A Stitch in Haste

We interrupt our regular "Biblical dinosaurs" nonsense to bring you some Twenty-First Century Lamarckism:

"If the mother is eating Cheetos and white bread, the fetus will be born with those taste buds. If the mother is eating carrots and oatmeal, the child will be born with those taste buds," said Robert Trevino at the Social and Health Research Center in San Antonio, Texas.

And if the mother dyes her hair blue, then the fetus will be born with blue hair, and if the mother breaks her leg while pregnant, then the baby will be born with a broken leg...

One can only hope that Dr. Trevino — an advocate of sociological gobbledygook best described as the junk food equivalent of "Just Say No" (and we all know how well that worked in the War on Drugs) — was just being sloppily figurative and really meant that parental behaviors (post-natal, of course) may influence their children's eating habits and not the preposterous "acquired taste buds" stupidity that he actually said.

Not that it really matters:

The federal government will spend more than $1 billion this year on nutrition education — fresh carrot and celery snacks, videos of dancing fruit, hundreds of hours of lively lessons about how great you will feel if you eat well.

But a review of scientific studies examining 57 such programs found mostly failure. Just four showed any real success in changing the way kids eat — or any promise as weapons against the growing epidemic of childhood obesity.

"Any person looking at the published literature about these programs would have to conclude that they are generally not working," said Tom Baranowski, a pediatrics professor at Houston's Baylor College of Medicine who studies behavioral nutrition.

But, in a warm-fuzzy-feeling environment such as the current obesity mania, mere failure will of course not be viewed as any reason to stop throwing a billion dollars a year at the "problem."

(Via Fark.)