Dear 'Fat Friend' Researchers

via Newsweek:

Now a new study by researchers at the University of Buffalo suggests an even more radical idea: banning fat friends from eating together. Sarah-Jeanne Salvy, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the university's School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and her colleagues found that fat kids consume significantly more calories when they chow down with friends who are also overweight than when they eat with lean friends.

This makes me sick. Not just sick like I ate too many McGriddles, but sick like I was drinking McGriddle McGrease. Okay, we all knew that obesity was an epidemic, but the phrase 'the more, the merrier' shouldn't really apply here should it? To say that eating fatty foods with a friend makes you eat more is irrelevant. That's like saying that smoking crack with a friend is more likely to make you an addict. Regardless of who's doing it with you, engaging in an unhealthy act is unhealthy. The study says that "being friends increased food intake, being overweight and eating with an overweight [person] increased eating." No shit sherlock. Of course you're not going to be down to break bread as easily with some random kid from a study, than if you were chowing down with your regular friends.

I'm not in the least bit supportive of most things American, one of them being research and studies that prove things that we already know from common sense. Professors and researchers spend countless hours and ridiculous sums of money to put together these studies. Then they post them up in Newsweek or on Dateline NBC, scaring Americans for the 5 minutes that they're paying attention, until hunger strikes and we reach for another Ho-Ho. If researchers really something to make American kids less susceptible to obesity, they should show them something that would truly scare them skinny.

How to scare America's kids skinny:
- Show "fat" versions of their favorite cartoons and TV shows. I'm sure Rocket Power would have been a lot less rocket-powered if the kids snapped their skateboards from their ridiculous weights.

- Put a picture of an inhumane chicken or beef farm on the lawn or front window of every fast food restaurant in the country.

- Make Monique and Bruce Bruce have sex at each school in America to show how much of an 'acquired taste' sex with a big person is.

- Start putting Dexatrim or some other black market weight-loss substance in candy. That way, kids won't even know they're getting fit until they start having emotional breakdowns because of the unbalanced chemicals.