It depends on the populations.

Steppe populations from modern Ukraine easy through to the Urals lived mainly on meat and dairy 5000 years ago (even if they didn’t yet have the lactose tolerance adaptation).

At a certain point, I realized that from another perspective, the big divide seems to be between those who see continuous distributions as just an abstraction of a world that is inherently finite vs those who see finite steps as the approximation of an inherently continuous and infinitely divisible reality.

Since I’m someone who sees math as a way to tell internally-consistent stories that may or may not represent reality, I tend to have a certain exasperation with what seems to be the need of most engineers to anchor everything in Euclidean topography.

But it’s my spouse who had to help our kids with high school math. A parent who thinks non Euclidean geometry is fun is not helpful at that point.

My point is that raising risks of getting hit by a car, or other accidental causes of injury and death beyond the individual’s control, is a deflection.

Cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada.

Full stop.

No one single risk factor is responsible for that. Building the evidence base to be able to both inform individual behaviour but also to inform food safety regulations is important.

Cancer is the leading cause of premature mortality and morbidity (death and disability) in Canada.

So, an accumulation of small risks, and avoidance of risks, have significant benefits at both the individual and population levels.

The general population needs to be aware that unhealthy eating is impacting their lives and quality of life.

Let’s stick to the peer reviewed science and evidence consensus.

WHO established the four behavioural common risk factors for the four major chronic noncommunicable diseases decades ago.

The kind of research synthesis in this article is about continuing to build the evidence on relative and absolute risks, and in some cases look at how these differences impact different populations more or less due to intersecting determinants.

Common risk factors

• unhealthy diet
• physical inactivity
• tobacco use
• harmful use of alcohol
• air pollution added more recently

Major chronic noncommunicable diseases

• cancer
• cardiovascular diseases
• diabetes
• chronic respiratory diseases

And yet, you’ll see many people posting elsewhere on social media that it shouldn’t be relevant.

Can’t imagine trying to share a life with someone who didn’t share my values, but there seems to be a contingent that think that other things should be more important.

I would argue that a lot of the computational based problem solving , from middle school through early undergraduate years, focused on topics historically oriented to boys’ interests, aren’t a good measure of innate math talent either.

But those have historically left a lot of female students behind.

Male or female, most students are really looking to get through math requirements with plug-and-chug replication of algorithms to get to an answer - not genuine problem solving or abstraction. However, being able to reproduce an answer on a very slightly different problem, or just one with different numbers to plug in, does very little towards using mathematical as a means to model problems independently and find solutions.

So the childhood favourite ‘Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh’ was onto something.

Clearly, the ability to be outside in appropriate clothing for activities isn’t being mandated. This is where a temperate climate enables ridiculous practices to persist.

All I can think about when I see this image is how in Ontario, the responsible provincial ministry requires all schools and ‘day nurseries’ (read day and after school care) to put the kids out in the yards twice a day unless the weather conditions are severe (Less than -20 or more than +30 Celsius.).

Parents are responsible to send their kids with suitable clothing for the cold. One rarely sees little girls in skirts in schools unless they are wearing tunic dresses over leggings.

In an earlier era, pre 1970s, when skirts were mandatory for girls, that meant switching to pants or snow pants from the skirts 3 times a day to go outside in winter (two breaks and leaving end of day).