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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm good in part listeners because today's episode really allows me to get my policy geek on.
N. Rodgers: I think you get your policy geek on quite a bit in this part.
J. Aughenbaugh: Pretty much every day.
N. Rodgers: Am just saying.
J. Aughenbaugh: I started reading the newspaper and I'm just like, wow, this is fascinating stuff and then I go down a policy rabbit hole and the next thing I'm like, oh damn, I'm going to be late to class.
N. Rodgers: See, I think if this episode in part as one of those unintended consequences things. Pretty much for this whole podcasts. We like the government does a thing and they probably didn't think about this thing as a result of the thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: The framers put a clause into the Constitution like, hey, every 10 years we're going to count people and then they didn't recognize what a big deal it would be.
N. Rodgers: Because once you get 330 million plus, it's a lot harder to count than it was when there were.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then you tie government benefits and representations.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, and now it's just bananas.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: A part of what started this conversation is that the government on a regular basis changes what it says, our nutritional rules for foods being served to children in schools.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's correct.
N. Rodgers: Infamously, there have been some really bad choices. Ketchup is not a vegetable even though it was listed as one for awhile.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. During the Reagan administration. Yeah.
N. Rodgers: But we're also talking about the fact that the pyramid used to have an enormous amount of grains. Enormous amount of meat. Then vegetables were like, hey, you should probably have some vegetable. It was this weird. Now we know enough about nutrition to know. First of all, every individual is different.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Nutritionally, but also we know that that was wrong. But then you get into the FDA. We just have just been discussing the FDA. But you get into the FDA allowing a certain level of sugar and a certain level of fat in various foods. Which leads us to where we went with this episode, which is first of all, this episode will not be about fat shaming, obesity shaming, anything like that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. No, we're not doing that.
N. Rodgers: Aughie and I we we don't we don't believe that there's any reason that that's anybody's business, particularly in terms of your body, your life, your choices. That's all about you. There are lots of reasons why somebody might be overweight. There might be genetic reasons, there might be conditions that cause that. There might be other issues and nobody knows anything about those. We're not talking about those. We're basically talking about its health at any size, which is not true. You cannot be military ready and be obese at the same time according to the US government.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia is talking about, at the time we're recording this episode. Nia and I saw two related data points, if you will. Early in 2023, the Biden administration announced what Nia just previously discussed. New food guidelines okay, for meals served at schools in the United States K through 12.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. They're trying to limit the sugar. They're trying to limit other things, but they're mainly trying to limit the sugar that's going into the foods.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, first step, constitutionally, the federal government has constitutionally no role in public education because historically that's the domain of states. But again, the federal government insinuates itself into the meals served at public schools because they create federal government programs that give a whole bunch of money. The school systems across the United States. By doing so, they now have a chit in the game. They have a stake in the game. The other data point.
N. Rodgers: Wait, timeout. They also have a public health concern.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, we'll get to that. But this is one data point. The federal government, not state governments, not local governments, the federal government is involved with food and nutrition guidelines for the meals served at public schools. We're going to get to the controversy about that. That's the one data point. The other data point is something that Nia and I took note of last summer. Listeners, you've probably picked up on this both Nia and I have a background in Homeland Security. One of me is graduate degrees is in Homeland Security for a period of time I was the director of VCUs graduate program in Homeland Security. For even briefer amount of time, I was in charge of the entire program undergraduate and graduate. We pay attention to stuff when we get news articles. That talk about the nation's preparedness.
N. Rodgers: It pings on our radar.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it pings on our radar. What we're talking about is last summer, summer of 2022, a Lieutenant General from the Marine Corp, David Ottignon. Wait Ottignon.
N. Rodgers: Ottignon.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Ottignon, and again, longtime listeners, you know, Nia and I love.
N. Rodgers: We love games, but we're not always great with them. But we like, general Ottignon because his name is hard to say.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But he testified in front of a congressional committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he went ahead and reported.
