On Halloween at our house, the magic doesn?t end at bedtime. After my children have had their fill of fun-sized candies, they will attempt to go to sleep. Only then, under cover of darkness, the sugar sprite will spring into action. On small but oddly powerful wings, she will airlift the remains of their Halloween candy to her own forest home, where sugar sprite children await their unusual sustenance of corn syrup and orange dye. The sprite will leave, in its place, a thank you gift. (She?s partial to Legos.)
If you?re rolling your eyes, I don?t really blame you.
The hardest decisions in parenting occur at moments of ambivalence. When I feel in my heart that a cause is true, I am able to look into my child?s eyes and deliver an impassioned plea for even the most difficult choices. But when I?m conflicted myself, the result is a muddled message. ?Okay, kids! A low-ranking fairy of dubious origin will now swap you out of one evil and into a store-bought bribe.?
If I told you that my two children suffered from diabetes, this odd little tale would quickly resolve itself. The midnight exchange of sugar for molded plastic would be both logical and compassionate. My kids are healthy for now. But our family?s relationship to sugar is complicated. One of their grandparents has already died, with Type II diabetes as the culprit. Another grandparent now struggles with the disease. Four of our uncles have it.
Under our own roof, it?s tempting to look around the table at our average-weight faces and defer the issue. Pass the cookies; we?re fine. So I recently asked an endocrinologist to help me frame my thinking about our risk. My first question was a simple one: How could I know the odds of my children eventually getting Type II diabetes? Was I worrying over nothing?
Unfortunately, no.
In families like ours, around a 50% chance of contracting Type II diabetes is a reasonable estimate, said Dr. Jack Turco, associate professor of medicine at Dartmouth?s Geisel School of Medicine.
To hear him say it out loud was a shock. It shouldn?t have been, but it was. My two kids, through no fault of their own, each have a 50/50 chance of having diabetes some time in their lifetimes. But the timing of this risk is the real parenting challenge. Expecting a child to manage a disease which may not be felt for forty years is asking a lot. Saying nothing is a bad plan, but so is lining the dining room with posters reading: COOKIE = DEATH.
My natural inclination is to discourage my children from eating high glycemic foods to teach them that candy and sweet beverages are not food, that they do not sustain us in a healthy way. And if we lived in a bubble, I could probably pull it off. But my kids are smart, and they?re out there in the world, where juice boxes are as common as Velcro.
Instead, I try to stake out the middle ground. Moderation is a pretty word, but at birthday parties, it?s a tough sell. ?Of course you can have a piece of cake. But I?m going to put water in your cup even though there?s lemonade. Seconds? Not of the cake, only of the fruit.?
The only proven way to fight against genetic propensity toward diabetes is to maintain a healthy body weight, to match your calories to your needs, Dr. Turco told me.
It is a simple goal, but nonetheless presents a parental quandary. I can either emphasize the healthfulness of each food choice, or adopt the bigger-picture goal of maintaining a healthy body weight. But the latter invites my two children to compare their very different body types. For now, I?m not willing to go there.
So the Sugar Sprite and I must stumble along together, our awkward wings sometimes snagging shopping carts, and the tops of whole grain cracker boxes. We will try our best to find the logic in prizing Legos over Twizzlers, in putting oranges into the Christmas stockings alongside a moderate allotment of chocolates. It?s bound to appear arbitrary to those who do not know us well (and sometimes even to me). If you should witness a grocery aisle exchange wherein my child and I debate the nutritional merits of granola bars coated in chocolate, you might even glimpse the sprite?s gossamer wings floating just over my shoulder.
Sarah Pinneo is a food journalist and novelist; her most recent book is Julia?s Child.
Source: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/halloween-forecast-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-diabetes/
davy jones dead monkees last train to clarksville tim tebow taylor swift post grad arpaio carol burnett
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.