Island Med Student

A few weeks ago I found myself with very little money and hungry for breakfast while on vacation, so I ended up eating an egg and cheese biscuit at a McDonalds. As I sat inside eating my sandwich, my attention turned to the “playground” area. I realized that the McDonalds did not have the standard playground that I had come to expect as a child. Instead of swings, a slide, and other fun things to play on, there was a large video game console. Children sat in chairs, with their hands firmly gripping the controllers, and their eyes fixated on the video screens. I couldn’t help but grimace at the sad irony of it all. McDonalds are known for serving high-fat, high-calorie meals. So, not only had these kids just eaten incredibly unhealthy foods, but they were now sitting on their butts, remaining completely sedentary, instead of frolicking around with other children. What habits are being reinforced in these children?

I recently watched this video, published by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. It struck me as a perfect example of the kinds of habits I see being developed by many kids these days. What are we teaching our children?

When I think about by own habits as an adult, I can’t help but think back to my own childhood. I grew up on a farm in rural Virginia. My family’s farm produced a lot of the food I consumed. We grew fruits and vegetables to eat, milked goats for most of our dairy needs, and had a few chickens who provided our eggs. My mother instilled good eating habits in me as a child. She made her own ice cream, dried her own fruit, and made many other yummy foods from scratch. At the time, it didn’t seem like a big deal to me. It was just how things were.

I grew up in a house with three other sisters. We were all very active from a young age. When we weren’t helping plant seeds, shoveling manure, or shucking corn, we were running around in the fields, or covering each other with mud. We had access to no, or very little television for most of our childhood. The Internet didn’t exist. There was no reason to play a “virtual” game of baseball on a video game console. For us, a game of baseball meant gathering sticks, leaves, walnuts, and of course, our imagination.

But now I’m an adult, and I’m a poor student living in New York City. I don’t have room in my studio apartment for a garden, goats or chickens (and my dogs refuse to produce milk or eggs). I no longer have a huge field of grass to run through. But I realize that the habits I developed as a child made a huge impact on my lifestyle. I still try to eat fresh fruits and vegetables when possible. I prefer to walk to get around, I take the stairs instead of the elevator, and I am a regular visitor to parks.

So, what does this all have to do with medicine? In my opinion, everything. While access to healthcare services, medications, and health insurance are obviously immensely important to overall health, there is no substitution for a healthy lifestyle.

I have so much I’d like to say about all this. There are so many variables involved like healthcare access, resources, socioeconomic status, and race, but I don’t have the space to go into all of them in this short blog entry.

One thing that I will say, though, is that socioeconomic status can have a myriad of influences on one’s own health. Education, income, and race are all factors that influence the ultimate health outcomes of different people. If a mother has to work two full-time jobs to support her single parent family, she might not have the time or money to prepare healthy meals for her children. The examples are endless.

I consider myself to be a lucky gal. As a child, I sometimes resented my mother for not allowing us to eat processed cheese or watch cable television. But now as an adult, I realize how much I am in debt to her for everything she did. If I ever have children of my own, I hope to be able to pass the same values on to them. And although they might resent me for not allowing them to play video games at McDonalds, I hope that one day they might actually thank me.

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