N. Rodgers: Which by the way is where a lot of these information come from. Because the Senate Armed Services Committee is what the big kahuna in terms of congressional oversight of the military. For listeners who want to keep up with these kinds of threads. Just watch who they're talking to and what things are coming out of that committee. Anyway. Sorry. Yeah, he said something pretty terrifying, didn't he?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well Nia and I are also very interested in this particular senate committee because historically, in our lifetime, the State of Virginia has always had at least one of its senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
N. Rodgers: Which makes sense because of the military here and Pentagon is actually in Virginia. All those things.
J. Aughenbaugh: But he said something that just blew us away. He said that only 29% of American youth are eligible for military service. Then he goes on to say only 2% of 17-21 year-olds are both eligible, meaning that they can meet the minimum physical and mental requirements and have a propensity to serve only 2%.
N. Rodgers: When you run a volunteer army.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is a huge problem.
N. Rodgers: That's a huge problem. But the problem is that 29% of them, for the most part, cannot meet the physical standards.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: A certain small percentages they have a criminal record that does not allow them to serve for whatever. They murdered someone. They've done something like that, although I'm a little unclear on why murdering someone would keep you out of the military purpose wise, but anyway, but mostly it has to do with their physical lack of eligibility.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: This is the first time when 30%, dang near 30% of American youth cannot serve because they can't pass the eligible requirements.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, no. Only 29% are eligible.
N. Rodgers: Are eligible. Sorry, 70%.
J. Aughenbaugh: Over 70% of our young people.
N. Rodgers: Are not eligible. Sorry, I had it universe. I'm sorry.
J. Aughenbaugh: What you just got done saying is even worse.
N. Rodgers: It's even worse.
J. Aughenbaugh: More young people are not qualified.
N. Rodgers: What's the deal with this, Aughie? Why are people not qualified?
J. Aughenbaugh: What we're talking about here is and this is where why Nia and I wanted to do an entire episode about the connection of these two policy, if you will, issues. Is that one public policy can affect or contribute to another public policy problem and it's the interconnectedness of policy problems and solutions that is oftentimes not covered or addressed. They probably should be and that's a longstanding problem in regards to public policy in most western democracies, but particularly in the United States. We just get this tunnel vision about, we have a problem about how we feed our kids at school and then we just focus on that. But there is a related problem because our children are growing up to be physically unqualified for a vital federal government service which is national defense?
N. Rodgers: National defense. Part of what I think of this as the law of unintended consequences. It's this idea of, so part of why the government has allowed children in school to think of why Reagan allowed ketchup as a vegetable. Is because it is cheap, it is inexpensive, and the government gets lobbied. We've talked about this over and over, this tension between the government needing to regulate a thing, but the government also needing to be financially responsive to encourage the thing. For the longest time, corn was not in everything that we ate.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: But then the lobbyists came along and they're like, we got a lot of corn. The next thing, you know, corn is in everything. High fructose corn syrup is in everything because lobbies pay that all.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then we also added corn byproducts to our gasoline.
N. Rodgers: Exactly and we feed corn to animals and all of it plays in. When you pluck one string, the entire heart makes a noise and sometimes it's a terrible noise.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because these things are interrelated. If the government does not encourage healthier eating and physical activity, a combination. It's not just that you need to healthy eating. We don't need to say and all children need to be vegan. There we go. We're done. That's not the solution either. The solution is that there needs to be a mixture of both but if the government doesn't do that, the unintended consequences 10 or 12 years later, those kids can't serve in the military.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Then people who say, we need to put troops in Ukraine, where would you like for us to get them?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It's a mathematics problem at that point. It's a shear straight up mathematics problem.
J. Aughenbaugh: Some of the statistics when I was doing the research Nia, I was aware of generally of the problem but some of the statistics. Recent studies found that COVID-19 is responsible for spike in obesity among American youth.
N. Rodgers: Well, and let's be honest American adults as well.
J. Aughenbaugh: But for this particular project [inaudible].
N. Rodgers: But for this purpose, we're talking about job [inaudible]
J. Aughenbaugh: As COVID ends, about 20%, 19.7%, over 14 million young people are categorized as obese. Now listeners, I know some of you are very critical. You are aware that some doctors are very critical of the federal government's body mass index, which has a whole bunch of Americans considered obese. We get that.
N. Rodgers: We get that the numbers may be weird and off a little bit, but 14 million, even if you have a rounding error.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's a lot of young people.
N. Rodgers: That's a lot of young people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Who are obese. Seventy-six percent of American youth fail to meet federal physical activity guidelines, which is why you just got done talking about Nia.
