“7-11″ evidently stands for how the number of pounds a regular customer will gain in six months
The University of Montreal conducted a study of 632 kids and their families from across the economic scale in an effort to determine how their neighborhoods affected their weight. Most of the children were of normal heft, but 42 percent were overweight and 22 percent downright obese. The researchers looked for correlations between weight on the one hand, and parks and green spaces and commercial food outlets on the other.
Their conclusions: Neighborhood availability of parks, playgrounds and other open areas doesn’t seem to have any affect on children’s weight; fast food restaurants may be somewhat relevant to childhood overweight, but there appears to be a direct connection between childhood obesity and proximity to convenience stores.
The researchers feel strongly enough about this to have recommended that convenience-store-free zones be established in the vicinity of Canadian schools.
Of course, it’s possible that this study was secretly funded by McDonald’s as part of a blame-shifting strategy, but when you think about it, the fast food chains at least make some effort to address their role in our national fat problem, whereas your typical convenience store seems dedicated to selling the least healthy food products permitted by law. Then again, what would you expect from a place that also sells cigarettes and lottery tickets?
Further proof, if any were needed, that people who enter eating competitions are batpoop loony
If eating competitions merely involved widely beloved food items, such as your hot dog and hamburger and pancake and apple pie and other items off the classic Norman Rockwell America menu, that would be one thing. It would be simple gluttony.
But eating competitions don’t stop there. They go on to include items than ordinary, rational Americans would eat only to avoid offending hosts in a hostile foreign land or to humor future in-laws here at home. And that verges on crazy.
Think I’m exaggerating? Herewith are a few such items, and the current world records for consuming them, straight from the Uncle John’s Endless Engrossing Bathroom Reader, 2009 edition.
- Haggis (sheep lungs, liver and heart, plus oatmeal and onion, boiled in a sheep’s stomach): three pounds in eight minutes.
- Pickled beef tongue: one entire three-pound tongue plus a few bites of another (because who can stop at just one tongue?) in 12 minutes. On Fox TV, no less, which somehow makes sense.
- Cow brains: 57 of them, totaling about 17.7 pounds, in 15 minutes.
- Jalapeno peppers: 247, in an unspecified space of time, but probably not as long as the winner later spent in the bathroom.
- Butter (a classic American food item, granted, but always on something else, such as toast or corn on the cob; I mean, if somebody brought you a “snack” that was simply pats of butter, wouldn’t you be weirded out?): seven quarter-pound sticks in 5 minutes.
If the images of the eaters setting these records don’t curl your hair, or at least curb your appetite, keep in mind that these were competitions, meaning that whole bunches of people were desperately and zealously hammering down the cow brains or sheep innards or whatever. We’re not talking about isolated individual nutjobs, here, but whole legions of demented enthusiasts.
And you were worried about vampires and zombies.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)
Mini-marts linked to childhood obesity; eating competitions linked to insanity