“If we want your opinion, we’ll give it to you”
I was all excited about the Open University course I’m taking (a nutrition course), but then found out (from one of my favourite beauty blog commenters) that the Open University’s teachings about nutrition are all based on the food pyramid. Like my commenter/correspondent, I think the food pyramid is pretty flawed, so am disappointed that I’ll be on a course where - rather than discussing and debating the merits of different nutritional approaches - I’ll have to suck it up and just regurgitate what’s in the book if I want to pass (as my correspondent just had to do on her final exam).
I dropped out of university because I found it terminally boring, and I’ve got a big problem with having to sit at a desk and do what I’m told, and being told how and when to do it. I was quite looking forward to doing education in what I imagined would be a grown-up way, on my own time and in my own space, and getting to have adult conversations about the subject. So perhaps my disappointment is unreasonable, and I’ll have to reserve final judgement for when I am actually in the midst of the course, but it seems pretty sad that even higher education in this country is so paternalistic. (This should be less of a problem in the French course I’m doing.)
Filed under: Life
I’ve got nothing to say about Open University, but I just read “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle” by Tom Venuto, and I think it’s very, very good and a decent start on an education in nutrition (and exercise). It’s sold as an e-book for $40 and it’s 340 pages, but it’s a quick read.
Thanks, Carolyn! My main motivation is utter inability to believe confidently in anything I read about nutrition these days. So many supposedly solid sources contradict one another, I question and doubt everything I ‘learn’. So I was hoping to learn about the most up-to-date research and how thinking about nutrition is evolving…but I guess a university classroom isn’t where you go for learning the important stuff.
“I’ll have to suck it up and just regurgitate what’s in the book if I want to pass”
Perhaps. When I did my OU degree I included anti-Keynesian graphs by Murray Rothbard, quotes from Hayek and Mises, and still got good marks.
Just put in all that “on the one hand and on the other hand” stuff.:smile:
> So many supposedly solid sources contradict one another
When you’re diagnosed with diabetes, the conventional Western doctors explain the condition to you, and what they tell you is that we eat sugar and carbs for energy and use insulin to convert the glucose into fat for storage. That is the conventional mainstream medical view. Until you precede exactly the same explanation of where fat comes from with “According to Dr Atkins,” whereupon it becomes dangerous quackery.