Respect Authority

Want to look older? Eat a lot!

A new study released this week shows obese children as young as ten years old have the arteries of 45-year-olds, as well as a series of other abnormalities that raise their risk of heart disease. Considering that about a third of American children are overweight, one-fifth are obese, and we don’t even have enough Social Security left for the actual 45-year-olds, this is bad for both health care and the future of our society, though perhaps good news for Gymboree Big & Tall.

Okay, that doesn’t exist.

“As the old saying goes, you’re as old as your arteries are,” Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of a Kansas City children’s hospital told The Associated Press. Despite the fact that I would hardly classify that as an “old saying,” the doc has it right. Kids these days are just piling on the pounds that the rest of us earned after hard-fought battles with “adult things” like beer, and nacho cheese.

Considering what’s almost universally hailed these days as an “obesity epidemic” and the fact that fat kids are popping up all over the place, there have been a litany of news stories lately about various activities designed to keep healthy kids healthy, and fat kids from becoming even fatter adults. Among them: incorporating things like Nintendo Wii, Dance Dance Revolution and skateboarding into schools’ physical education programs, because it seems children take longer than I would have thought to comprehend the “Just don’t tell them it’s healthy/exercise/broccoli” ruse.

What’s truly sad is that even something like middle-aged arteries can’t seem to convince people to take a more hard-line approach. It would seem to me that mandated knowledge of things like math and science will become fairly useless when one needs a fork lift to get out of their house.

Fuck this Wii bullshit, mandate boot camp for America’s youth, or better yet — fat camp. Based on a particularly enlightening episode of MTV’s True Life, my understanding of fat camp is that time is divided equally between exercise, gossip, and figuring out who the thinnest fat person is so everyone can admire/resent them. Considering this sounds a lot like… well, the real world, I think kids would benefit greatly. As would I, from the inevitable and absolutely necessary reality show: “Dancing Until You See Stars.”