@Lookout
I hadn't thought about the development of the brain and of thinking when one is young. Yes, those first five years matter. I wonder if it made a difference for me that my father refused to have a TV for my first six or seven years. Yes, my stubbornness is inherited! On the other hand, we went to Mcdonalds all the time when I was a kid, it was a cheap relief for Mom to not have to make dinner. I haven't been to a McDonald's in like 20 years now :). Stubborn.

Diets and what people eat and what we are recommended to eat is so... fraught with problems some times. It really does depend upon the experts, sometimes.

Thanks for the great comment!

...and that gets to the issue. We have to carefully select the experts we trust, and understand sometimes even they are mistaken.

For example in the case of diet, the Harvard nutrition dept.are primarily plant based 7th day Adventists. They push an agenda which many accept as gospel. I look to the functional doctors who I find more reliable.
The foundation of functional medicine is the use of food as a first-line therapy. The right nutrition, combined with lifestyle and behavioral interventions, will help you take charge of your health. In 2014, Cleveland Clinic was the first academic medical center in the country to establish a dedicated functional medicine program.
https://www.ifm.org/functional-medicine/what-is-functional-medicine/

I've had similar experience with the pandemic doctors, as well as Earth Scientists. You have to use judgement to select the people you trust on all topics.

You also bring up the interesting point of childhood imprinting and development...
Our first five years of life lay down the foundation for the rest of our lives.

Between birth and 5 years old, 90 percent of a child’s brain development occurs, and at a lightning-fast pace. Every sight, smell, sound and sensation makes an impact. Long before most children step foot into a classroom, neurons are building networks, cognition is exploding, language is developing, and the foundations are being laid for a lifetime of learning.

Outside of that five-year window, you lose opportunities you may never get back. Children who don’t develop sufficient language skills in those first years are up to six times more likely to experience reading problems in school. When children fall behind in reading, every other aspect of education suffers.

There's a reason for happy meals and fast food, cereal, and sugary drink ads targeted at children. Just look at Americans...they've been effective.

Well thanks for your expert OT. Hope folks in the Eastern US weather today's storm. We're just due rain thankfully. I HATE ice storms...the trees breaking sound like gunshots when we have one. Take care and be well!

@QMS
Very good points. I didn't even think to put this in anthropological terms. Doh!

cultural modification of an individual, group, or people by adapting to or borrowing traits from another culture (re: media)

or

the process by which a human being acquires the culture of a particular society from infancy
(what is the role of educators?)

whereas culture = the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education

quoting bush the younger ... is our children learning yet?

thanks for the OT Simi!

@enhydra lutris
'None of that really goes anywhere except for two ancient precepts:
1) The true experts know the right questions, not so much the answers
2) Question everything'

And that's exactly where to start with finding out which 'experts' one follows. Question always, listen to what the experts are asking, and how they are trying to answer those questions. It takes work, one can't be complacent or fall back on the agreed upon thinking. And that's so very difficult at times.

but thanks for the OT. I see QMS tossed out "acculturation", and in the same vein I'll toss out "Weltanschauung", but really, there are volumes that could be written here. Always remember, however, that argumentum ad verecundiam is a fallacy, experts can err and the untutored can speak profound truths. More to the point is the associations and connotations that we all learn, and the fact that we all learn slightly (or even grossly) differing variants and in a different manner.

One thing that popped into my head is a pair of seemingly antithetical phrases from my childhood. Generations were raised on the dichotomy "Better dead than Red" and "Better Red than dead", both of which presuppose and equate "RED" with something that will absorb or kill you as the case may be. Generations, through that and other misdirection and misrepresentation learned to hate and fear communism (and socialism) without having ever read Kapital and The Manifesto, or either, or any of Marx or Engels, for that matter. Communism/socialism is simply a set of lrgely undefined bad things to them.

Another thing is the Olmecs. At first, merely the people who made the giant heads, we achieved a certain understanding of them and their culture through investigation and interpretation. Eventually Olmec "meant" a whole encyclopedia entry worth of characteristics and "history". Part of that was their role (or not) as the mother culture of the Maya, another people who exist as a whole encyclopedia entry worth of characteristics and history. Those compendious entries were, for a long time, what those words meant. Today, however, it looks to be quite possible that both entries are largely wrong in various particulars, rendering certain things taken for granted as part of what those words meant by many experts to be simply wrong. Science can work like that. However we may face decades of the kind of rear guard action that faces many or all such radical shifts in understanding, witness "Clovis", another vast basket of beliefs and features rolled into one word that retains some basic characteristics while abandoning or modifying others, at times seemingly solely to preserve those basics.

None of that really goes anywhere except for two ancient precepts:
1) The true experts know the right questions, not so much the answers
2) Question everything

be well and have a good one

edit - inserted an omitted word and changed an improper blockquote into italics