N. Rodgers: Walking 30 minutes a day, aerobic or anaerobic activities and blah, blah, blah. Which by the way, the CDC has a whole guide in how much physical activity you should be having for your age.
J. Aughenbaugh: Speaking of the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, it has reported that childhood obesity rates have tripled over the last three decades. Basically we've gone from roughly 6.5% of the youth population being obese to now, nearly 20%. That's in the last 30 years and we're talking about the wealthiest nation in the world. We're not talking about a Third World, underdeveloped nation, that doesn't have the resources to feed its population well, into encourage its population to get daily exercise. We're talking about the wealthiest nation in the world. But it's not just the obesity because Nia, as you and I've talked off recording. When you have pediatric obesity, then you get other chronic diseases that plague these individuals the rest of their lives. Things like hypertension, sleep apnea, diabetes, fatty liver disease, and depression. Just to give you one example from 2001-2017, the number of people under the age of 20 living with type 2 diabetes grew. In this statistic just blew my mind by 95%.
N. Rodgers: In case you're wondering, type 2 diabetes is often commonly called adult-onset diabetes. It is something that often happens to people in their elder, well, in their 50s, 60s, 70s right along in there. This is happening to people in their 20s or younger than their 20s.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: We're not talking about adults making adult decisions. We're talking adults making decisions for children that are harming them in ways that are lifelong. Once you're in the diabetes realm of medicine is really hard to get out of it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The USDA, US Department of Agriculture.
N. Rodgers: Sorry, we want to note of that 95%, probably 10%. It's a natural. There's other factors.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. But it's still a staggering increase.
N. Rodgers: But it is a huge increase.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The USDA and we've talked about the USDA gratuitous self-blog. We did an entire series on Federal Government Cabinet Departments and we did an entire episode on the USDA. But the USDA has the responsibility of administering nutritional programs for the nearly 30 million young people in the United States, I didn't know there was this many schools in the United States, over 100,000 schools nationally.
N. Rodgers: It makes sense lots of schools. Lots of neighborhoods.
J. Aughenbaugh: They do have the food guidelines during the pandemic. Because we knew that a lot of kids who were getting either breakfast through the Head Start Program or free lunches at school. Because a lot of kids were not going to school during the pandemic. A lot of these programs got transferred to pickup sites.
N. Rodgers: Which in some instances worsens what they can make available because fresh things are harder.
J. Aughenbaugh: To keep shelf-stable.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. If they're trying to give kids meals that will last a day or two. That's a little harder than when you can do it at school. We recognize that there is the intervening variable of COVID, which had a worsening effect on this. But we're also talking about the fact that there are companies that contract to districts.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That follow the "federal guidelines."
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Or feeding children that feed them stuff that you think oh my goodness, should they really be eating that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Meals or foods with a lot of carbs, a lot of sugars, a lot of salt.
N. Rodgers: Because those are cheap and they taste good.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I mean, let's be honest. Aughie and I are both people who have dealt with addictive things in our lives.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We both know if you handed us one of those See's Candies boxes of nuts and cheese the really good dark chocolate ones?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: A pound of those things. How long would it take for either one of us to go through those? We're not trying to throw shade here because we know, that that stuff tastes good. But part of parenting and part of nutritional programs should be geared towards helping children find better alternatives.
J. Aughenbaugh: Better alternatives. Again, we've joked about this on the podcast. You know my favorite food with my coffee. It's pie and if I can't get pie I want doughnuts.
N. Rodgers: You don't say, I'm going to have some broccoli with my coffee this morning. What's the last time you did that Aughie?
J. Aughenbaugh: I've never done that. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a banana with my coffee. That's a banana. We're not self-righteous, zealots here, folks, We understand that some food that is bad for us tastes really good. But how do you go ahead and create good habits for young people?
N. Rodgers: Part of what you have to do is get on board people like the School Nutrition Association, was like, "Oh no, what you want us to hard." What they really mean is what you want is too expensive and I don't want to spend the money on it. That's what they really need.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is where politics intervenes, is an intervening variable in regards to policy. We know what kinds of foods that our kids should be eating at schools. We know this. But when the Biden administration issued the new guidelines, almost immediately there was pushback. You had Republican politicians who have been very critical of increased regulation of school meals. Because they usually go ahead and conclude this is an example of the "nanny state". You had industry groups pushing back because they said school meal participation post-pandemic is already slipping. If the students don't like the food, the students will opt out even more.
