Go ahead, have another cookie....

As some of you may have heard or read, the American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends using cholesterol drugs on children as young as 8 to stem childhood obesity. If there was ever any remaining doubt that our doctors are not our advocates, this bit of news should seal the deal. This particular issue really chaps my hide because of my own job, and I see a public health problem like childhood obesity as also being part of an environmental problem, and public safety problem, and a whole host of other problems that go well beyond the AAP's approach in this recommendation. But I'll get to that in a minute.

First, I have a favor to ask. Could you all stop trying to make my son fat, lazy and stoopid? For real. I by you all I mean big Pharma, Uncle Sam, and now apparently, my doctor. By now I probably lost a few of you into the "conspiracy kook" qualification, but this is not some half-baked paranoia. Doesn't matter if you send your kid to private or public school, they will be pumped full of garbage and there's really not a damn thing you can do about it. Here's an illustration.

My son is in daycare full time at a center that provides lunch and snacks. I only recently enrolled him in the lunch program after struggling for about a year to make him appropriate bag lunches that met the dietary restrictions his school created- most importantly no nuts and/or nut products and nothing that would have to be "cooked" but the school. So forget the pb&j fall-back or anything that wasn't essentially pre-assembled. And, I know this is going to make me sound like a total whiner, but getting those lunches together was hard. Usually I was making those lunches at midnight before bed or 5 am before work. It didn't matter though. I was determined that he not be pumped full of sugar and fat during the day. And, to be fair, my son's school provides healthful snacks, and the lunch program is better than most, but that's simply a function of the fact that we spend in daycare tuition what we would spend if we were sending him to college. That's a whole other post. My point is that it was more than my boho sensibilities driving his lunches of rice and beans, pasta with tomatoes, carrot sticks, and whole grain crackers. It was also my desire to keep our doctor's visits to a minimum, to try and raise my dude with as few food quirks as possible and, to be totally honest, to keep his energy and mood stabilized so that when I picked him up after a day of arguing, posturing, and getting flogged by the man my preschooler would be more, well, manageable. There, I said it.

It wouldn't have mattered if my motivation were only altruistic, the fact of the matter is, when he sat down for lunch and his buddy Tyler was eating a sloppy joe, or salisbury steak, or a breakfast burrito, my kid didn't want his lunch, no matter what it was. He wanted the hot lunch and began hunger striking to get it. I resisted his teacher's calls to sign him up for the lunch program at first but eventually caved after I'd lost hours of sleep to packing lunches that got thrown away, hounding from insistent teachers pecking away at my obsessing over his meals, and repeatedly came home with a cranky, hungry child who, despite my best efforts, had found processed sugar, empty starches, and a distaste for anything green and crunchy. I caved. I signed him up for the lunch program. I admit that its nice not to have to onemorething to do at night before bed or first thing in the morning, but before long I began to worry about what a lifetime in the hot-lunch program would do to my son's health.

Well thank fucking god the American Academy of Pediatrics has let me know that I don't have to worry about that anymore. See, rather than put their CONSIDERABLE resources toward creating healthful lunch programs and vibrant physical education curricula in public schools or for schools who receive public dollars of some sort, they have sided with big Pharma and now suggest we just further medicate our kids. Forget fresh fruit and a jog, try Lipitor instead. Sure makes my job as a parent a helluva lot easier AND the pharmaceutical and insurance industries make a windfall. Everyone wins! Besides, just ask Alice Waters and the Berkeley and Oakland public schools- no one is interested in actually creating healthful models when there is sooooo much money to be made on maintaining illness models.

But here's the ringer for the doctors. The Hippocratic Oath. First, do no harm. Do. No. Harm. First. That is an ethical obligation to patients no different than my ethical obligation to my clients. I am their advocate in the legal system, and my doctor, my son's doctor, has a professional obligation to be an advocate in the medical system. Meeting those ethical obligations is a challenge, especially when insurance companies want you to save costs, partners want you to secure a particular outcome, and you want to get home and be done with this stupidfuckingclientalready. However, if I abdicate my ethical responsibility it will, at a minimum, get me a professional reprimand, if not a malpractice suit. For the American Academy of Pediatrics those abdication result in public health policy decisions, mainstream media accolades, and a whole lot of grease from the industries they are supposed to be keeping a critical eye on.