This episode of Technically, That’s Illegal discusses the power of children — they are capable of more than we realize. While modern adults don’t even trust kids to cross the street, the fact is that children are capable of so much, inlcuding facilitating healing.

Unfortunately, the government, however, is not as capable as a few small children…I hope to prove it with this post. Some articles to help my case:

Kid gets suspended for eating his pop tart into the shape of a gun

Man faces summons for laughing in his own house

Health inspector destroys perfectly good food

Man faces possible 7 years for empty ammo magazines

Police are your enemy

Never take a plea

We all know that government officials have gone overboard in their nannying of our food choices. This post won’t re-hash all of that — here’s a good summary. Besides the obvious fact that this is not acceptable in a free society, there’s also the fact that the government officials and their consultants are terribly inept at deciding which foods are unhealthy and which are not.

Over the years, we have heard a variety of different messages from the various governmental departments on this subject. The Department of Agriculture chimes in with their $.02., which turns out to be more like $155 billion (proposed 2013 budget). Then, there’s the other huge department offering their advice as well, the Department of Health and Human Services, which has 14 agencies under its umbrella (Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Aging, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Food and Drug Administration, Health Resources and Services Administration, Indian Health Service, Medicaid, Medicare, National Toxicology Program, and Substance Abuse and Mental health Services Administration).

Yet, all of this money and all of these agencies collecting and dispensing information don’t end up giving us clear information. Instead, they often try to influence public policy and private behavior through mandating in various ways that we, the citizenry, behave in a healthful manner.

We are left with what we already knew — we should make our own health decisions because there is conflicting information on health. Some people will tell you never to eat butter (see example here), and other people will tell you to find ways to add it into your diet (see example here). The bottom line is that nobody knows exactly how every substance will affect the human body. Our bodies are complicated. Even doctors and nutritionists disagree about these things, and they’ve dedicated their professional lives to this topic. So, you should never trust someone in government to make your nutrition decisions for you.

If you think nutrition is an exact science, think again. Even being obese isn’t always bad.

Kahlon says the research supports the ‘obesity paradox’ — that in some circumstances being obese may be better for your health, even though obesity is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, hypertension, death and catching infections like pneumonia.

“The thinking usually is obesity equals bad and this research demonstrated something different. It shows that perhaps we’re not looking at obesity in the right way. Is all fat bad? Is all fat equal? For acute illnesses, maybe we’re not looking at the right indicators for body mass index and obesity.”

That quote is from a study where overweight patients had higher survival rates than those of regular weight after being hospitalized for pneumonia.

So, while that goes against what we might have believed about obesity, it just goes to show you that we don’t know everything, and we certainly don’t know enough about it to start taking away private food choices.

Though not related to nutrition, please check out my podcast episode about how we’re constantly discovering new things: We Aren’t As Smart As We Think We Are.

So often on this blog, I cite stories of people who were arrested for normal behavior or things that we all do every day. Just stick around and do some surfing and you’re sure to find something outrageous.

The response of the public in situations like these is to ignore it and move on because often the charges were dropped or the person wasn’t convicted. But, I maintain that simply being arrested for something is a big deal and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

There are a number of reasons why being arrested can impact your life forever — societal stigma, court fees, job loss, or other things. And sometimes people are even convicted of things they didn’t do, which is the main thing our criminal justice system is supposed to avoid. Will Grigg also reminds us of a way that getting arrested can ruin your life.

So, this is just a friendly reminder to do your best to not judge people who have been arrested…and do your best not to call the police if there is any other solution you can think of.

Remember: I am spending a lot of time and energy making my podcast now. If you don’t subscribe to it, you are missing out on a lot of content here.

Should willing, rational adults be forbidden from selling their body parts?

