Gaming: Society's evil
Maybe the parents just aren't feeding their sprogs healthily enough more likely.
Easier to blame the latest set of media though isn't it.
The number of British kids suffering from the deficiency disease rickets is soaring, medical experts have claimed. The cause: too many hours indoors playing videogames. Professor Simon Pearce and Tim Cheetham, both of Newcastle University, wrote in the British Medical Journal this week that rickets – which can cause sufferers …
I was about to make a comment about how parents either:
A). Keep their little darlings inside just in case the terrorists / paediatricians* etc get them
B). Use the Playstation as a nanny whilst they ignore their offspring, leaving Little Jimmy playing Manhunt 2 until 3am every day**.
and the fact that the massive increase in convenience food - most of which is pretty shit for nutrition - has massively grown over the last few decades.
A lot of the current crop of parents are the ones who were babysat by the TV and fed microchips day in and day out. It shows.
*yes, I know. It was deliberate - not like The NotW!
** And playing Manhunt 2 is in itself enough reason to class the kiddies as "abused"...
>...recommend that vitamin D be artificially added to milk and other food products in the UK, in an >attempt to counteract the rise in rickets cases.
How about recommending that the kids get out a little more and get some exercise?
Lets treat the symptoms, not the cause - and they call themselves doctors (well I guess they do)! actually I suppose that's what happens in the medical profession anyway, so maybe thats their default behaviour.
ttfn
Rickets was endemic in the UK as late as the intra-war years, and I believe it was brought "under control" by a rather daring - for the time - social engineering ploy by the government.
Rickets is primarily a disease of poor diet, and the answer lay in getting people, mostly the poorer classes who were unable to afford luxury food items, to eat the right foods.
Turns out that a meal of Fish'n'chips once a week or so is a good start, so the plan was that anyone starting a fish'n'chip shop would be subsidised by the government.
(What's that? A capitalist idea from what was then mostly socialist Britain? Isn't that, like, totally illegal under a treaty with the Americans or something?)
This is probably the reason why the meal has such a prominent place in British culture, and why corner fish'n'chip shops were once a common sight.
It's my understanding that in the 80s the subsidies were discontinued. This (along with decline in fish stocks and the subsequent rise in costs) brought on the gradual decline of fish'n'chips as a UK staple and wouldn't ya know it, a new rise in rickets is seen.
Hmmm...
I suffer from a pancreatic condition that sprang into my personal foreground some years after I emigrated and stopped eating cod once a week (couldn't get decent cod over here). Turns out the secret to moving this problem back into the background again is to take capsules containing Omega-3 fish oils.
Or eat Cod once a week.
So kids have a bad diet because healthy food is too expensive and big businesses destroy the way people eat, "hai Monasato!"
Plus parents don't let them go outside 'cause the paedos will get them, or so say the newspapers.
And it's all the PS2's fault ????
I normally find el'Reg a good laugh but this is just stupid. Please, think of the children !!
Nothing expensive about a clove of garlic or an onion.
But yeah, it's blame the parents. Or the parents' parents. Some parents are lazy and were themselves raised without the know-how of how to look after themselves, let alone their kids, and this is especially true in lower working-class areas. And their kids will grow up the same, and it'll never change without intervention (most probably evolution, if you can wait a million years) taking care of the problem.
I know that rickets are meant to be more prevalent in younger children but as its related to diet wouldnt that mean that it should be more widespread considering that before computers there was more tv ??
Also, what about the older generation that have grown up in the late 70's and early 80's onwards when the home computer boom started. I used to spend all my time on a computer in my bedroom (no internet though) playing games on a C64, Amiga, TRS80.
I have a job, family, etc and have never felt the need to go on some rampage afterwards either.
Isn't it more a case of current society simply becoming lazier in the way we eat and live our lives rather than the blame lying at the door of computer games ???
...it's the fact that when the brats do actually go out into the fresh air, they insist on wearing long sleeved hoodies, with their hoods up, in the middle of summer. I remember seeing a gang of them one *blazing* July day a couple of years back, wearing not just hoodies but massive 'puffa' jackets all fully done up, and thinking that it wouldn't be long before there was a rickets epidemic. I'm surprised (and schadenfreudially overjoyed) that my cynical musing has now come to pass !
The only body part that teenage boys seem to expose these days is their scrawny spotty arses, thinking they're dead hip and up-to-date... for their info, it was already a joke when it was shown in 'Clueless' (1995)... I suppose that these days any teenager with sufficient intelligence to operate a trouser belt gets bogwashed for being a swot...
Hang on, this isn't the Daily Mail website, how did I get here ??!!!