You know what assignment must suck for TV cameramen? Getting those shots of fat people walking around, usually cutting off their heads to protect their girthy innocence. You've seen it all a hundred times: a serious sounding newscaster voices over shots of hefty citizens dressed in garish clothing, waddling down the sidewalk, chubby elbows swinging by their expanding sides. The report is always something incredibly obvious like: "Local scientists finds that people who eat 4-10 sticks of salted butter per day have a higher risk of getting stuck in revolving doors. For his next study, this same scientist will actually hurl bags of grant money directly into a lit furnace."

There is no doubt Americans have been chunkified, but the fact is we aren't even in the top 5 fattest countries on Earth. Germany, France, England, Japan, and Mexico all have higher obesity rates according to a recent study (that probably neglected to visit New Orleans, Houston, or Wisconsin). Nonetheless, do we really need shots of gigantic butts to visualize the fact we're a bunch of chubby chumps? Who knows, the enormous rump you see may belong to a guy heading to his weight loss class (heck, at least he's walking around, right?) It's a staple of the slow news day, and yet it's not really anything new. If you eat a lot and don't exercise, you get fat. I knew this when I was about 3 years old. Stop blaming McDonald's unless Ronald McDonald has personally rendered you unconscious and injected an IV of fry-oil directly into your blood stream.

Next time the news is out of good material, they should just run 5 minutes of pictures of puppies and kittens. Now who wouldn't THAT put into a good mood, huh? And truth be said, I'd rather see a tubby tabby than a pudgy pedestrian.

Posted by James Dziezynski @ 12:33 PM