Junk Food For Kids!

I'm no svelte girlie myself -- I've always been more on the stocky-athletic end of the spectrum, at least since puberty -- but while at WBOS Earthfest on Saturday, I couldn't help but notice the somewhat disturbing amount of overweight little kids.

The weird thing is, I was a big TV (specifically, cartoon) nut when I was a kid. My diet was mostly rice, although I graduated to granola bars later on (chocolate chip, of course). I wouldn't eat vegatables, save corn, cucumbers, potatoes, and celery. Forget about fruits altogether, although I used to sip lemon juice like it was OJ. I didn't like most meat very much, although I'd occasionally get tricked into eating chicken or a cube steak (I didn't like hamburgers, except from Wendy's). But I did love milk, and drank at least 2 glasses a day. I was lazy and frankly, I kind of ate like crap. But I was tiny anyway. As much as I liked sugar, we didn't keep that much junkfood around the house, so even my powdered sugar habit (I occasionally would pour myself a bowl) was kept in check.

So I see these little kids running around and they're just huge, and it's weird. I remember there was always that one huge kid in your grade. Ours? There were two kids -- Ryan and Brian, I guess, but even they weren't enormous by any means. Just a little pudgy, and one worked it off somewhat by the time we were in high school, and the other sort of didn't but still was never morbidly obese or anything. Most of the kids were little and sort of stringy with chubby cheeks and little tummies, which is how kids look, or so I thought.

When you see the kids of today huffing past you, you can't help but wonder where the difference is between them and you. Was I just a bag of Cheetoes away from being that kid? Were the looser clothes of the mid-eighties just more conducive to kids not looking like little tubbagoos? I don't know the problem specifically, nor the solution. Why? I don't have kids. I was a kid once, but as I said, I had my share of bad habits. Probably all my little friends did, too. I didn't play sports until I was in junior high. I rode my bike a little, rollerskated, ran around the neighborhood, but I still didn't look like these little vacuums at the 'fest.

Good to know that on top of all the issues our youth have in America, obesity is getting right up there.