

Yeah, drinking water apparently does not in fact prevent dehydration, as discussed HERE, and the EU, which must not have much else going on right now, want to make sure bottled water distributors don’t put that claim on their bottles for fear that it may lead to……I really don’t know what it might lead to. Perhaps a further collapse of the Euro?

From what I understand of politics, any member of the elected official can put in any motion they want, but then it’s up to the rest of the parliament (or congress in the case of the states) to vote on whether they all want to make it pass or not, and as a result makes sure stupid stuff doesn’t get on the books and only the stuff that really matters gets put forward.

In other words, one person probably decided to make pizza a vegetable, and found a way to convince everyone else that it was a good idea and they all went for it. This is the literal definition of the phrase “the inmates running the asylum.”

Top it all off with the fact that the Canadian government recently relaxed the requirements for meeting activity requirements to stay healthy because people felt they were too difficult to achieve (the recommendations were to be upright and mobile for an hour a day. It’s now cut to 30 minutes each day). This isn’t like grading on the curve, where if you’re the smart kid in the dumb class you still get an A even if you only got 50%. If you don’t hit the target, you’re not getting enough to be considered active and to get the health benefits. PERIOD.

I’m not going to claim to have all the answers, but I can assure you these aren’t steps in the right direction. I would be really happy if they made the leap of spending the extra $0.14 a day to put good quality foods in the cafeterias and spend the money short term to help prevent massive health bills down the line, or to also restrict companies like KFC from saying things like “everything’s better with bacon.”

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I think I just had palpitations watching that. Maybe they could also put a cap on the size of Big Gulps. I swear there are ones out now that could fit your entire head inside.

Is it just me or is this driving anyone else nuts? Leave me a comment below and let me know your thoughts on these matters.