Re: cleaning the car

On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:19:52 -0700, Evan Kirshenbaum
<kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Robin Bignall <docrobin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:12:10 +0100, Wood Avens
<woodavens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:38:27 -0700, "Skitt" <skitt99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

In our family, mealtimes were mealtimes, and there were no snacks
between them -- not that I still adhere to that regimen.

When I was young, eating between meals was at least as sinful as
omitting to clean one's teeth before bed. "Snack" still carries
automatic overtones of "bad" for me, so that I have to re-calibrate
every time someone innocently suggests I partake of one.

My wife and I are of that generation, and snacks are something that
we don't have. The early lessons stuck, and I am sometimes amazed
at people pushing trolleys out of Sainsbury's filled with crisps,
biscuits, tooth-rotting drinks and the like.

Out of curiosity, is there a lot more "tooth rotting" today than there
was when you were a kid? It really seems to be *way* down in the US
than it was in the '70s. My son is ten and has yet to have a cavity.
I'm sure that I had about a dozen by the time I was his age.

It's a good question, and the answer almost certainly depends on the
time we're talking about and the stratum of society one belongs to.
WIWAL in the 1940s and early 1950s, of the working classes, one only
went to a dentist to get teeth extracted. in 1957 I had a summer job
in a cigarette factory. They employed thousands of people in those
days and had a full-time dentist/anaesthetist duo whose only job was
to extract teeth from employees suffering from toothache. I didn't
have a tooth filled (rather than extracted) until I was in my late
teens, and I've only started noticing British youngsters with braces
on their teeth for cosmetic reasons, rather than serious dental ones,
during the past 20 or so years. Sugar was rationed until I was 13 so
it was difficult to develop a craving for sugary drinks.

At the current time in England (don't know about the other countries)
a new government contract for NHS dentistry, introduced a year or two
ago, makes doing NHS work unprofitable for dentists, so a large
majority of them insist. This means that several million people
cannot find a dentist who will perform NHS work.

<q>If you normally pay for NHS dental treatment, there are three
standard charges. The amount you pay will depend on the level of
treatment that you need.

NHS dental charges

The three NHS charge bands are as follows:

Band 1: £16.50. This charge includes an examination, diagnosis and
preventive advice. If necessary, it also includes X-rays, scale and
polish and planning for further treatment.
Band 2: £45.60. This charge includes all the necessary treatment
covered by the £16.50 charge, plus additional treatment, such as
fillings, root canal treatment or extractions.
Band 3: £198. This charge includes all the necessary treatment that is
covered by the £16.50 and £45.60 charges, plus more complex
procedures, such as crowns, dentures and bridges.
</q>
http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/1781.aspx?CategoryID=74&SubCategoryID=74

Even if one can find a dentist who does NHS work these charges annoy
many people who expect the NHS to be free at the point of delivery,
and the net result is that there are a lot of people who don't visit
dentists unless they absolutely have to.

No wonder there's an obesity problem.

[somewhat tongue-in-cheek] Is there? I went looking for norms in an
attempt to bolster my arguments to my son (just sliding into the body
changes that accompany puberty and becoming unsure of his self image)
that he is not, by any stretch of the imagination "fat", when I
discovered that the Body-Mass Index (BMI) norms for kids are different
from those of adults. For adults, they're absolute thresholds (<18.5
is "underweight", >25 is "overweight", >30 is "obese"), but for kids
the "overweight" threshold is apparently the 85th percentile for that
age and sex. So 15% of all kids are overweight, by definition, and it
will always be the case that 15% of all kids are overweight.

But seriously I thought that the current wisdom was that snacking (as
long as it's healthy) when you're starting to get hungry is actually
better than waiting and sitting down to big meals really hungry,
because when you're really hungry you eat more than you need before
your body tells you it's no longer hungry.

This may well be the case, but we (Jeanne and I) are probably
well-conditioned by our upbringing to not snack. In my own case, the
approximately 2.5 years I spent as an in-patient a decade ago robbed
me of my appetite and I often have to force myself to eat an evening
meal just to keep my BMI above 20. Being on such a rigid diet doesn't
help even if I did want to snack. Nuts, chocolate, dairy products are
verboten, as are processed meats and shellfish, and anything
containing salt. A rusk with jam has long ago lost its appeal.


When I was in kindergarten, in 1969, there was an official "snack"
(juice and cookies) partway through the morning. That didn't happen
in the other grades, but it was certainly standard for kids to get
something when they got home from school "to tide them over until
dinner". For my son, the school encouraged the kids to bring a snack
at least through third grade (age 8), and he has something when he
gets home from school.
--
Robin
(BrE)
Herts, England
.

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