The company I work for is very conscious about their social responsibility, which is why employee fundraising drives appear every so often. The biggest one by far is a 'ride for the cure' for juvinile diabetes in the fall. Each year there is a drive for volunteers to ride a stationary bike for 20 minutes or so to raise money for diabetes research. This year I declined due to my personal beliefs.<\/p>\n
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At first glance it looks like a good cause: Babies with diabetes having to get needles every day really tugs at the heart strings. What kind of unfeeling (or worse, non-team player) am I for not participating?<\/p>\n
I believe a lot of the diseases we experience are caused by environmental and lifestyle factors. Cancer, diabetes, parkinsons disease.... the number of cases has been on the rise since the industrial revolution. Where were these diseases before industrial toxins flooded our environment.. before fast food was a staple of the north american diet... before mercury started being detected in wild fish? A better question: how is it that many non-industrialized countries in the world are avoiding such plagues? A child growing up in remote parts of Japan will live to 90 and is less likely of dying of heart disease.... move that same Japanese child to America and the risk increases four-fold.<\/p>\n
And so in my mind, we should all be riding for the 'prevention' of disease and not the so-called 'cure'. Finding cures is a reactive effort and quite late in the process of eliminating disease. There are studies that trace diabetes back to environmental conditions, however the Juvinile Diabetes Research Foundation<\/a> web site only lists one factor and it is buried deep within their web site: Weaning off breast milk and the timing of an infant's exposure to certain foods like cereal. They took the page down, but Google still has it in their cache<\/a>. So why isn't the JDRF doing more to warn new mothers of the perils of baby formula? Who knows, but intuition tells me that if the solution was that simple they would certainly lose a good portion of their 'cure' funding, not to mention they would be picking a fight with the dairy industry.<\/p>\n If you want to know how effective a charity is, go to CharityNavigator.org<\/a> which rates charities based on their program to administraiton expese ratio. The JDRF had $175 million in revenues last year, and it cost them $25 million to raise it. That's a whopping $125 million spent on diabetes research each year from this charity alone. Can you imagine the impact it would have if that money was spent on preventative measures?<\/p>\n Anyway, each person riding for the cure needs to raise a minimum of $50 before they are allowed to ride. The JDRF has a neat web site that allows each rider to collect credit card info from their sponsors which made the whole process quite simple. So I donated my $50 and figured I was in the clear. Come the day of the ride however I was asked by my peers why I didn't ride my 20 minutes. It would have been satisfying to launch into a speech about the morals of charitiable fundrasing, but that would have been futile. Instead I asked why I needed to ride if the JDRF already received my donation. Nobody had a good answer for that, but it didn't matter - I still looked like a bad person. I should have just played the politics, but instead I did the equivalent of shooting myself and asking the JDRF it it hurts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The company I work for is very conscious about their social responsibility, which is why employee fundraising drives appear every so often. The biggest one by far is a 'ride for the cure' for juvinile diabetes in the fall. Each year there is a drive for volunteers to ride a stationary bike for 20 minutes … Continue reading