Dear IRB...

You know, if I could do a study right this very minute, I think I would do it on nutrition intervention. (I say right now because I haven't taken the time to see what sorts of studies have already been done in this regard....) I just read an article about potentially taking severely obese children out of the home to help them have a better lifestyle and lose weight. They mentioned at least three different cases where the child lost significant weight within a year. However, two points were made that I think are more significant: one mother fed her son McDonalds because she worked two jobs and didn't have time to cook. The article itself said healthier food is often more expensive. I suppose that might be true... if you only wanted to eat ramen and mac and cheese. (Even then, I bet I could argue that buying pasta and sauce would ultimately be cheaper.)

So what I'm interested in now is do nutrition classes work? I have very mixed feelings about removing a child from their parents/caregivers, and that seems like the next most logical conclusion. One of the commenters suggested nutrition, budgeting, and meal planning classes. Sounds brilliant... but would it really work? I mean, parents of severely obese children tend to have their own weight management problems, so it could either be a win-win or a completely unwinnable situation.

On a random tangent, that mother who worked two jobs and fed her child fast food might be interested to learn that sometimes working two jobs can add up to being more expensive than just working one. I watched an interesting little clip for one of my classes where this finance guy looked at a two-income household and found that between commuting, daycare, and the cost of fast food from not having time to prepare lunches and things, (and apparently second incomes get taxed more than primary) this woman was bringing in only a few thousand a year. Wow! Not to mention the sacrifices in time they were making, because they had to juggle two children, so the couple rarely saw each other except on Sundays or something. Is it worth the extra 3000 a year? Anyway. Long random tangent.

I would be very interested to see if having families (yes, the whole family) attend a sort of nutrition class for a month would ultimately affect their eating and health over the course of a year or five years. Because really, if it would, then it seems a much better solution than removing kids from the home. Even if it were only temporarily, as the article suggested, wouldn't the problem come back once the kids returned home anyway?

The downside? I also read an article about government spending and the debt ceiling. People who feel they can't spend money on "healthy" food (which I still maintain is usually cheaper than premade food, it just costs extra time) probably won't find the money to attend a nutrition class. So who would pay for it? I guess it would probably cost less than throwing more children into foster care.

Sometimes I look at the state of people in America and it makes me sad... I guess I just have a lot to be grateful for, even when things aren't going as smoothly as we hoped.