Flap over Fluff

As you may know, I've written quite a bit in the last couple of years about the nutrition in our schools - specifically about the sorry state it's in, and about the few things that are happening that bode well for the elimination of things like sodas, candy, pizza, bagels, doughnuts and all manner of other fatteners.

These are measures that I've been urging for years, for the sake of the waistlines, hearts, and self-esteem of today's children - and tomorrow's adults. And until very recently, I thought I was more or less doing it alone. But lately, it seems at least some in the various levels of government are waking up and smelling the coffee.

The latest of these seems to be a state senator from Massachusetts who's upset at that state's public school system for offering his third-grade child what's become know as a local delicacy…

A Fluffernutter.

For those of you who don't recognize with shock and outrage just what this kid's been offered, I'll educate you. A Fluffernutter is a sandwich made of Wonder bread, peanut butter and a marshmallow-y spread manufactured locally called Marshmallow Fluff. With the exception of the peanut butter, that's a recipe for flab. And apparently, it's what's for lunch at a lot of Massachusetts schools.

And to get back to the story, that's what on Senator Jarrett Barrios' mind. In fact, he claims to want to propose legislation in the Bay State to limit public schools from serving the sandwich more than once a week, according to a recent Associated Press article. To this, I say: Why not once a YEAR?

I'm not knocking the man's attempts at setting some limits to the sugar-laden trash the pointy-heads in charge of educating our kids are trowel-ing out to them, but come on. ANY junk food is too much for schools to be dishing out to children. Period.

Not according to another Massachusetts state senator, a fellow Democrat whose district is near where Marshmallow Fluff has been produced for more than 80 years. She's counter-proposing a piece of legislation that designates the Fluffernutter as the state's "official sandwich."

Fine, make it the state sandwich, I say. The rotund Teddy Kennedy has obviously eaten enough of them to justify such a bill's passage - just don't feed any more of them to the kids!

An increasing number of Americans are so fat they can't be effectively X-rayed, MRI-ed, or medically scanned in other manners - either because they won't fit into the diagnostic imaging equipment, or because they are simply so fat that the various rays, waves or beams won't get through their blubber to the organs that need looking at…

This, according to a recent report issued by a team of radiologists from Massachusetts General Hospital. The findings, reported in a recent Reuters article, are based on an increasing incidence of documented mass-related diagnostic imaging complications between 1999 and 2003.

Of course, as I've reported before, this increase in patient size has spurred an entire industry in plus-sized medical equipment, from MRI machines to stretchers to hospital beds…

And since we keep stuffing Fluffernutters and other such junk into our mouths, it won't be long before they'll be making extra kilo-watt imaging machines to meet the meaty demand.

Excess of ALL types is the American way, after all.