Some links of interest and references for this episode:

A Donor Makes the Case That Kidney Sales Should Be Legal

Allowing the Sale of Human Kidneys Would Lead to Abuse

Death Penalty Stats from Death Penalty Information Center

An Article Discussing Abortions Going Up Under Republican Presidents

Man Sentenced for Illegal Kidney Sales

Public nuisance is a term that should speak for itself. It’s something that is public and annoying, basically. Here are some generally accepted public nuisances in regards to municipal code — loud mufflers, tall grass, unkempt yard, trash strewn about, etc. In the law, it is generally assumed that the “victim” of these crimes is the public as a whole. The “crimes” are publically viewable and annoying to the populace.

The very term public nuisance would exclude things that occur in private. But, that doesn’t stop many cities and counties in California for using public nuisance as an excuse to ban smoking in apartments and condos.

Calling it “the next frontier in California’s ongoing efforts to protect its citizens from secondhand smoke,” the American Lung Association’s Center for Tobacco Policy and Organizing compiled a 2011 report on smoke-free housing policies and provided an update that shows 18 cities and counties in the state have banned smoking in multi-unit housing, including apartments and condominiums.

Thirteen cities and counties have banned smoking in all existing and new multi-unit housing, with five more doing so in 2012, according to the center. Thirteen of the cities listed in the report have placed a smoking ban on 100 percent of new and existing multi-unit housing.

I definitely don’t think smoking is healthy, but I am completely mystified by those so vehemently opposed to smoking that they try to ban people from doing so in their own homes. No, they don’t own them, but, if their landlords don’t mind, I don’t see how the government should have anything to say about it. And, it’s especially dumb to label it as a public nuisance. It’s obviously a private behavior occurring on private property.

I wonder who is going to enforce this. I imagine that landlords already have a hard time with compliance without being forced to ban smoking in their units.

On this blog, I typically only write about legal issues relating to the United States of America. In this case, I am going to branch out a bit. You see, USA lawmakers are following in the footsteps of Denmark in several ways.

A year ago, Denmark enacted a “fat tax,” which attempted to “engineer a healthier populace” by heavily taxing saturated fat and sugar, thereby discouraging their use.

According to the Danish Ministry of Taxation the country’s tax on unhealthy, high-fat products had driven up prices and put jobs at risk.

The Wall Street Journal describes it this way (emphasis added):

Danish lawmakers have killed a controversial “fat tax” one year after its implementation, after finding its negative effect on the economy and the strain it has put on small businesses far outweigh the health benefits.

Besides the issues mentioned in the above quotes about how taxes put a strain on the economy, there are several other obvious problems with this.

Which government agencies/programs are being instituted or beefed up with this new tax money? Is the money simply going to balance the current budget expenses? If the government becomes reliant upon this source of revenue, they are automatically not going to achieve their end of having a healthier populace. You see, the government will come to NEED and depend upon that money. Therefore, if they actually achieve what they say they want (for people to stop consuming saturated fat), they will need to come up with some other tax in order to continue their spending habits.

Then there’s the whole issue of saturated fat in the first place. It’s not as if the science is settled on the fact that it’s unhealthy. These taxes enacted in Denmark and other places have the underlying assumption that saturated fat is terrible for your health. If fat is just plain terrible, why does high fat dairy lower your risk of a heart attack? I recommend you browse around the food renegade site for more information, but a nice debunking of the saturated fat myth can be found here.

Well, what about the sugar? They taxed the sugar, too. Well, I agree that sugar is terrible for your health. There’s really nothing redeeming about it, other than its taste. However, see my above reasoning about why I don’t believe taxing it is the correct thing to do. Then, add to that the fact that I believe people should be allowed to indulge if they choose.

Now, let’s bring this back to the USA. I have documented a number of cases that lead me to believe we are going down the path toward these kinds of taxes on a nationwide level.

Federal guidelines limiting school lunches to 850 calories

NYC’s ban on large sugary drinks

FDA’s plan to gradually reduce salt content in foods

Of course, there are more…but they haven’t been documented here yet. I’ll get to them eventually, but there’s never a shortage of things to write about.

