New day, new entry. I'm not sure whether I should consider this the true "inaugural post" of this blog since the first two were really just my soapboxing. I'm going to take a tip from one of my favorite bloggers, Christian (Not Safe For Work!!) and stick to one entry a day. Exactly one. No more, no less.
Why? I think one's a good number, it makes sure I've got some content coming out every day, and also sticks me to a schedule. On my previous blog I noticed that if I'd update more than once a day, I'd end up getting complacent and thinking "oh, that should be enough for a while..." Part of the reason I'm blogging again is to really become a better writer, and to do that I feel I need a measure of discipline in my writing.
That aside, one of my philosophies in life is that the best ideas are the ones that frighten a person. The thoughts that we want to banish are the ones, I believe, that end up challenging us the most. When we hear ideas we find unpalatable or subversive, our beliefs and thoughts are called into question, leading us to either affirm them further or abandon them if they are found inconsistent or insufficient. It is in that spirit that I am writing this blog - I want to try to discover at least one dangerous idea a day, novel or not, and examine it for myself. Hopefully anyone reading this will find it just as fulfilling.
So here's your daily deleterious thought. As someone who is obsessed with fitness and loves food, issues of hunger relief and malnutrition home very close to my heart. If you're reading this, there's a very good chance that you're eating very well. Even if you're gourmet to the point that no meat under $10 a pound satisfies you anymore, well, hey, you're getting something, right? Check this out:
16% of public school children in the Philippines are undernourished.
How do we visualize this? There are many different ways, but because I'm a bit of a meathead, I decided to think in terms of calories. Calculations are made using this calculator.
I remember that my youngest brother, at ten years old, was exactly 5'2" and 100 lbs. Using the BMR calculator above, if he stayed in bed all day, his body would burn about 1408.4 calories all by itself. Consider that ten-year-old children in Philippine public schools are likely smaller than my brother was, who was well-fed at the time. This would make their BMR lower. Now consider that people are not lying in bed all day, and they need to be eating more calories than their BMR to at least not be losing weight.
A cup of rice has about 380 calories. No protein, fat, vitamin, minerals, or fiber. For many Filipinos, rice is all they can rely on to keep their bones moving. Now for every hundred kids in a Philippine public school, sixteen of them are wasting away because they're not eating enough. Sixteen of them can't get the caloric equivalent of a measly four cups of rice.And we haven't even gotten into talking about vitamins!
You can look up information about malnutrition and hunger yourself. The World Health Organization calls hunger the single gravest threat to the world's public health. More than AIDS, malaria, SARS, bird flu, or genocide. More than that, I believe that the fact that obesity is an epidemic in a day and age when people still have nothing to eat is mankind's single greatest moral obscenity.
Damn, that was pretty gloom-and-doom. So how do we respond to this? I've been on the internet long enough to know that when in doubt, google. Sad reality, but what I think what makes human life great is that there's always room for improvement. World hunger may not be wiped out in our lifetimes, but if we can push humanity a little bit towards that goal at all, we come closer to a lifetime when no one goes hungry again.
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