The Great(er) White(er) North: The best way to be healthy? Have money.

Oh hey, you say. BEEN a while, you say.

GET OFF MY BACK, I say.

Nah, I'm just kidding, but honestly, I just either didn't have time to gather my thoughts or may have simply not had any interesting thoughts for the last couple months. Would you really want me to make up a blog post where I ramble on about nothing in particular? Of COURSE not. (We have Facebook for that, amirite?)

Fortunately, nothing inspires me quite like Weighty Matters (the blog by Dr. Yoni Freedhoff). He posted a a couple days ago this article, Why Doctors Should Screen for Poverty. This is a big sore point for me. Not because I'm well, poor, although I am like every student in that there have been times where your dinner consists of rice with a bit of seasoning. I was even incredibly lucky in that my parents paid for my first degree - I had it SO good in comparison to most. That said, I've worked with a lot of people in the downtown eastside in Vancouver, and even here in PG where a lot of people aren't so lucky.

Here are a few of the main points from the article:

Cardiovascular disease: there is a 17% higher rate of circulatory conditions among the lowest income quintile versus the average
Diabetes: prevalence among the lowest income quintile is more than double the rate in the highest income quintile
Mental Illness: the suicide-attempt rate of those living on social assistanceis 18 times higher than higher-income individuals
Cancer: low-income women are less likely to access screening interventions like mammograms or Pap Smears
Development: infant mortality is 60% higher in the lowest income quintile neighborhoods

Now, a lot of my chums who work in healthcare would agree with this, at least to some extent. Look at your lower income, less educated populations and there is a definite trend toward major health problems.

What kills me? SO many of them are related to food.

As a university student, what do we live off of? Kraft DInner, McDonalds, Mr. Noodles, etc. Why? It's cheap and easy. What a lot of us don't realize is plain unprocessed foods aren't actually all that expensive!! Why oh WHY do we pay $4 for a cheeseburger and fries when that could buy a bunch of lettuce ($0.99/bunch), a tomato ($0.50?), a carrot ($0.25?), and a bag of dried beans from the bulk section ($0.32/100g, so say $0.50) and a whole wheat bun ($0.50)? Obviously, these are ballpark prices, but there we have a meal with all the nutrients with a grand total of $3.75.

You could save the rest of that and buy a chocolate bar, if you really want.

Even as university students, some of us grow out of this and start making real food. But even of university students, not all of us figure it out. Eating healthy is more work, admittedly, than eating convenience food. And if you're a bit less educated, you may not know the bazillion benefits, including lower chances of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and just generally feeling better. I can't totally fathom this even now, but I have extolled the virtues of vegetables to many a person whose response was, 'So?' What if you don't know salt isn't so good for your heart? What if you don't know pop is THAT full of sugar? What if you think juice is a pretty healthy way to go so you drink a litre of fruit punch every day because 'It's healthy!'? Especially in our lovely western world we have some skewed ideas on vegetables. I read somewhere (if I find the article I'll attach it) saying even healthy-eaters in North America will generally respond to psychological testing indicating that healthy food is 'gross' and junk food is 'yummy'. We all start out this way as kidlets, but somehow in France, that idea gets reversed as adults so junk food becomes 'gross.'

However, that little meal idea I rattled off was only one example. A lot of healthy foods ARE more expensive. Brown rice? Defs more expensive than white. Omega 3 supplemented eggs or even free range? Like, DOUBLE. And if you're struggling financially, we tend to go for things we associate with satiety. A cheeseburger sounds a lot more filling than my tasty salad. If you don't know how far your food budget is going to stretch, you want to be FULL. I know this to be true from the various places I volunteered in the DTES. I volunteered last January at a women's centre, and there were people crying because they came late for the waffle breakfast and were going to have to wait 10 minutes for us to pack up food in take home packages. One lady threw an absolute tantrum. It's understandable if you think about it; when you're hungry, it's hard to think about something else. If your whole life revolves around getting access to food, you're going to be RIGHT PUT OUT if it disappears in front of you.

One of the places I volunteered, the Neighbourhood House, only served vegetarian meals because A) they wanted to make sure everyone could have some, and B) they went by what was donated - know what's cheap to donate? VEG! and C) people need to see how to make simple healthy foods tasty and easy. It didn't cater to homeless people so much during the hours that I was there, simply to people who were struggling. A lot of people in that situation may have the desire to eat healthily, but what do you do if you don't have transportation to go get it? And if you do, what if you can't afford the equipment to cook it?

THAT sort of blew my mind. Working with dual-diagnosis patients who were moving out form a treatment centre: this lady has no teeth. What if she can't afford a blender? Some people are working with a spoon and a hot plate. Or if you've got 6 kids and a limited budget? You might be going for the peppers in that bag under the counter that need some, ahem, doctoring. In that case, those peppers probably don't taste so sweet, and while you're doing the best you can, your kidlets may grow up thinking peppers are gross. People with less money also tend to be less educated people who are potentially more easily swayed by whatever advertising/people telling you useless nonsense/I swear this pizza is GOOD for you, etc, because you're not always taught to think critically.

UGH. It's so damn HARD.

Obviously, this is only a small part of why you need money to be healthy. If you're sick and you can't afford to take time off, you go to work anyway. If you're lucky, you'll shake it off. If you're not, you're not getting any time to rest, and you get sicker, until you HAVE to be off work. Then you lose money because you're too sick to work, and by the time you're well enough to work you're completely in the hole so you make yourself sick by working overtime or simply from stress. THEN you can't afford the medication, and so on and so on. It's bad, folks. I'm just hitting the tip of the iceberg, here. And this is not the case with everyone, of course. But which populations do YOU correlate with obesity? Think about it.

And now, to end this post on a funnier and less aggravating note, here are some pictures of my first attempt to make macarons. Not macaROONS, macaRONS, those aggravatingly cute little French cookies. I have since made another batch that came out much better - this one I WAY overwhipped the egg whites after completely misreading the directions, but even now I seem to either get the cute little feet at the bottom OR a smooth top. I have yet to manage both. Sigh. Stil dericious with raspberry jam or nutella in the middle. For all you other would-be-macaron-bakers out there, learn from my failures. It gets better, I promise.

FEET!!

The slightly better ones from the first batch. They had
said feet, but are terribly cracked. More recent ones are less
cracked, but no feet (these were WAY overbeaten, though.)