A new study came out yesterday from a group of scientists (or game show writers, judging from the obviousness of the conclusions drawn) telling me what I’d already learned from my days as a fast-food restaurant burger flipper:  Children, by and large, have a peculiar habit of eating the kinds and types of food their parents eat.  No joke?  You really think so?

Now, I’m not putting down the value of research in general.  Without it, we’d never know important stuff; like how much a banana slug weighs during its pre-ovulatory phase versus its “I’m going on birth control” phase.  Nope, I’m chuckling over a study which manages to both state the obvious and give us all pause for concern over the increasingly-bloated and gelatinous lumps of flesh our offspring seem to be turning into.

I’m genuinely concerned, because it seems as if parents out there now need an expensive, gold-plated, scientifically-rigorous, peer-reviewed study to tell them they should be making their kids eat more fruits and vegetables and fewer doughnuts and triple-decker cheeseburgers with extra mayonnaise and ranch dressing.  No, really…cut back on the fatty stuff and eat the healthy stuff.  What a concept!  I need to get to work on a grant package to conduct a study on the negative effects writing Internet articles has on its authors, as quickly as possible before somebody, somewhere in the government gets wind of this little cash cow (conducting totally superfluous studies which state the obvious).  Easy pickings like this are normally only available from starting up one of those Internet offshore gambling websites that take your money, never pay out winnings, and end up turning a person into a Texas Hold ‘Em addict for the rest of his life.  But enough about me:  Back to the issue before us, which is making a kid pick up a real, honest-to-goodness piece of fruit instead of a real, honest-to-goodness piece of fruitcake.

Soda-pop drinking also seems to be a big culprit in the race to see how many kids we can turn into pasty-fleshed versions of Jabba the Hut:  In a nod to the powers of adult persuasion, it was found that the little fledglings of parents who drank soda every day had a forty percent greater chance themselves of becoming infatuated with the piquant aftertaste found only in the finest high fructose corn syrups and carbonated waters. I knew this already, too, seeing as how I’d often witness my sister pouring large amounts of the stuff into her youngest child’s cutesy little sippy cup.  No wonder the kid’s a junior league version of Hellboy these days:  He’s got enough sugar and long-lasting preservatives in his system to last him for his twenty-seven lifespans, him being Hellboy and all.

So, in just a few decades, we’ve gone from making sure kids eat relatively healthfully to making sure they can dine like lion cubs off the fatty- sweet carcass of a large, glistening Candybeast.  It’s almost enough to make me want to put down the jellyroll I just bought from the office vending machine.  Almost.

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