Maggie's Farm

Thought I might share the data from a meeting tonight about vitamins, health, and cancer. The short version:

- Do not take folate-containing supplements unless you are bearing babies. (Unfortunately, the government in its infinite wisdom mandated its addtion to bread and other foods for the benefit of child-bearing women who eat terrible diets.)
- Adults should not bother with vitamin supplements, except...
- it's probably a good idea for most people to take 2000 iu of Vit D3 daily (which is actually a hormone, not a vitamin) even if you spend time outdoors, and...
- 20 minutes of daily exercise is a good thing.

That's just one researcher's opinion, of course.

The essay, Are We Really That Ill? (in which the author notes that, according to that Psychiatric diagnostic manual "DSM", half of us are mentally ill) in the NY Sun has been referenced frequently this week. And regrettably so, because the author is a Professor of English and knows little of the practice of Psychiatry.  I only have the time to address one of his statements:

With over a million copies in print, the manual is known as the bible of American psychiatry; certainly it is an invoked chapter and verse in schools, prisons, courts, and by mental-health professionals around the world.

Yes, it is invoked often - but it is no bible. No well-trained Psychiatrist uses it as a tool for understanding or treatment. It was designed as a research tool, so that researchers would share definitions. It rapidly became a tool for filling out the "diagnosis code" space on insurance forms so that patients might be eligible for some medical reimbursement.

Many of the "diagnoses" listed are not illnesses in any usual sense: nictotine addiction, insomnia, alcohol abuse, post-traumatic stress, personality disorders, ADD, and "adjustment disorder" are just a few examples of the listed items which are common parts of the human condition, but which are subjects of medical research and which are things for which people often ask for help. But they aren't illnesses - they are insurance codes.

As I have discussed frequently here, people in America who fall into the poverty income stats (which significantly do not include govt and charity help - or take assets into account like our Maine blueberry famer with a 200-acre farm) because:

1. They do not function well or adjust well in civilized society, for whatever variety of reasons.
2. They don't care and are content with - or at least not motivated by - their economic condition (eg organic farmers in VT, moonshiners in the Kentucky hills, starving artists and actors, people following their hearts, blueberry farmers in Maine, Maine Guides, Indians on reservations where there is little work, ski bums, real bums (including San Francisco runaway kids), welfare and disability addicts, Vermont farm hands, people who remain in the old town after the jobs have left, old hippies in N. Calif., etc.).
3. They don't report their income (there's a huge cash-only economy in the US - not to mention "real" crime).
4. They are the temporary poor - students, new immigrants, people between jobs or people starting out in life or new careers.
5. They ran into some bad luck or made some bad financial decisions and life choices (eg getting over their heads in debt, crushed by medical problems, being single moms, having no savings and living on Social Security, drug addicts, folks in jail, etc.).

Furthermore, as long as poverty income stats are based on the lowest X%, it will never go away - even if, as it appears now, American poor have large-screen TVs, air-conditioned homes, and cars - and tend to be overweight.

Somebody - not a sociologist - should go out there and interview some poor people and get their real stories. It would be revealing. I know plenty of their stories and know what poverty is about because I work one day a week, pro bono, at a charity medical clinic in Boston - but I cannot tell those stories here.

The subject comes up because Steve Malanga has written the definitive report at City Journal: Getting Poverty Wrong, and it turns out that family structure accounts for the main problem. One quote:

The Census Bureau’s study on the living arrangements of American children appeared in mid-February. The data show that the number of children now living in two-parent families has dipped just below the 70 percent mark for the first time since the Census began collecting data on family formation nearly 130 years ago. After peaking in the 1950s—when about 87 percent of all children lived with two parents—the traditional family went through a rapid decline beginning in the 1970s and has continued to shrink over the last three decades, though the rate of decline has slowed somewhat. As part of this sweeping change, the percentage of children living with married parents has fallen more rapidly, down more than two full percentage points, to 66.6 percent of all kids, in the last 10 years alone. Consistent with these decreases has been a sharp rise in the number of children living with single parents and with unmarried parents.

The economic impact of this breakdown has been profound. Researchers estimate that the entire rise in poverty in America since the late 1970s can be attributed to “changes in family formation,” a euphemism for the decline of families headed by two married parents. The latest Census data illustrate the problem. Only one out of ten American kids living in two-married-parent families is in poverty—and about one-third of these families are recent immigrants whose poverty is temporary. By contrast, 37 percent of children living with single mothers are impoverished.

Read the whole thing (link above).