The Ankle-Biters Ski Club

Rich and I were taking ski lessons at Sun Valley.  Our instructor brought us to a halt on Lower Warm Springs and told us to unbuckle all the buckles on our boots.  He emphasized that all of the buckles had to be completely loose, no chance of clipping in.  As we complied, he told us that we would be skiing the remainder of Warm Springs boots undone.  The uniform looks of incredulity led to, “what!  That’s impossible.”  Our instructor explained that if we had the correct body position, we did not need boots at all, “the boots are there just to keep the skis from running out from under your feet.”  Off he skied expecting us to follow, which we did, sort of … a lot of cold, wet feet from walking out of our boots.

As we, timidly, worked our way down Warm Springs, suddenly we were swarmed by the Ankle-Biters Ski Club, five- to eight-year-olds with amazing skiing abilities.  Some of them did not come up above my knee.  They wove in and out amongst us, flipped around and skied backwards, circled loudly and audaciously.  They could ski well and let us old ski-schoolers know it.  My excuse was they had a much lower center of gravity and less distance to fall … yeah, right.  The Ankle-Biters were and are the future of skiing.

Many people believe that children under the age of eighteen or so can seemingly eat almost anything with impunity.  Is this assumption valid? 

How about some statistics?

“… today one in thirteen American children has a serious food allergy, a rate that increased by 50 percent over the last two decades.  Nearly 9 percent of our kids have asthma, with dramatic increases in rates from 1980 to today.  The prevalence of childhood eczema/atopic dermatitis in the United States is 10.7 percent overall and as high as 18.1 percent in individual states – again, a rate that nearly doubled in the past several decades.  More than 1.6 million Americans have Crohn’s disease or colitis, and one in ten is a child.  One in roughly 140 Americans has celiac disease – a rate that has increased 4.5 times over the past fifty years, with rates increasing among children in particular, and this is before we get to gluten sensitivities.  Gastrointestinal reflux affects 8 percent of children, and today 10 percent of infants younger than twelve months with reflux now develop significant complications resulting in a disorder called gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD.  Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) occurs in 6 to 24 percent of kids from middle school through high school.  Type 2 diabetes accounted for less that 3 percent of all cases of new-onset adolescent diabetes up until ten years ago, and now it accounts for 45 percent of these cases.  One in five American children is now obese.  One in forty-five boys and one in sixty-eight children have a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, 11 percent of our children have a diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and just over 20 percent (or one in five) of our children either currently or at some point during their life will have a seriously debilitating mental disorder.  These, too, are rates that have skyrocketed over the past two decades.  Finally, nearly 60 percent of our children experience chronic headaches, with 7 percent of these being chronic migraines.”

Michele Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017).

Whew!!!  Most of these diseases are chronic and hard to treat.  In fact, conventional medicine has no tools with which to treat these conditions, the best physicians can do is treat the symptoms.

This is a blog about skiers and snowboarders, so how big is the problem and does it really affect young skiers and snowboarders?

I could not find any statistics about the number of children under the age of eighteen that ski and snowboard.  I did find some Canadian Ski Council statistics that showed about 55 percent of skier and snowboarder households included children under the age of eighteen.  Statista found that 4 percent of the US population aged 30-49 skied or snowboarded in 2018.  The 2018 US population was approximately 327 million, thus, there were about 13 million skiers aged 30-49.  If we assume this cohort comprises most of the households with children under 18 who ski and snowboard, and assume further than in most of these households both parent ski or snowboard, we get 7 to 10 million households.  Applying the Canadian data, we get 4 to 6 million households with skiers or snowboarders under the age of eighteen.  The average US household is 3.23 persons.  Thus, we may conclude there were 5 to 7 million skiers and snowboarders under the age of eighteen in the US in 2018.  (All US data from the US Census unless otherwise cited.). These young people are the future of skiing and snowboarding.

Take this crude estimate of 5 to 7 million skiers and snowboarders under the age of eighteen and apply it to the disease and condition statics reported above.  No matter how imprecise and crude the analysis, the numbers are staggering.

What are the sources of these problems and why have the conditions skyrocketed over the past several decades?  One of the most obvious causes is frequently cited in the nightly news … diet … eating too many processed foods, ones high in carbohydrates, sugars and synthetic ingredients … not-real-food-food … donuts, Cheetos, Fruit Loops, Big Gulp Slurpies … the foods that take up most of the square footage and shelf space in the modern grocery store.

