Monday, July 11, 2011

When did playing outside become a disease?

I couldn't believe when, watching TV the other night I saw an advert for Oralyte for healthy kids. For those who have not come across this before, it marketed in the UK as Dioralyte and is a drinkable  salts and glucose mixture used to help rehydrate patients who have severe intestinal problems and had nifty little animations demonstrating how salts ad electrolytes are lost through sweat and how easily they are replaced by Oralyte. This advert was encouraging mothers to feed this stuff to their children who "become dehydrated when playing outside. I'm sorry....what??????????
In a society which seem sdetermined to prevent children from playing In streets parks and gardens, walking to school and generally rushing around on bikes this seems the final step to far. Kids who are playing outside require (I'm told from my friends with kids) frequent feeding and watering and if this is done the there is no need to seeking medical treatment.
It  seems to me that this is a cynical attempt to frighten parents into buying a treatment for their kids that is unnecessary and redundant. Whilst electrolyte replacement compounds have been used to treat severe diarrhoea in children there is no evidence that in ordinary thirst it is any more effective than ordinary water or fruit juices especialy in healhty individuals.
This does 2 things, firstly it exploits parents by implying that the old way to look after their children in the summer is to make them drink electrolyte supplements and secondly it emphasise a more important trend in today's society to find medical ways of treating ordinary life experiences. Is this how we want our children to grow up - frightened to play in case they dehydrate?

1 comment:

  1. I completely agree. I also saw the advert and was appalled at the idea that healthy children need electrolyte balanced drinks because 'they hydrate better than water' I see the same use of scare tactics in advertising in a certain make of disposible nappies. If you believed all the hype, no child would ever develope normally without the use of these, citing both physical and mental development occuring only if the child never wakes up in the night!

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