Children must learn to respect their bodies
How will our children learn to adopt life-giving habits, to make life-sustaining decisions if they have no respect for their bodies?
Children must be taught the effects of junk food on their bodies along with the Canada Food Guide. Sugar has addictive qualities. It does cause imbalances. It is difficult to want vegetables after sugar. When it is consumed before protein, it is damaging to some people.
We need to teach our children to pay attention, to listen to their bodies. Children also must be taught about the downside of advertisement. We are conned into believing that pop is cool regardless of its effects on our bodies. Let’s teach our children that how they feel is important!
Anne Caza,
Holmwood Avenue
Cycling on ice
I enjoyed reading the Feb. 6th edition’s articles about Bert’s Bike Repair (City program promotes re-use of bikes, PCs by Stacy O’Brien) and biking on the canal ice (Bikers want in on Winterlude excitement by Kelly Bullock).
Including Bert’s, Centretown has at least two sources of recycled bikes, the other being the Bike Dump/Dave’s Recycled Bikes on Catherine Street. According to Dave, Ottawa discards as many as 20,000 bikes per year, which is close to 10 per cent of the total bike population.
The desire of MTBKanata members to ride on the Rideau Canal ice reminds me of my own enquiries to the NCC 10 years ago about this.
It wasn’t like they “don’t encourage” biking on the Canal, as stated in the article by the NCC’s Marie-Eve Letourneau.
It was an outright prohibition, enforced by the skate patrol and hefty fines. The skate patrol goes home at 10 p.m.
What is remarkable about riding illegally on the ice is that, unlike the pocked hardpack of plowed, adjacent bike paths, the surface is so incredibly flat. Much of it is cleared but unpolished, not slippery at all.
MTBKanata member Caitlyn Kealey got it right when she said road salt “is really bad for your bike.”
For winter riders the problem is now worse because the city is using liquid instead of dry salt.
The extra water on the road is a brine that bike tires will spray directly onto everything unprotected by fenders, such as the rear gear shifter and the chain.
When it was dry gravel it would bounce off or accumulate as a slush you could at least brush off. One ends up slowing way down to traverse the wet bits.
Of course, the roads would never need clearing if Ottawa was covered by a series of enormous transparent retractable domes, but we live in a tiny-minded, archaic market economy so it will never happen.
David Hoffman,
Hawthorne Avenue