N. Rodgers: Sometimes they won't eat, which is scary. We don't want them to not eat.
J. Aughenbaugh: We do want them to eat and I got whole mad as a parent sometimes. I can't believe what I've gone ahead and given my daughter as a meal simply because I don't want her belly to be empty and I chastise myself for days afterwards and usually other parents-
N. Rodgers: Nuggets and fries is not a meal but she ate it. We get that. We're not saying, and so you should present a plate of whatever and I actually liked tofu so I'm not slam tofu, but it's like tofu salad to an eight-year-old. They're not going to eat that. We get that. We're not suggesting that is the case. But one of the things that peeves me about this and I'm just going to be peeved and Aughie can see from my face is starting to get tickled, is the milk thing. It's the thing of the international dairy foods Association said, "Oh, but kids won't drink unflavored milk, " and part of me wants to scream at the top of my lungs. I had unflavored milk every day as a child and I drank it and you know why? Because my mother told me to. Like saying that kids won't drink unflavored milk is straight-up, not true. Kids don't have to have chocolate milk or strawberry milk. You don't have to flavor and sugar the milk in order to get kids to drink it. I do not believe that's true and it aggravates me and Aughie is just giggling, y'all can't see him and he's being very quiet about not doing it on the recording. I know I sound like one of those old people, get off my lawn, you kids. I'm not trying to sound like that, but I know that we don't drink enough milk probably for the federal recommendations like kids probably don't drink enough milk anyway. But I don't think that that's the solution is to say, well, if they don't like something, let's just put a metric tonne of sugar in it and then get them to eat it that way.
J. Aughenbaugh: See. I have a daughter who will not drink regular milk.
N. Rodgers: What does she put flavored milk on cereal?
J. Aughenbaugh: She will put unflavored milk on cereal.
N. Rodgers: Oh, Aughie, what have you done to this child?
J. Aughenbaugh: I think it's my bad.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: How do I get my daughter to go ahead and eat the recommended amounts of dairy? I do know she likes string cheese. She also likes me making her cheesy scrambled eggs.
N. Rodgers: Does she like yogurt?
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: Okay. You got to experiment with your kid, is basically what you're saying, is that maybe schools need to have some flexibility in the options that they offer.
J. Aughenbaugh: But every time Mackenzie's pediatrician said, "She needs to drink more milk." We were like, well, unless it has chocolate syrup in it, she ain't drinking it. We know this. Now that's the pushback about the food guidelines. Now let's go ahead and talk about how this becomes an issue in regards to national security. We already gave you the stats from the lieutenant general. By the way, his testimony was not brand new. Members of Congress should be acutely aware of this because in the last 12 years I have found four other military officers who have testified that this was a growing problem.
N. Rodgers: Well, if it's been going on for decades, if you said three decades, it's gone up 30%, they've known for a while this was a problem because they tried to recruit off time.
J. Aughenbaugh: To really highlight how this is controversial or how it's become a huge public policy problem, it's not just that the number of potential candidates had shrunk, it has also caused problems once a young person has been accepted by the military. If you just focus on the lack of physical activity, and I'm going to mispronounce this word, musculoskeletal injuries have gone up dramatically in the United States military. It has led to 25 million days per annum of limited duty across the military branches. That means you have somebody in the military who because of old muscles, knee sprains, etc, can't perform their duties, they are unavailable for service, for the arduous work that they've been recruited to do. It costs the military $3.7 billion in medical treatment. Billion, buh, boy, ball.
N. Rodgers: Billion, not million per year, you're saying.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, per year.
N. Rodgers: Well, now you know where the defense budget is going.
J. Aughenbaugh: Moreover, this is extremely problematic because the United States military for decades has drawn the greatest number of recruits from what region of the United States, Nia?
N. Rodgers: I would imagine in the South.
J. Aughenbaugh: The South. But the South, according to CDC statistics, has the highest obesity rates and the least amount of physical activity rates of young people in the country.
N. Rodgers: Well, it's hot here, Aughie, you should just have another piece of fried chicken. Sorry. I say fried chicken because everybody in this house hates fried chicken.
J. Aughenbaugh: We'll sit underneath a tree and have a Coke.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. That's a better example.
