If you say that cyberbullying has given school bullies more power than ever before, I will not argue. But please don’t dismiss another addition to their arsenal.

The recent emphasis placed upon ferreting them out to make schools a “safe haven.”

While it’s unintended, the current anti-bullying campaigns empower bullies by accentuating rather than dismissing their actions.

Now don’t get me wrong. I want my students to feel a sense of community in my classroom that encourages them to speak their minds. And I don’t want them subjected to any sort of physical abuse in the halls.

But to never receive a dirty look? An extended stare? An occasional unkind word?

This is merely boorish behavior, not bullying — but is now being perceived as such by students who have become hypersensitive in large part due to anti-bullying campaigns. As a result, these students react to pseudo-bullying the way house cats react to being abandoned in the woods.

If you’re wondering how a rant about unintentionally empowering bullies makes its way into a health-and-fitness column, it’s because — besides being true — I believe such a diatribe will anger or even offend a few.

Getting angry. Becoming offended. Both can lead to something essential to improving your health and fitness.

Taking action.

And while some people need to be angered, offended, or even bullied to do so, logical souls simply require the right information. What you read next, I hope, does the latter for you.

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Are you both sleep-deprived and unable to create a way to get more shut-eye because of your present schedule? Researchers at Stanford University have a way for you to lessen the harm created because of this.

Eat better.

They reached this conclusion based on a survey they gave to 245 Stanford physicians in March of 2106. The results, which were published in the October issue of the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, showed that the physicians who ate a diet high in saturated fat and sugar had higher sleep-related impairment (SRI) scores.

Not being able to fall asleep once in bed, obviously, only exacerbates all the problems created by shortchanging bedrest.

Those surveyed whose diets were considered low in saturated fat and sugar because they plant based diets tallied lower SRI scores.

So the takeaway from the online article about this research found at Medical News Today.com: Even “exhausted” brains and bodies work better when given the right fuel.

A personal experience adds much to the aforementioned article penned by Lauren Sharkey. Stanford researcher, Maryam Hamidi, Ph.D. — a nutrition scientist and researcher at the WellMD Center on campus — found that her preference for snack foods changed when she did research that required her to stay awake for 21 hours at a time.

“I had not craved chips since my undergraduate college years,” she says. Yet around 7 p.m. on one sleep-deprived day, Hamidi ate three full bags.

“I’d never eaten three bags of chips at once,” she admits. “But I’d also never been that sleep deprived.”

Sleep-deprived or not, the typical American still eats too many bad carbs, according to interviews of almost 44,000 Americans between 1999 and 2016 used to create an article published in the September issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. Fang Fang Zhang, the senior researcher and associate professor at Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy in Boston says, “Our study shows that Americans are eating a lot of low-quality carbohydrates from refined grains and added sugars — 42 percent [of daily calories]. “That’s a lot of calories without many nutrients [and] partially related to convenience foods.”

Zhang believes that a lack of will is not the only reason for such a heavy reliance on bad carbs, in part because the interviews revealed that disadvantaged Americans have poorer diets than those who are wealthier and more educated.

While this column can do little about the former, it can address the latter — as well as wonder about Zhang’s use of the word “will.”

Could what Zhang calls a lack of will really be a love of convenience?

When people ask me, for instance, about what I eat in a typical week, the most frequent response is, “How do you find the time to prepare all that food?”

It causes the English teacher in me to explain that it’s not a matter of “finding” time. It’s a matter of how I choose to spend it.

And while I do spend a few hours each week just preparing that week’s snacks (and nearly as long to concoct my main meals), what I haven’t spent since 2001 is a day where I was too sick to work out or teach.

But some people aren’t wired to spend time that way. They spend those two or more hours I use each week to make healthy snacks to surf the internet, check out social media, or binge-watch TV.

Maybe it’s time for a bit of rewiring?