An article in the paper this week commented that Walt Disney World was re-tooling their exhibit on "childhood obesity" to be more sympathetic to fat people. They were pressured into this, it is implied, by the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance. I find this astonishing. Not that Disney can bend to political pressure, but that fat people have a lobby.

Just what is this NAAFA? The acronym itself sounds like something you could expect a fat person to pant heavily between bites. The website of the NAAFA looks like the kind of site you'd expect to see from a canned link farm. Maybe NAAFA doesn't have a whole lot of people on staff who can hit just one key on a keyboard to program a better site. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect that their site is bare bones because someone ate the rest of it.

It turns out that NAAFA was created in 1969 in order to organize letter writing campaigns. It's hard to motivate others to accept your cause when you won't get off your ass for it yourself. In the years since, NAAFA has overhauled itself to become more pro-active. There are over 11,000 members in the group: if each pulled his own weight, they'd be able to get remarkable things done. Like make Disney change their policies. For all their trying, the 16-million member Southern Baptist Convention has never managed to do that. Maybe the Southern Baptists need to put on a little weight.

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The FDA has announced "concern" over the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA), widely used in food industry packaging for the better part of a century. BPA is a synthetic estrogen that provides plastics with added resiliency, making bottles that resist shattering. The FDA has long approved the use of the chemical, but now the agency finds itself under pressure from consumer safety groups arguing that BPA can disrupt fetal brain development and lead to increased obesity. In short, it seems that BPA can make you stupid and fat but at least you'll be more resiliant to damage.

Tests performed recently by the Canadian government agency Health Canada reveal that aluminum cans of Coca-Cola contain 0.18 micrograms (µg) of BPA per liter. The chemical leaches from the epoxy lining of the cans themselves after canning and mixes with the delicious and entirely wholesome Coca-Cola within. No wonder North America is obese: it's not our soft drinks, but our soft drink containers conspiring against us.

Canada's recommended safe level of consumption is 25 µg per kilogram of body weight per day, meaning that you would have to drink more than 138 liters of Coke PER KILOGRAM each day to consume concentrations considered unhealthy. That's over 31,108 12-oz. aluminum cans of Coke per day for the average 80kg (176lb) American. Before you panic over the FDA's announcement, compare that to the USA's advised safe level of 50 µg/kg/day!

Recognizing the severity of the situation, baby bottle manufacturers and distributors have already willingly begun turning away from using BPA in their products. That's a sound start to prevent the clearly overwhelming deleterious effects of consuming Coca-Cola on the development of your unborn baby's brain. But I suggest that it doesn't go far enough. In the interest of product safety, I recommend that everyone install an industrial Coke dispenser in their own kitchen so that they may drink Coke as nature intended: directly from the nipple. That way you can consume your American allotted 273 liters per kilogram per day safely and without fear that the chemicals in our cans are making us obese.

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Perhaps you've heard this by now, but there's a death row inmate in Ohio who is suing the state to prevent his execution. The essence of his argument is that since all approved methods of execution would result in cruelty as a result of his obesity, he cannot be executed by the state.

You've got to admit that's pretty clever using the system against itself. "You can't kill me because I'm too fat, and you can't make me lose weight because then you'd just kill me." Check and Mate! What this really proves is that you can have your cake and eat it, too.

This fellow sounds like a true Kingpin of Crime at work to me.

Damn, that's one fat criminal.

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