Offensive Lines
When a week launches with the Super Bowl, where can it go but downhill? At a time when television audiences are famously fragmented, a record-breaking 111.3 million viewers tuned in to the game, including even people like me. I’m not saying I’m indifferent to professional football, but I walked into a Super Bowl party Sunday night planning to root for the team wearing red, white, and blue. I only recognized the flaw in this plan when I saw the cupcakes. It turned out some spectacular plays went down, at least according to comments I overheard from other guests. But now, with 51 weeks to wait for the next Big Game, we might as well turn our attentions to post-game analysis of some pediatric passes, touchdowns, and fumbles.
This week’s highlights include the latest report from the National Youth Tobacco Survey. The good news? Between the years 2000 and 2009 the percentage of nonsmoking middle-school and high-school students forced to breathe other people’s cigarette smoke in cars fell by almost half, from 39% to 22.8%! The bad news? That’s still over a fifth of nonsmoking young people regularly trapped in a small space with toxic fumes. The study also looked at kids who are themselves active smokers. It turned out that of these respondents 24.7% are forced into cars where they have to breathe clean air, up from 17.7% in 2009. Frustrated Mötley Crüe fans still await subgroup analyses to evaluate Smoking In The Boys Room, for which data were last reported in 1985.
Speaking of big games, what do you think would happen if a kid went online to play virtual ball with a couple of peers, but instead of playing with him they totally left him out, and then he went to a real gym with real balls. Would he participate actively, or would he sit on the bleachers hoping no one noticed his tears but if they did maybe they’d be nice to him? This experiment, actually conducted and then reported this week in Pediatrics, allowed 19 carefully selected young subjects to experience what I like to call my childhood. Purportedly it shows that ostracized children are less active than those who feel included, but I barely read the results, too busy imagining how this thing got past an institutional review board. To be fair, at the end the participants were told about the set-up and rewarded with $20 gift cards. The authors do not state whether those cards were good toward psychotherapy.
Of course balls are not the only things kids throw. Researchers reporting in JAMA this week have pioneered a simple and cost-effective way to encourage schoolchildren to throw away more vegetables. It turns out that kids whose cafeteria trays were festooned with attractive photographs of succulent vegetables were much more likely than kids with plain trays to load up on carrots and green beans, more than doubling their take of green beans and tripling their servings of carrots! Then, as far as I can tell from the results table, those kids tasted the actual vegetables and realized they’re not as good as the ones in the photos. Overall, since so many more kids chose the vegetables the average vegetable consumption per child did rise slightly by what appears to be one bean or one and a half baby carrots. I’d like to repeat this experiment, but this time instead of putting pictures on the trays, I’d show them to the cafeteria staff and say, “Make the food like that!”
With the excitement of Super Bowl XVLI behind me I’ll have even more time to read the pediatric literature, and, even better, it will be nearly a year before I have to remember how to use Roman numerals again. Even those of us who aren’t that into football now know that at least every 8 years the halftime show will offer an inappropriate moment.