J. Aughenbaugh: Take a load off, have a Coke. When I moved down South for graduate school, I heard that with some regularity and I'm like, does anybody do anything?
N. Rodgers: Well, we put gravy on everything.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We believe that everything should be served on top of mashed potatoes. You're having spaghetti, you should put that on another carb somehow. It's very strange the way we are in the South. I love us, but we are not particularly healthy. We think of it as down home cooking. But when you think about what used to be down home cooking in the South was vegetables because people didn't have a lot of meat and they didn't have a lot of carb. That has changed in the southern cuisine over the last 5,200 years as we've moved away from farm life. My mom grew up on a farm and she said, "We would never have killed a milk cow. Are you crazy?"
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, you would never do that.
N. Rodgers: They didn't need a lot of beef. That was a treat, that was not a regular. What they had was a lot of vegetables because they had an enormous garden. We've lost some of that. But the physical inactivity thing wouldn't be so bad if people ate poorly if they also were highly physically active. We know people who do that. You and I both know people. I see your arms flailing at yourself and I'm not casting that stone, you can cast it at yourself. You have a high level of physical activity.
J. Aughenbaugh: My family doctor has gone ahead and said, "If it wasn't for the fact that I work out five or six times a week, the way I eat [inaudible] ."
N. Rodgers: Because you do it like a teenage boy. Now I just slammed teenage boys. They're lovely people, but they do eat a lot of garbage.
J. Aughenbaugh: They eat a lot of garbage. I eat a lot of garbage. I drink a whole bunch of coffee. I usually eat stuff while I drink coffee. But I get away with it because as you pointed out, my physical activity rate for my age is above average.
N. Rodgers: Well, and COVID did not help young people because they weren't physically walking around to school.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: They weren't having to go to gym class, they weren't physically walking up and down halls, they weren't doing any of that, so they were getting even less physical activity.
J. Aughenbaugh: There wasn't after-school stuff with their friends, where they would be running in the yard, kicking a soccer ball around, going to a park.
N. Rodgers: Or organized sports. Organized sports stopped. There was no baseball, there's no basketball, there's no any of that stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because we were supposed to minimize our contact [inaudible] to people. Fine, fair enough.
N. Rodgers: But this was happening way before that folks. The point we're trying to make is this has been a slow burn to get us to the point where our military is now saying, "This is extraordinarily problematic." Because right now, even if we had to institute a draft, you're still not talking about a huge number of people who would be able to serve. If Canadians are listening this would be a really good time for you all to make a move. I'm just saying, I'm not trying to incite insurrection, well, not insurrection because they're not American, but I'm not trying to incite a war.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, let's be very clear.
N. Rodgers: I'm saying that in a time when espionage is a real thing, understanding somebody's military capacity can make you make different decisions about what you do with your country's capacity.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because that's a key point of analytical assessment before you go to war. What is the capacity of your enemy? We're already seeing this for instance, in Russia with the Ukrainian war, where Russia is now struggling to go ahead and replace the soldiers that have either been injured or killed in that war. Because in part, Russia, like the United States, increasingly has a young population that is not engaged in healthy practices.
N. Rodgers: Right. We're not trying to say that this is just the United States, it's just that we focus on the United States, generally speaking, as our government that we worry about and our government documents. But this obesity/physical activity problem is happening worldwide. Worldwide obesity rates are going up, worldwide inactivity rates are going up.
J. Aughenbaugh: As we come to the end of this podcast episode, Nia and I both want to go ahead and cast this into a larger, if you will, perspective, which is this. Nia, you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, unintended consequences. But when you are crafting public policy in a country like the United States, what you want to do, there may be good for the collective. You're going to get pushback.
N. Rodgers: On personal liberty.
J. Aughenbaugh: On personal liberty.
N. Rodgers: With good reason. I don't want the government to be able to tell me, the whole soda thing in New York where they were like, ''We're just going to get rid of big sodas,'' and I'm like, ''I don't drink soda anymore, but I want the right to drink a soda if I want one.'' Who are you Bloomberg to tell me that I can't have a soda.
J. Aughenbaugh: I remember some of my friends who were generally in favor of government policies that protected collective, who were like, ''Hey, wait a minute here, I'm a fan of 7-Eleven good Gulp.''