Just remember that the next time government tries to get involved in your food choices that they generally manage to make things worse.

The law fixes a problem that never existed — at least not among doctors. “We’re not aware of any undocumented immigrants that are physicians,” Palmisano said.

Isn’t that the case for many new laws? They purport to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. In many cases, the problem wouldn’t even exist without government involvement in the first place.

The quote above comes from NPR and is referring to the law that now requires medical professionals in Georgia (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc.) to file paperwork that proves their citizenship or legal residency in order to renew their professional licenses. Long time readers will know how I feel about professional licensure in the first place.

Phones go unanswered. Paperwork piles up. And processing delays, coupled with confusion over the new rules, mean lots of expired licenses.

Hughes estimates about 1,300 doctors and other medical practitioners have lost their legal ability to work. Some didn’t submit the required paperwork. Others are stuck in the backlog of applications that haven’t been processed yet.

Pretty soon their economy will take a hit because people who aren’t making money, aren’t spending money. Then people will wonder what happened. I’ll tell you what happened…the government got involved.

The crazy thing about all of this is that they aren’t even checking whether the submitted documents are genuine. So, the office workers spend tons of time checking passports and other acceptable documents against the names and addresses on the submitted paperwork and don’t even make sure they’re genuine. So, if there was a problem with illegal workers, this law isn’t even fixing it. And, this whole process has not yet revealed a single undocumented immigrant worker in the system.

Just a heads up: If a government bans something that is overall very beneficial for the citizenry, you can bet that the reason for banning it is because they enjoy having a monopoly on “helping” people. Governments are power hungry and crazy like that. If you don’t believe me, stick around, subscribe, and follow stories from around the country that prove my point over and over again.

The latest example of this phenomenon (governments banning something simply because they want to be in control) comes to us from the state of Minnesota.

Coursera offers free, online courses to people around the world, but if you live in Minnesota, company officials are urging you to log off or head for the border.

The state’s Office of Higher Education has informed the popular provider of massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, that Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there. (source)

Minnesota’s office of higher education claims to have best interests of the students in mind. They say that they have a “responsibility” to “protect” students. However, it’s clear to me that they simply feel threatened by Coursera. After all, if people can take free online classes taught by professors at the University of Michigan, Stanford, Emory, Johns Hopkins, etc., why would they pay to enroll as students in Minnesota’s public universities?

However, they don’t really need to feel threatened by this. People who complete Coursera’s courses don’t actually receive college credit (usually). Most of the students are high-school students or professionals trying to brush up in their work fields.

However, true to form, the banning of these courses in Minnesota has opened up a business avenue for anyone wanting to give it a try:

Referring to Coursera’s caution that Minnesotans who do enroll study outside the state, Robert Talbert, an associate professor of mathematics at Grand Valley State University, in Michigan, had a suggestion.

Writing in his blog on The Chronicle’s Web site, he said he sees “a strong potential for a cottage industry: Set up a chain of coffee shops with free Internet access and on-site tutors just across Minnesota’s borders…

Minnesota should be ashamed. Instead of feeling threatened and pretending to be concerned, they should encourage free education for their citizens. Doesn’t education empower all of us for a better life? That’s what governments want us to believe about their public schools. But, as soon as it’s not a public school, we’re supposed to believe that it’s somehow not in our best interest.

Until today (October 1st, 2012), children in Maryland could ride without any kind of child safety seat if they were at least 65 pounds. Now, they must remain in a booster seat until they are 8 years old (I accidentally typed 89 just now, maybe it’s a Freudian typo) unless they are at least 4′ 9″ tall.

In other words, when deciding if a child needs a safety seat or not, the child’s weight is now irrelevant, but their age and height aren’t.

This is a law that should help keep children safe. It makes it clear that when a child is under 8 years old they need to be in special child seating.

