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Can we talk about how crazy we’ve become about food?

First, a daycare worker in Manitoba followed a well-intentioned, if misapplied, policy to ensure that children are given a well-balanced meal and the internet broke. Ritz crackers as a grain?! How stupid is that!

At the same time, there is this New York Times article on rich Manhattanites hiring an exclusive nanny consulting service to teach their nannies how to cook healthier and more sophisticated dishes for little Imogen and Atticus. Mr. Leandro, one of the founders of the service, was quoted as saying, “Some of these nannies already do the cooking in the family, but they’re throwing chicken fingers in the oven, or worse, the microwave — they’re doing the bare minimum.” And feeding children the easy way is clearly not good enough for one mother featured in the article who “wanted her daughter to adopt a more refined and global palate, whether it’s a gluten-free kale salad or falafel made from organic chickpeas.”

So, pretty much: The poor people I pay to take care of my children are feeding them poor people foods!

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Why Some Parents Choose To Not Vaccinate

It used to be that doctors prescribed the medicine and we gratefully took it. No questions asked. Modern medicine had been able to treat and prevent so many diseases, to save so many lives, and doctors were given unquestioning authority by the majority of people.

Welcome to the information age. Magazines, newspapers, t.v. and now the internet report on all the latest medical news and the general population now knows about every new study, each inconsistency and all the dissenting opinions. We know about how the medical establishment let us down by over-prescribing antibiotics and ushering in the age of super bugs. (Though it was us begging our doctors for something to treat this sore throat.) We know about the many flip-flops of opinions about diet and nutrition. (But we still lock onto the latest tidbit of information as though it were gospel. Trans fats bad for you? Ban them! Blueberries good? Eat them by the bushel.) We know that formula was good but now it’s bad and that babies should be put to sleep on their tummies, er, sides … what’s that? Backs. Yes, for sure backs.