News & Views

Otherwise intelligent people do too many stupid things

W. Gifford-Jones MD & Diana Gifford-Jones

October 21, 2023

BY W. GIFFORD- JONES MD & DIANA GIFFORD-JONES

At a breakneck pace, today’s world threatens to leave us gasping for breath. You name it – climate change and pollution, the global demographic explosion, autocratic rulers trampling civil society, or the threat of AI’s unintended consequences. For all the things where meaningful influence is out of the hands of most of us, why are there still so many things well within our control that we do so little to change?

Consumers have a lot of power, for example, but too infrequently use it. If you don’t like the microplastics in the ocean, stop buying food sold in excessive packaging. When affordable public transportation is available, we spend far more to drive our own vehicles. We buy enough clothing to stuff our closets, and then some.

Otherwise, intelligent people do too many stupid things. They don’t give it a moment’s thought.

Just this week, we were dismayed to learn about a high school that hosted a gelato eating contest involving the students. Four “winners” tied for consuming a whopping 25 scoops each. The average scoop of gelato has about 17 grams of sugar and 160 calories. At least, one might argue, it wasn’t ice cream. A half cup serving of ice cream has 25 grams of sugar, roughly half the amount of sugar a person should normally eat in a day.

What do we make of a school sanctioning the consumption of 425 grams of sugar in one sitting? Alarm bells should be ringing! That’s enough sugar to cause severe and immediate effects on the body. The rapid spike in blood sugar will have the pancreas struggling to produce enough insulin. Like night follows day, excessive sugar consumption will lead to obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, gastrointestinal problems, fatty liver, and heart disease.

Why did no teacher object? Why did no student object? Why were parents not informed until after the damage was done? The only answer is that people still haven’t learned the basic lesson. Even when we know better, even when we’ve been told a thousand times, we still don’t make the small changes in our lives that will give us better health outcomes.

Halloween is approaching. How many readers will stock up on sugar-filled, tooth-rotting, mindless candy giveaways to the young children knocking on their doors? The kids may not like the message, but someone needs to tell them that the candy they collect should be consumed in moderation. Halloween would better be a history lesson and a neighbourhood meet-and-greet than what it has become, unfortunately.

Scott Adams, the brilliant satirist of workplace culture, offered this warning, “Never underestimate the power of human stupidity, especially when it’s willful.”

We humans need to smarten up and be willful in making change to the things we know are clearly bad. It should not be allowed to serve 25 servings of gelato to a child in one’s care.

Let’s take up the big opportunities. Tobacco should be outlawed. If that can’t be done, then increase the taxes higher still. Companies that produce junk food should be charged in the court of law with knowingly causing illness, and they should have to pay for the costs.

We wonder if there is any hope for young people to make necessary changes. Are the kids these days, with all their access to information, smart enough? If youth obesity and diabetes rates are any indicator, they are not.

One thing is for sure. If we were running a school, we would not sanction gelato-eating contests. And we would give a failing grade to anyone who did.

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Written By W. Gifford-Jones MD & Diana Gifford-Jones

Dr. W. Gifford-Jones, MD is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Harvard Medical School. He trained in general surgery at Strong Memorial Hospital, University of Rochester, Montreal General Hospital, McGill University and in Gynecology at Harvard. His storied medical career began as a general practitioner, ship’s surgeon, and hotel doctor. For more than 40 years, he specialized in gynecology, devoting his practice to the formative issues of women’s health. In 1975, he launched his weekly medical column that has been published by national and local Canadian and U.S. newspapers. Today, the readership remains over seven million. His advice contains a solid dose of common sense and he never sits on the fence with controversial issues. He is the author of nine books including, “The Healthy Barmaid”, his autobiography “You’re Going To Do What?”, “What I Learned as a Medical Journalist”, and “90+ How I Got There!” Many years ago, he was successful in a fight to legalize heroin to help ease the pain of terminal cancer patients. His foundation at that time donated $500,000 to establish the Gifford-Jones Professorship in Pain Control and Palliative Care at the University of Toronto Medical School. At 93 years of age he rappelled from the top of Toronto’s City Hall (30 stories) to raise funds for children with a life-threatening disease through the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Diana Gifford-Jones, the daughter of W. Gifford-Jones, MD, Diana has extensive global experience in health and healthcare policy. Diana is Special Advisor with The Aga Khan University, which operates 2 quaternary care hospitals and numerous secondary hospitals, medical centres, pharmacies, and laboratories in South Asia and Africa. She worked for ten years in the Human Development sectors at the World Bank, including health policy and economics, nutrition, and population health. For over a decade at The Conference Board of Canada, she managed four health-related executive networks, including the Roundtable on Socio-Economic Determinants of Health, the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management, the Canadian Centre for Environmental Health, and the Centre for Health System Design and Management. Her master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government included coursework at Harvard Medical School. She is also a graduate of Wellesley College. She has extensive experience with Canadian universities, including at Carleton University, where she was the Executive Director of the Global Academy. She lived and worked in Japan for four years and speaks Japanese fluently. Diana has the designation as a certified Chartered Director from The Directors College, a joint venture of The Conference Board of Canada and McMaster University. She has recently published a book on the natural health philosophy of W. Gifford-Jones, called No Nonsense Health – Naturally!

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