She's not just fat, she's a LUSH and a HO!

This morning on the radio, I heard a report about some obesity research at UofM. Basically it was a study that shows that overweight girls enter puberty earlier than thinner girls. Since so many female hormones are tied to leptin and since leptin is tied to body fat, this is not especially surprising research.

But I had to laugh at the news reports. Because it seems that even NPR has to jump onboard the "obesity epidemic" bandwagon and make their news stories sound as scary as possible. In this case, the news people naturally couldnt content themselves with reporting early puberty because that might not be scary enough. So they go on to say that the reason we should all be so worried about all these overweight girls hitting puberty earlier is that apparently girls who go through puberty earlier tend to have sex younger and tend to be more likely to experiment with alcohol. That is right folks, the principle negative effect of allowing your daughter to get fat is that she'll become a BIG FAT LUSH *and* a HO.

I usually laugh at those news reports because they are so obviously designed to scare people into listening to the news for more information. I usually laugh until I remember how so many people will listen to a news story like that and look at their charming but overweight daughter and then start taking that daughter down a road of self-esteem bashing. Or even if the parents dont do that to their kid, maybe the parents will feel a little guilt about having a fat daughter or maybe they will be more worried about her being a slut or a lush. I dont know.

I know that if I had a daughter, I think it would be really cool if she were a slut (as long as that is what she wanted to be) and I wouldnt be especially worried about experimentation with alcohol although I would feel better about experimentation with pot. But not too many folks are like me and they DO worry about such things. I think that the news media are doing the average parent a huge disservice when they air scare stories like that.