From the Mon Valley Independent:

I continue to appreciate the opportunity that the Mon Valley Independent has given me to write articles on health and wellness. This will be my last article for the year due to the upcoming birth of my daughter, who is due in December! I will be writing next year! My wife Lacey and I are very excited to welcome our firstborn. While I have not become a parent just yet, I want to preface this article by saying that in no way do I think I know how to raise a child, nor do I think it is going to be easy. It will be an amazing blessing, and I ask for all your prayers that my wife and I can be strong, loving, wise, and courageous parents.

I figured what better way to end my year of writing than to talk about some of the health and wellness of our country’s children. You have read from me all year long about the importance of faith, a whole food diet, an electron-rich diet, exposure to nature, cellular health, and exercise. You have heard about our rapidly declining healthcare system. There are many topics that surround the health of children, and I wish I could go over them all. Maybe I will at some point. But let me knock out some of the big ones.

In my own experiences as a kid, I know a lot of the behaviors and habits I developed were primarily from two sources. My environment around my parents’ raising. I was extremely blessed to grow up in a two-parent Christian household with loving and supportive parents. Shout out to Dana and George.

Let’s start with parents. The destruction/lack of the family unit is probably the biggest factor that affects children, in my opinion. 18.5 million children in the U.S. live in a home with just a single parent. There is no country in the world currently that has more single-parent homes than the United States. It is difficult to raise a child with two parents, let alone one. Some of the best people I know were raised by single parents, and I think a lot of it is adversity building character, but we are doing our children a disservice when we exit their lives for whatever reason. A special shout-out goes to all the single parents raising their children to the best of their ability, regardless of circumstance. Since 2020, 33% of single-parent households reported not having enough money to buy food and housing for themselves and their children. Now while I wont go into depth with reasonings for the high rate of single parent homes, we need to recognize that so many children are growing up in households where one parent is trying to support the family and in many cases is struggling to provide, therefore must spend more time earning a living, less time raising a child and this then allows a child’s environment to raise them Moreso than the parent. Let me be frank. If your environment is surrounded by Christ or there is a sense of community that looks after the youth in positive ways…..great chance that the child will have a great influence. If not, the stats show the child will be swallowed up by an environment that leads to destruction, unfortunately. My only word of advice there is, let’s get our communities to step up their game in looking out for these kids in a positive way.

Let’s talk about social media. This, I believe, is one of the most important topics of health for adolescent youth currently. If you were to walk into a room of teenagers at any given moment, I would say there is a 90% chance that they are all using some device and scrolling on their phones. I call them “screenagers”. Yes, it’s frustrating to try to hold a convo or get them to listen because they are so enthralled in their phones. But to be honest, it’s not so easy for them to put away their phones. As we discussed in the last article, dopamine is a neurotransmitter made in the brain that is released above baseline when we are exposed to something of perceived reward, pleasure, or motivation. It is an important process that controls our pursuit and action. While dopamine is necessary for life, it can be dangerous as well. When we get a rewarding feeling or a sense of euphoria from drugs and alcohol, we seek that behavior until it becomes a habit and eventually leads to addiction. We consistently will chase that dopamine hit. This is no different with the use of social media, except it can actually be worse.

When we become accustomed to stimuli, we start to predict rewards before the reward is even given. This is called reward prediction error. For example, if you make a post on Facebook, you expect “likes” to occur. Positive prediction error is when you get more reward than you actually predicted (ie, you get 150 likes when you only expected to get 20). Negative prediction error is when you get less reward than you predicted (ie, 5 likes instead of 20). Social media companies like Instagram and Facebook have publicly admitted that they vary the time frame of notifications, meaning they may withhold a “like” notification at a specific time. This does two things. 1. It gives more gratification if that person gets a bunch of likes all at once, and 2. It makes the user predict more if they will receive the reward, so they consistently will pick up their phone and use the app more often to check to see if their reward (notification) is present. You can think of it like an addicted gambler. They aren’t necessarily addicted to winning or losing money; they are addicted to the anticipation of getting a reward. Am I going to win $500 dollars spinning this wheel? Vs Am I going to get comments and likes on this selfie post I just made? It is all anticipatory.