Because we all know that police offers have measuring tape they use to determine the height of children if they suspect a violation. Additionally, all parents are travelling with their children’s birth certificates to prove their age. How about the radical idea of LEAVING THIS DECISION UP TO THE PARENTS?

When I was in high school, I played sports. I went to work after my team’s after school practices. I ate a lot. Also, my school’s lunch time through high school was 11:00am. I almost always ate a school lunch. By the time I was ready for dinner, I was very, very hungry.  I was not overweight.

I’m glad that was the late 90s and not now. I would be in even worse shape if I had to go to high school these days. Some states are adopting the federal guidelines that limit school lunches to 850 calories. That might be fine for some people, and even the majority of people. But, that does not mean that this one-size-fits-all approach is a good idea. Of course, it’s almost always a one-size-fits-all approach when the government gets involved.

The solution to the problem of hungry kids, according to a school’s nutrition director is (emphasis added):

We need to encourage breakfasts at home or at school. We need to encourage students to take all of the items at lunch and then to plan for after-school activities by packing a healthy snack.

School districts that once financed bigger lunches could continue to offer extra food and comply with the calorie restrictions by establishing an afternoon snack program, Johnson said.

Parents of athletes and other active children should make sure they have a healthy snack between school and practice, Johnson said.

I totally agree that parents should become involved. Responsible parents probably already were involved. But, I think it’s ironic that the school is acknowledging there are hungry kids, which is a problem they caused, and then asking for parental involvement to solve the problem. Maybe we should just trust parents and kids to regulate their own behavior at lunch to make the best choices for themselves and their children. If the problem is that we can’t trust parents and kids, then how are these regulations helping when they require MORE parental involvement in order to make sure kids don’t go hungry?

And, of course, the supposed problem of having school lunches contain too many calories is not even solved with these guidelines. Even Witicha schools (one of the schools following the guidelines) has set up “share tables”:

Wichita schools cut down on waste by setting up “share tables,” where students can leave items such as bananas, oranges or packaged foods they don’t want.

So, in other words, a hungry kid can go up to one of these tables and a banana (at 110 calories a pop) and easily go over the 850 calorie limit, anyway. And what are these “packaged foods” they mention? Isn’t the idea that the lunches should be healthier? Isn’t “packaged food” just a synonym for “processed food?”  Anyway, they don’t elaborate on that, so I guess I’ll leave it alone.

The fact is that the government continues to try to protect you from yourself. Of course, you could always bring a brown bag lunch to protest these rules, and many kids have, but don’t forget the fact that some schools forbid this. And then there was the case of the child who was forced to eat a school lunch when it was deemed that their home-prepared lunch was too unhealthy.

Do I think childhood obesity is a problem? Yes, I do, actually. I think obesity is a problem in general in this country. However, I think the government has got it all wrong one how to solve it. Diet is a big part of it, but restricting calories isn’t a good idea. It slows your metabolism and causes you to want to binge later in the day. It decreases performance and alertness. It can even cause bone loss. Anyway, I’m no nutritionist, but I think the best way to get “cure” obesity is to eat less sugar, including processed breads.

But, I’m not here to spout my nutritional theories. I’m here to remind you that the government is intruding once again. Even though I think sugar and processed foods cause big problems, I don’t believe in totally restricting them, even in my own house.

On the flip side of this, if we don’t want government regulations, we need to stop requesting assistance from the government on these issues. When we see a problem in our country (like obesity), we need to resist the urge to think the government should do something about it. The fact is, we won’t be satisfied (as a whole) with what they decide to do, anyway.

If we think obesity is a problem, we are most likely referring to “those other people” we saw at the buffet the other night. If we were worried about our own obesity, we would do our own research, start our own exercise regimen, and get cracking on it. We wouldn’t sit around and wait for the government to do something about it. And, lastly, if we’re not worried about obesity at all, we’re really going to be mad when “those other people” tell us we can’t have our large sodas.