N. Rodgers: Right, 64 ounces of sugary goodness.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's going to get me through the afternoon and you're telling me that these are going to be banned? This is where you get political rhetoric, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because you get pushback in regards to, well, on certain policies, they don't get enacted because it's my body, my choice. Right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay, fine, fair enough. But we're now going ahead and imposing on a whole bunch of young people that it's not their bodies and it's not their choice. How is that compatible? How's that congruent?
N. Rodgers: Well, and for parents, don't tell my kid what to eat. That is me as a parent. That is not you as the nanny state government, get out of my face. Then you say to a parent, ''Do you think ketchup is a vegetable?'' They go, ''Of course not.'' There's room here to have a discussion. I think what Aughie and I are trying to get at is one, sorry I need to word this in the proper way. There needs to be less strong lobbying and more strength in what's best for kids in the long term than we have currently. I'm not throwing Aramark under a bus particularly, but Aramark is a huge contractor for colleges, for a lot of school systems and for the military. They have these enormous contracts. If they were forced to meet certain standards, they would do it because they want to keep the contract.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: There needs to be more control in that way, but also there needs to be more physical activity. A lot of times too part of what we see in the classroom with children is they need to burn off that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Excess energy.
N. Rodgers: That excess energy. In schools where there's not enough teachers, so they have to cut out PE because they don't have anybody to watch them run around the playground and run into each other to knock things over and all that other stuff, so they just don't take them outside and they need that. They need that stimulation.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, it's a good habit to get into because if you get into the habit as a child of going outside and getting some physical activity, most of us are not going to be professional athletes. We're not going to make the Olympic team. If we get into the habit as a young person of going outside, and getting some exercise, we know that there are incendiary health benefits. There are incendiary mental health benefits, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: There's also incendiary, if you will, intellectual growth and development benefits. Because Nia, you and I talked about this. If either one of us spends all day in front of the computer, having meetings, working on reports in my case grading and I don't get to go outside and I don't get to work out, or you don't get to go outside and take a walk. It affects our performance. It affects our ability to go ahead and intellectually process stuff later in the day. There are residual effects in the next day, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're cranky and were unpleasant to be around.
N. Rodgers: Aughie brings out the last point that we wanted to bring out, which is very important, which is the idea of building habits with children.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Or building habits with young people.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: One of the habits that you need to build this to help them make good food choices and make it okay that sometimes they make a bad food choice too. Sometimes it's okay to say, no, I see that salad and I'm going to eat a pizza instead. But if you eat that every day instead of saying that's the exception or that's once a week, and then the rest of the time I'm going to eat healthier. But if you help them to build those habits and they will carry them into adulthood. Similarly, if you help them build habits of physical activity, then they will carry them into adulthood. Carrying them into adulthood then allows them to be able to serve in the military. We don't have the numbers for fire and police, but it's got to be a similar problem of people not being able to pass the physical exams to do those things. That's a thing that we need to be concerned about as a society. Even if what you say is, ''Well, I'm happy the Defense Department is smaller and we don't need a big army.'' But we need police officers and we need fire officers. We need firemen who can put out the fire in the house next door before it catches on your house. If you don't care about anything else, you should care about the self-servingness of that, of your own personal security. You want people to be able to perform in those jobs. But Aughie had brought this up is a really good point to me when we were discussing it about this episode was that habit-building. It allows a kid to have other options about how they deal with stress and about how they deal with frustrating situations than to turn to food or a game on a Console. It gets them other options of things to do with that.
J. Aughenbaugh: One he was referring to is in listeners. You probably have heard me joke a number of times. I went to Catholic school and I was taught by nuns. Not all the lessons of the nuns resonate with me. But one of the ones that we heard all the time, I got to admit when I first heard it, I was just like, yeah, blah, blah, blah. But the nuns were always fond of saying, ''A healthy mind healthy body.'' You want to develop your mind and you want to develop your body. I'm not always good at either. No. But I try.
