Kid Studies

Missed most the world news but I didn't need to see it to have something, although I could go off about the 10 minutes they spent on the royal couple.  There were two of them that are related on the local news.  They were national stories so perhaps you saw them even if you aren't local to me.  Just a couple more pointless studies that I thought you may be interested in, if for no other reason then to know where you tax dollars are being wasted.


The first study goes back to health again.  This time they decided to study kids health in particular.  The whole point was to see what the average kid intakes for sodium.  The study found that a kid takes in about what most adults do, just over 3000mg.  The thing that I can't understand is why they are surprised by this.  The federal lunch program, and commodity products associated with it, are highly processed.  And what comes with a high amount of processing?  High fat and high sodium.  The point of processing food is to use up parts that most people won't eat outright (think about the recent pink slime stories) and use up the fat.  They add a lot of sodium because it is a cheap and natural preservative.  Most schools rely on these commodity products to be able to offer a meal to their students so naturally a kid's diet is going to be high in sodium!  How about finding a better thing to research?

So what's next on the list of wasted cash?  How about the latest study on texting?  Or should I say sexting?  Yep, they did a study about sexting among teens in the United States.  They found that 30% of teens in the study have participated in sexting.  Really?  We live in a sexually charged culture now.  This isn't the 1950's when they hid everything basically pretending that no one had sex.  It is a part of every day life now.  Turn on just about any show containing actors, sitcom or drama, and there will be some kind of sexual reference in at least one point during an episode.  But they didn't stop there with their attempt to wow you with their new found knowledge.  They found that of those that had participated in sexting, they were 50% more likely to be sexually active then those that didn't.  Holy cow that's amazing information!  I would never have guessed that kids that actively talk about sex are more likely to have had sex.  Just stupid!

For those of you who are wondering why the United States is in financial trouble, these are perfect examples.  I will give you that these were probably fairly cheap but there are thousands of these studies happening every day.  Take the $10000 that each of these probably cost and multiply that by 20000 that probably occur and you get $200000000 a year.  In case you are having trouble with that, it's $200 million.  And that's just the small cheap ones.  Imagine what kind of good that amount of cash could do for the school lunch program.