These companies are taking advantage of children by knowing the reward systems of the brain, creating pop-ups and notifications to let you get instant gratification for a short period of time, knowing you got a like or comment from a friend. These companies have also shifted the types of reactions you can receive for posts. Emojis and hearts, sad faces and angry faces all open up a more significant dopamine response. The average smartphone user will get at least 46 pop-up notifications daily from various apps. Research estimates that the average U.S. teenager spends 4.8 hours a day on social media and that 90% of teenagers between 13 and 17 years old have social media accounts.

Research tells us that at the age of 5, we have 50% more neurons and neuronal synapses (connections between neurons) than we do after age 25. Between the ages of 5 and 25, we are “pruning” neurons and neuronal connections we are not using and making connections stronger of what we are using. So if we are strengthening neuronal structures around certain activities like technology, then we will use it more. I think that’s why when you give an older adult who has never used technology between 5-25 years of age a smartphone, they are mostly lost in how to use it efficiently, whereas 3-4 year old children can navigate their way into buying $100 worth of merchandise from their parents’ phones!

The increased use of phones with social interaction through texting, video chats, picture chats, and social media causes less physical interaction, less in-person interaction, and a different emotional connection. This creates an environment where there is less family interaction and therefore isolation and loneliness are subsequent. The U.S. surgeon general has reported that 73% of people between 16 and 24 years of age have reported “struggling with feelings of isolation or loneliness”. This has steadily increased every year since 1976. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this is changes in technology and decreased physical social interaction. Perhaps it’s a lack of a support system and family unit. Perhaps it’s something else.

If the average teen spends 4.8 hours a day on social media alone, there’s a high chance they aren’t physically active or exercising. A sedentary lifestyle leads to a host of issues, including cardiovascular/pulmonary issues, musculoskeletal issues, and metabolic issues. According to the CDC, between 2017 and 2020, 19.7% of children between 2 and 19 years old were obese. That’s 14.7 million children in the United States. It is estimated that 5-10% of children in the U.S. have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Prior to 1980, this percentage was 0%. Why? We continue to have a food industry that can exploit kids with addictive and toxic chemicals, as well as added sugars, in most items that can be labeled as healthy. Remember, 72% of every item found in a U.S. grocery store has added sugars. When a child consumes processed sugars, we go back to that dopamine hit. Eventually, that leads to more desire for sugar and then down the road to addiction to sugar. The average 6-12-year-old child can metabolize 6 grams of fructose a day via the liver. The national school breakfast program contains, on average, 41 grams of fructose, and that’s just for breakfast. The liver cannot metabolize nearly 8x the rate of fructose, and hence, fatty liver disease occurs. This is the exact equivalent of your liver trying to metabolize 8 alcoholic drinks in 1 hour, when in fact it can only metabolize 1 drink per hour.

Most of the foods that are marketed to kids are ultra-processed foods. Not only do ultra-processed foods cause increased rates of obesity, metabolic disease such as diabetes, and cardiovascular issues/increased rates of cancer, but it also causes mental disorders. Most research shows a link between an ultra-processed diet and higher rates of anxiety and depression. A specific research study showed that the ultra-processed food diet group was 1.4x more likely to develop anxiety and 1.44 more likely to develop depression. These foods are low in omega-3 fatty acids, which are vital to the development of brain health. They are also high in refined sugars, which cause spikes in blood sugar that can cause crashing and mood swings over time. So….buy more whole foods in the grocery store. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store! Most of the whole foods are on the perimeter, and the processed foods are in the middle. Cook at home more often. Convenience is not always good for your health.

I don’t have all the answers to improve the health of our youth, but I do know this. Our children now are the next generation that will raise the next generation. Let’s give them the best possible jumpstart to life that we can. In order to be productive members of society, we have to have our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. We have to give our children a fighting chance for positive health outcomes. It starts with us adults.  Big pharma, Big food, and Big tech SHOULD NOT RAISE OUR CHILDREN. We should. I pray that the health of this nation, especially our children’s, will improve day by day. Proverbs 22: 6

“Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

-Dr. Emilio Galis