N. Rodgers: It's okay to fail. You just got to keep trying.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I find myself answering questions from my daughter where we go out to eat, I will go ahead and get a salad as an appetizer, and she'll be like, daddy why are you getting salad? I say, well, I'm not always all that interested in getting a salad, but if I eat a salad, then if I go ahead and have that big plate of pasta, I don't feel as bad about the fact that I just ate a big plate of pasta, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: She's asked me, daddy, why do you go for a run or why you lift weights? She goes, you do this like every day. I said because I feel good afterwards, and I said, and it gets me to take a break from all the other responsibilities that I have. I said, sometimes McKenzie in-between classes, I'll just go for a walk. She's like, but why? I'm like, because I need to stop. I need to stop thinking about my students. I need to stop thinking about a meeting that perhaps I don't want to go to. I need to stop about other kinds of responsibilities. Taking that walk and paying attention to what's going on around me or just enjoying the fact that there is a breeze, is a good thing. I said, it doesn't always make sense to me and it's not always very helpful, but I'm in the habit. Now I rely upon it, and of all the things that I've grown to rely upon in my life, taking a walk or getting a good healthy meal with a friend is some of the better things I've grown to rely upon.
N. Rodgers: You and I have both had habits where we're not proud of them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We're also not trying to cast shame or aspersion or anything else on the folks who find themselves in their 20s, and however old, and have been told, well, just bootstrap it and get it going. It's not that simple. It would be so much easier if the government would help encourage those habits when you are young and don't have to think about it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: And make them habit as opposed to a thing that you have to make yourself do, which is a lot harder. It's a lot harder. Will is a lot harder than just habit.
J. Aughenbaugh: How do we go about doing this, is as important as what, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: We can identify the policy problems. But let's start having a conversation about how we do this. It can't just be well paid lobbying for various associations or corporations. We need people to sit down and go ahead and say, how do we do this so that we can actually begin to get some meaningful change. Because even if you don't care about kids.
N. Rodgers: Which is a little sad.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which is a little sad, but I understand.
N. Rodgers: If you don't, that's okay too.
J. Aughenbaugh: But you probably enjoy national security.
N. Rodgers: Right. Living under the umbrella of the security of being within the arms of the American government.
J. Aughenbaugh: So this is a problem.
N. Rodgers: Exactly, even if you don't care about kids, you should care about yourself.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. In conversely, if you're not a big fan of a large department of defense, fine. But think locally. Think about your own kids, or think about the fact that you are a young person and you don't want to get to be 40 years old and have type 2 diabetes with a whole bunch of other chronic conditions. I mean, if you want to think about narrow self-interests, how do we get there?
N. Rodgers: The first thing that we need, I think it's for the USDA to say, we're not going to have any lobbying about what the pyramid looks like.
J. Aughenbaugh: Wow.
N. Rodgers: No lobbying from financial interests. We're going to do that from a science-based, health based point of view, and we're not going to take into account any of the industry's involved. We're sorry if that causes the milk industry distress, we're sorry if that causes the corn industry distress. But that's too bad because we're putting kids first. I know that's a pipe dream, I know, because lobbying is the way of the American government, but I can dream Aughie and I'm not going to let you crush my dreams in this.
J. Aughenbaugh: All right.
N. Rodgers: I hear you snickering. I hear it. When I'm president.
J. Aughenbaugh: When you're president
N. Rodgers: I'm going to say to all the lobbyists, y'all need to go over and stand in that room and I'm not going to listen to anything you have to say until I hear what the scientists say about how we can improve kids' lives through better nutrition.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're going to give the lobbyists a timeout?
N. Rodgers: Yeah, I am. In fact a timeout. Everybody turn around, face the corner. Thank you, Aughie. I appreciate that we can have this discussion without being cruel and without being mean to people. It's not about that. It's not about being mean to people or making fun of people. Anybody who shames somebody for their bodily appearance is a rotten individual who needs to just shut their pie hole because that's not okay. That's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is protecting children and helping them build good habits.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Then to protect us later because Aughie and I don't want to join the military ourselves.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because let's face it.
N. Rodgers: We're too old.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I don't think any country wants.
N. Rodgers: Oh my gosh. Can you imagine the army that would take us? That would be such a pitiful holy cow. That would not be a good situation.
J. Aughenbaugh: Wait a minute, isn't Aughie supposed to be on the frontline?
N. Rodgers: We would have to advise them to just give up. We would say, y'all need to just surrender.
J. Aughenbaugh: Isn't Aughie supposed to be on the frontline? No, he's back getting a refill on his coffee mug.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. No, not good. Thank you Aughie.
N. Rodgers: Thank you Nia.
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