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Jack Knox: Islanders take the cake in healthy-living study

I ate birthday cake for breakfast today. No, that’s a lie. I had birthday cake after breakfast for dessert. Which would probably cause the B.C.
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OK, a report says that people on Vancouver Island are in better shape than the rest of the country. Look closer at the figures, though, and you'll realize it's like being the classiest Kardashian or the highest-scoring Canuck.

Jack Knox mugshot genericI ate birthday cake for breakfast today. No, that’s a lie. I had birthday cake after breakfast for dessert.

Which would probably cause the B.C. Healthy Living Alliance people to have a heart attack if they were unhealthy enough to suffer a massive jammer, which they’re not, because they only eat steamed kale and drink boiled quinoa water, followed by an hour of Pilates, whom I confused with the guy who allowed the death of Jesus. You know, Pontius Pilates.

The healthy living organization just put out a report showing how well British Columbians are controlling the risk factors linked to chronic diseases such as lung cancer, diabetes and hypertension.

The good news for Vancouver Island: People here are doing better than the rest of B.C., which in turn is doing better than the rest of Canada.

“Vancouver Island overall appears to be ahead of the provincial average on a number of health measures,” said alliance chairman Scott McDonald.

The bad news: That’s still like being the classiest Kardashian, or highest-scoring Canuck.

Almost half of the people in the Island Health region are overweight or actually obese, the report says. Just over half of us don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables. A quarter are inactive. One in six still smoke, which is a surprise, since I thought we had the last tobacco addict burned at the stake in 2012.

Or maybe that’s just a Victoria thing, since the capital (motto: “Solving the world through regulation since 1862”) has been pretty aggressive about using bylaws to chase down smokers (who, frankly, aren’t that hard to catch, usually having to take a knee and call “times” mid-chase). The Capital Regional District has led the way in gradually banning cigarettes from workplaces, bars and bus stops, culminating in October’s decision to shoo smokers out of parks and playgrounds and — I might not have this quite right — force them to ring a bell and chant “Unclean!” while in public.

And it has worked! Smoking rates on southern Vancouver Island are now just half of what they are in the more lawless north (motto: “Live free or die; well, no, live free and die”).

Here’s the really good news: The Island’s overall incidence of lung cancer fell between 2000 and 2009, particularly among females. McDonald called Vancouver Island “the only region in the province where women’s lung cancer rates have declined substantially.”

It seems it actually is possible to regulate people into better health. In Quebec, where the marketing of junk food to kids has been banned since 1980, children are markedly fitter than those in the rest of Canada. (This from the province where you used to expect cigarette machines in daycare centres.)

Around here, we have mandated healthier fare in vending machines in schools and rec centres, but that doesn’t prevent parents from packing Junior a lunch of pre-packaged diabetes, washed down with so-called “sports drinks” that might make sense if you have just run a marathon, but are just another salt-and-sugar bomb if your “recovery” is from a four-block walk to Sedentary Elementary (as if any modern parent would let a kid walk to school; the way it’s going, they’ll be like battery chicken, all breast meat, no legs). We’re still poisoning our own children.

But it’s so expensive to eat healthfully, is the reply, and it’s true that there’s a link between poverty and a whole range of illnesses — but it’s also true that organic fare is no more expensive than the fattily delicious convenience food we cram down our pie-holes or drool over on the Food Porn Channel.

Of course, this comes from the guy who just ate birthday cake for breakfast.

I confessed this to the people at the B.C. Healthy Living Alliance, who kindly mentioned what dietitians call the 80-20 rule, which says that if you eat healthily 80 per cent of the time, you get to indulge the other 20. They were so nice about it that I thought it would be churlish to point out that for some of us, the ratio is more like 20-80.

Government and groups such as the alliance can only go so far in prodding us to eat right, butt out, get out of our cars. If you want the birthday cakes to keep coming, at some point you have to take control of your own life.