Officials at Prague High School in Oklahoma are finally taking a principled stand against the degradation of civility in our culture by denying 2012 class valedictorian Kaitlin Nootbaar her diploma. Nootbaar reportedly substituted for the word “heck” in her graduation speech, referring to her confusion about her possible plans for the future. Now, until she submits a written letter of apology, she will not be able to do those things you can do only if you have a physical copy of your high school diploma, like frame your high school diploma. Fortunately, Nootbaar already has a full scholarship to college, allowing her to still pursue such promising career options as rap lyricist, talk radio host, and Dante scholar.
Gimme a “D”
While the cure for the common cold remains elusive, a group of researchers from Harvard has gone a long way toward finding effective prevention. How far have they gone? To Ulan Bator, Mongolia, the place they deemed best for finding lots of kids deficient in vitamin D due to a climate so unforgiving that even people who’ve lived there all their lives don’t want to go outside. There they found that supplementing children’s diets with a mere 300 IU of vitamin D a day (3/4 the current US recommendation) was enough to cut the incidence of viral upper respiratory infections in half.
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News flash: kids usually prefer video games to dietary sources of vitamin D.
While most American children live in places with more sunlight than Mongolia, Americans’ vitamin D levels can be just as low, since any home in the US can be transformed into a mini-Ulan Bator simply by adding a video game console. Most American children require supplemental vitamins to get adequate quantities of vitamin D. Dietary sources do exist, but many are not popular, at least with my kids, including sardines, liver, and cod liver oil (combining all the goodness of sardines and liver in one teaspoon!). If there’s any dietary vitamin D source likely to stave off colds in my kids, it’s margarine. Just in case, I’ll be giving them supplements this winter, but honestly I hope they don’t tell their classmates. I just can’t sit through another 15 minutes of Perfect Attendance awards this year.
One Wafer-thin Mint?
Can one marshmallow make a difference in obesity? Apparently it can if it was used in the famous Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. The study, so influential it served as a plot point in The Five Year Engagement, correlated preschoolers’ ability to hold off eating a marshmallow in return for a second one with their subsequent success in school and beyond. Researchers publishing in the Journal Of Pediatrics wondered if performance in the original experiment, conducted between 1968 and 1974, might predict adult BMI.
They did not report on whether the original experimental subjects are sick and tired of providing personal information to scientists and just wished they’d had a stomach bug the day they were offered that first pillowy treat. They did report that subjects’ ability to delay gratification in preschool correlated with a lower adult BMI. My take-away from these data is that, since I never really enjoyed marshmallows, I will be massively successful and live forever. Researchers suggested that parents who want to teach their children to delay gratification encourage them to participate in activities like martial arts, games like “Mother May I,” and trips to the Department Of Motor Vehicles.
A Pox On None Of Your Houses
(c) Digital Vision
Chicken pox: no problem for chickens, but potentially a big problem for unvaccinated kids.
It seems that when The Vaccine Conversation comes up, parents I talk with often get stuck on varicella. What, after all, is so bad about kids having chicken pox? That’s when I like to pull up my shirt and show them the scars I have from the two weeks I spent bedridden at age 14 drinking chicken broth and watching Gilligan’s Island reruns, but some parents tell me this “freaks them out,” and that I’m “over-sharing.” So instead I remind them that varicella infection can and does lead to hospitalizations and even deaths. Now the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) has released a new analysis of how well the varicella vaccine is doing at preventing those things, although they leave out the scars left by wound infections and overdosing on Bob Denver.
In the decade between 2000 and 2010 varicella cases dropped by 80%, from 43 cases per 100,000 population to a mere nine. Even better, 2010 saw only four deaths from varicella, none in vaccinated patients. I don't know whether these data will slow online sales of varicella-laden lollipops but I sure hope so, or I might have to pull up my shirt on You Tube. Will it work? To quote one promising Oklahoma valedictorian, “How the hell do I know?”