Lakeside Week 3—Sustaining and Appreciating Nature and the Environment

Today's speaker at Lakeside, David Kline, is an Amish farmer. He described how the Amish decide what advances in technology they will accept based on what it will do to their community and family life. He asked the youngest in the audience, a college student, if she would rather give up the automobile or her cell phone, and she said the car. Same with the Amish. He said their young people have ...little problem giving up their driver's license (when they are baptized), but the cell phone has been a different matter. As I left the lecture I walked past a family of 5, 3 small children, with Mom totally engrossed in her smart phone while walking with the kids. I guess there were no birds or flowers or puddles to talk about.

He is the editor of Farming Magazine for the small scale farmer and an author.  I learned that Amish buggy horses are Standard Breds that didn't make the cut for racing. He's quite a story teller. http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Larksong-Naturalist-Explores-Organic/dp/1590982010

New safety standards for Amish buggies

This may not be a problem in your state, but in Ohio there have been 1400 accidents in the last 10 years involving animal drawn buggies and wagons with motor vehicles resulting in 17 fatalities.

"After a decade of advocacy and education, Ohio State University Extension recommendations for lighting and marking animal-drawn equipment have been standardized, paving the way for national and international adoption of safety procedures on vehicles, such as Amish buggies, horse-drawn farm wagons and urban carriages.

The standard, officially adopted by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE), outlines the practices and procedures for establishing a unique identification system for slow-moving, animal-drawn vehicles on public roadways or highways. The document includes proper lighting and marking of both the vehicle and the animal, such as the use of headlamps, tail lamps, battery-operated or generator-powered lighting systems, and retroreflective material, as well as how to display the slow-moving emblem."

Read the OSU press release with links to instructions and diagrams.

Do you remember what you weighed in 7th grade?

I do. I was 5'3" and 114 lbs. by the end of the school year. We had "public" weigh-ins. I don't know how common that was, if it was the teacher's idea, the county or the state; it may have been included on our grade reports. I wasn't teased. Some were, and I'm sure it was a miserable experience for them. No one would put a child through that today. Or would they?

Arkansas has been held up as a national model for its childhood obesity program. The 4th annual report is now out. Junkfood was removed from the schools, nutrition and wellness was included in the curriculum, and exercise and physical activity were included for a recommended healthy lifestyle. The Arkansas Act included compulsory BMI screening with reports sent to parents. Even by the third report, no reduction in childhood obesity was shown, and by the fourth participation was down. It seems the counties with the fewest number of overweight children were showing the most underweight children, and there's concern that the intense focus on weight and a healthy lifestyle might actually be causing children to adopt unhealthy behavior!

Sandy at Junk Food Science has a complete run down on this Arkansas program, and has covered it before, citing studies that show BMI in childhood means nothing for health in adulthood and low-fat diets for children aren't good for their development. In fact, no one even knows what a healthy BMI is for children, and it was never meant to be a diagnostic tool for "good health." Also, there's concern that in a poor state, this unproven program has taken important dollars that could be better used elsewhere (math, science, reading, for example).

Since Act 1220 was enacted in 2003, it has failed to have any measurable effect on children’s weight status; it has failed to demonstrate meaningful improvement in their overall diets or physical activity levels; it has failed to demonstrate improved health outcomes; and there are growing indications that it’s having unintended consequences. Parents, healthcare and educational professionals, as well as taxpayers, might rightfully question if the costs for these school-based initiatives might be better utilized in efforts to help improve the future of Arkansas’ children.

Another really interesting read at Sandy's blog is on the myth of the thin Old Order Amish (Lessons from the Amish), those guys who eat healthy and get lots of exercise--like 12-16 hours a day!

It’s one of the most popular contemporary myths — and the foundation of present-day obesity public policies — that if we all lived rural lifestyles and did hard physical labor all day; ate homegrown, homecooked foods; and had none of today’s modern conveniences and electronics, we would all be thin. It’s a nostalgic vision of past eras ... but it’s not true.

Even living these idealized lifestyles, eating virtuously and physically active far beyond what most of us could imagine, the Old Order Amish are just as fat as the rest of the United States white population. In fact, the average BMIs of mature Amish women (over age 40) are 1-2 kg/m2 higher than those of other U.S. women the same age.

I think the jury is still out on why we're all getting so fat. Maybe we can blame global warming and President Bush.

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The Scarlet Letter - A

is for Amish. Someone should hang a big "A" on the back of their buggy. The Columbus Dispatch yesterday had an editorial about the terrible problem of puppy mills--the indiscriminate breeding of dogs, poor conditions, and the resulting auctions. Reading between and above the lines--Millersburg and Holmes County, the only words missing are, "Amish farmers."

But on Sunday, April 22, the Dispatch wasn't so reticent: "There are 186 USDA-licensed breeders in Ohio, and more than 100 of them are in Berlin, Millersburg and Sugarcreek, the heart of Amish country." The editorial in yesterday's paper says Holmes County licensed 478 kennels in 2006, a 40% increase. So a county license and a USDA license are not the same, if these numbers mean anything. Not only will these dogs not be healthy, but their resulting behavior problems will cause their early death at the hands of owners (who will have them euthanized) who wanted to save a few bucks by going to the pet store.