Anyone seen the latest ad from Chuck E Cheese?  A careful mom wraps her helmeted kids in bubble wrap before cautiously escorting them to the sunny driveway to ride their bicycles.  The voice-over asks (paraphrase), "Looking for a safe and fun activity for your kids?  Bring them to Chuck E Cheese!"  Cut to the much happier, relaxed mom beaming as her kids safely enjoy the nice indoor video games in a noisy food-oriented environment.  No risky behaviors for her family!

Look at all the messages in this ad:  Fresh air, suburban neighborhood, physical activity - bad, dangerous!  Food, video games, enclosed indoor spaces - good, safe!  Consumerism, good!  "Where kids can be kids" - they can't really "be kids" in the neighborhood, that's no longer acceptable.  Perhaps most insidious is the implied judgment on the mom.  A good mom's first priority is her children's safety, which she must maximize by finding ways to keep them entertained indoors.  The good mom knows that no amount of freedom is safe.

Ah yes, Chuck E Cheese - where kids can be kids.  Because so much of what was once normal childhood has been stripped from our children that video games are the best we can do.

A new study came out linking diet soft drinks to the development of metabolic syndrome, a set of symptoms that indicates a high risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.  This is a prospective study that assessed the dietary intake of over 9000 metabolically normal middle-aged participants, then followed them for 9 years watching for the development of metabolic syndrome.

Unsurprisingly, high intakes of meat and fried food were positively correlated with metabolic syndrome while dairy appeared to be weakly protective.  But the strong correlation with diet soft drinks was not predicted.