The Games Begin
This week can’t pass quickly enough for my kids, who are nearly apoplectic about the weekend’s big movie release, The Hunger Games, or, as my kids call it, The Some Hunger But Mostly Death Games. That’s right, the biggest event in youth literature and cinema since Harry Potter is the story of brave, noble children who kill each other. My state is in the movie, playing the dystopian landscape of “District 12.” North Carolina almost lost the role to another state, but the directors decided nowhere else would do once we pointed out how much we had done in real life to addict kids to tobacco.
The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, on the other hand, keeps trying to undo all the tobacco marketers’ hard work, most recently announcing an advertising campaign featuring actual diseased ex-smokers. The “Tips From Former Smokers” campaign started this week and will run for a total of 12 weeks, costing $54 million. That may seem like a lot of money until you realize the tobacco industry spends over $1 million an hour to promote their products. According to the CDC, the total cost of the campaign would cover 2 days of US expenditures on tobacco marketing and advertising or, alternately, the price of five of Mitt Romney’s haircuts.
I checked out some commercials from the series, and, frankly, I was disappointed. I expected some useful advice from these real former smokers, like on how to get stubborn stains out of my linen napkins. But no, these smokers just talk about depressing stuff, like how they lost their limbs to Buerger’s disease or how their kids have to go to the ICU with asthma. Then there are links to resources that help people quit smoking. I’m sure this campaign will be successful, since it’s based on solid evidence about behavior change, but I think people would like the CDC a lot more if they’d use my idea: “Stock Tips From Former Smokers.”
Lots of parents these days find themselves playing hunger games with their overweight children, seeking workable solutions to limit their caloric intake. Many adults, myself included, rely on low-carbohydrate diets to help them control their weight (tweet me, and I’ll share my recipe for lentils with peanut butter and anchovies). But researchers publishing in the Journal of Pediatrics this week suggest kids would rather eat smaller portions than forgo their pancakes. I can see the effects of this bias in my own household; there’s no question my kids would pass up a whole pile of scrambled eggs just to lick the sugar off one donut. Now that I’ve read this study I know what I need to do: stop hounding my children to follow a diet like mine and just buy them tiny little plates.
One habit I’ve successfully passed on is the use of normal saline nasal rinse to fight off sinusitis. As evidence piles up in the adult literature that antibiotics are about as powerful as water in treating acute sinus infections, some docs got the bright idea to just use the water (distilled or sterilized), albeit with some salt added for comfort. Now it appears these nose showers are just as effective as sinus surgery in battling chronic sinusitis in kids. Actually doing the nasal washes is fun and easy, so long as you’re the kind of person who enjoys wiping out on your boogie board and having a giant wave plaster your face into the beach while you wonder if you’ll ever again come up for air. To simulate that experience you just lean over a sink, breathe deeply and evenly through your mouth, and and squirt an estuary into one nostril, observing as it pours out the other side. For fun you can try to identify various fish species before they run down the drain. I’m not sure anyone will be using saline irrigation recreationally any time soon, but it does beat the heck out of sinus surgery. I find it helps to play The Ventures’ "Pipeline".
I think I’m going to start all three of my kids on saline irrigation this week, to ensure they’ll be healthy enough for The Hunger Games. Living in North Carolina will add a layer of realism as they spend the rest of the weekend pretending to be their favorite characters. Now I just have to remind them not to kill each other, but that's nothing new.