Furious with ABCNews

Today there is an article about how the reading of Harry Potter books actually keeps children out of the emergency wards. When kids are reading, of course, they are not going to be engaging in dangerous activities. Duh!! This was not the revealing part of the article that made me so fired up; it was the following quote from trauma surgeon Stephan Gwilym:

The only downside to this hypothesis [reading Harry Potter books] is turning active kids into bookworms. Potential problems could include "an unpredictable increase in childhood obesity, rickets, and loss of cardiovascular fitness," he said.

I can only say that from the real world trenches of middle school that the bookworms tend to be underweight while the low achieveing students are more likely to be overweight. I guess we can blame the schools for all the reading that we make students do because it is causing obesity; perhaps, we need to change the curriculum to only Playstation during first period followed by XBox; maybe reading needs to be cut out all together. Honestly, I cannot believe an educated person, let alone a doctor, would even suggest that turning children into bookworms might lead to obesity.

I wonder if the good doctor has ever looked at the nutritional value of school lunches or diets in general among children. The National Research Council has a book online entitled Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children which goes into some of the reasons that children may be overweight. Then again maybe its the microwave cooking that is causing the weight problem among children.