A second, and perhaps more insidious source (and one I have railed against in earlier posts), are the products of modern agrichemical industrial agriculture, genetically modified foods grown with synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics.

Perro and Adams present case study after case study in which children present conditions that traditional medicine is ill equipped to handle, in most cases arriving at Dr. Perro’s office only after being unsuccessfully treated elsewhere, including physical, psychological and emotional conditions.  In every case the children improved, significantly and often dramatically, after switching to non-genetically-modified (non-GMO) 100 percent organic food or homegrown vegetables from ecologically managed soil.

What are the major conditions to be addressed?  One of the most prevalent conditions relates to our gut, our microbiome.  We humans are mostly microbes, over 100 trillion of them.  Microbes outnumber our human cells ten to one. The majority live in our gut, particularly in the large intestine.  The microbiome is the genetic material of all the microbes - bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses - that live on and inside the human body.  The bacteria in the microbiome help digest our food, regulate our immune system, protect against other bacteria that cause disease, and produce vitamins.

When we eat we think our gut is digesting the food.  The reality is the bacteria in our gut “eats” the food; our body receives what the bacteria have processed and made available to us.   A healthy microbiome is essential to optimal health, and it matters what we feed our gut.  Where foods come from and how they are grown directly affect the health of our microbiome.

“Studies are finding that our bacteria (or lack thereof) can be linked to or associated with: obesity, malnutrition, heart disease, diabetes, celiac disease, eczema, asthma, multiple sclerosis, colitis, some cancers, and even autism.” 

“Introduction to the Human Microbiome,” American Microbiome Institute (http://www.microbiomeinstitute.org/humanmicrobiome).

“What we call ‘modern food’ is food that has been grown using intensive agrochemical industrial methods.  It is mass-produced, high-technology, and chemical-dependent food.  It is monocrop and livestock sources of food.  It is not organic food.  It is not locally produced organic food.  It is the kind of food that has led to massive subsidies for corn, soybean and wheat farmers across the United States, and that now relies on massive supplies of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  The key aspect of industrial foods that we are interested in and, in part, that fostered these chemical dependencies is, as mentioned, GM crops.” (Genetically Modified).  Perro and Adams.

Perhaps the single most damaging to our microbiome are the “Roundup Ready” and Bt toxin crops that comprise 99 percent of all commercialized GM crops … corn, soybeans, canola, alfalfa, cotton, sugar beets, potatoes and wheat.  You know Roundup (glyphosate), the Monsanto herbicide that has been the subject of endless litigation and huge monetary payouts for induced diseases.  Studies have shown that even small amounts of exposure to glyphosate can be harmful; industrial food is laced with it.  Furthermore, research has shown that plants that have absorbed high levels of glyphosate have lower nutritional value than organic plants that have never been sprayed.  (The Rodale Institute)  Genetic technologies and toxic chemicals have fundamentally changed our food supply and, consequently, those of us who eat it.

Do the conditions and chronic diseases in our children mean they are test subjects in a food production experiment?  What happens as these children age and become adults?  Will they fall into the ever-increasing trap of the unhealthy?  How long will they be able to ski?

We heard a great quote the other day, “the human body can handle single seemingly catastrophic events; the human body cannot handle chronic degradation.”  The pizza or chicken fingers on a ski trip will be ok as long as at home the food is non-industrial-agriculture non-GMO, pesticide-free, organic.

Hint: if you see the food advertised on television, especially if the words “healthy” or “nutritious” are used, you can be assured that none of us, children or adults, should be eating it.  For your health and the health of our children, stay out of the cereal aisle, the cookie aisle, the soft drink aisle, the frozen pizza aisle, the chip and snack food aisle, the … you get it, stay out of the center of the supermarket.  If you feel compelled, or your children drag you into those aisles, read the ingredient labels.  The more words you do not recognize or cannot pronounce in the ingredient list, the more you should avoid eating that.  It takes only a few of those words to drive you out of those aisles.  Better idea … shop from the edges where the real food is found.

The answer for the Ankle-Biters is the same as it is for us old folks … you are what you eat, and you can do what your body allows you to do.  Want to enjoy a long lifetime of skiing or other activities, learn to and do eat well.  We need to move from the ideology of “we have a pill for that” to understanding that food is medicine and the best medicine is food, the right kind of food.