Virgin minds cause bloating

Good morning! It is going to be a beautiful, sunny Friday today with temperatures reaching the upper 40s. But it won't be around for long, so take this newspaper outside! The park beckons.\nTo celebrate the week's end, we're going to play one of my favorite Friday games. It's called "Guess the Irony," or "How on Earth Did They Miss Such a Blatantly Obvious Point?"\nHere's the situation -- I woke up last Monday morning on a couch that I didn't entirely remember going to sleep on. Bleary-eyed, I rolled over to find a CNN anchorwoman confronting me from the television set. It was Headline News, and the immaculately bland face of a woman who didn't really want to be up at 8 a.m. was pitching the stories coming up after the commercial break.\nOne story in particular piqued my interest. Apparently, a new study had come out linking television to the enlarging problem of enlarging children. I sat up chuckling as the advertisements fluttered past, waiting for the martyred anchor to condemn her own profession. In my head, the eulogy ran something like this:\n"The American Such-and-Such Association announced today a child's rear end is directly proportional to the amount of hours it spends flattened in front of the television."\nBut did this happen? In short, no. According to the new study, food advertisements on television cause children to demand the salivating double quarter pounders their parents subsequently buy for them. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, television is an innocent relay in the dastardly game of marketing. It's a classic case of don't shoot the messenger.\nThe Kaiser Family Foundation's report found "the number of ads children see on TV has doubled from 20,000 to 40,000 (per year) since the 1970s, and the majority of ads targeted to kids are for candy, cereal and fast food," (The Associated Press, Feb. 24).\nI have one incredibly simple question for the Foundation. How long (they can use scientific notation if need be) did these kids spend in front of the tube to see 40,000 ads per year?\nLet's do a bit of math. Assuming there are 20 ads in a half-hour program, these children watched 2,000 shows. That's 1,000 programming hours, or approximately six weeks of solid television.\nIs there any great wonder the Foundation went on to report "15.3 percent of children aged six to 11 were listed as overweight in 1999-2000?"\nHere's an idea -- get up! The advertisements are only a fraction of the problem. The child is still sitting there all day every day without moving. If, instead, the television was off, the ads would cease to be a problem, and he or she would get some exercise.\nBrilliant!\nBut this isn't the route they're taking. A collaborating report from the American Psychological Association called on the Federal Communications Commission to restrict ads aimed at children. The report claimed small children do not understand the intent of advertising and therefore cannot ignore it.\nOf course, this skirts the underlying issue. Both the Kaiser Foundation and the APA missed the fact that a sedentary lifestyle is bad for children, regardless of what they're watching. Kids have an enormous amount of energy, so yank them away from the boob tube and take them outside! May I suggest the time-honored Frisbee? Above all, go enjoy the sun!\nLike I said, the park beckons.