At the risk of being perceived as a bunch of grumpy cranks we expose the waste of tax dollars spent on a study that, despite its inanity, at least provides a degree of light entertainment.
The perpetual conflict between Venus and Mars spices up the dinner table as researchers uncover profound, perhaps intractable, disagreement over what makes up a delectable meal. Men want meat and pizza while women delight in yogurt, fruit, and vegetables. The intrepid researchers note that reckless men prefer their eggs runny and their hamburgers "undercooked," two preferences that the experts warn carry a higher chance of contamination that can cause illness, while the prudent women prefer only one edible, raw alfalfa sprouts, that can be considered risky due to outbreaks of food poisoning.
It wouldn’t be a study if there wasn’t an element of surprise contained within and these researchers are astonished that men, despite their deplorable carnivorous leanings, chow down some of the most nutritious vegetables with far more relish than that evinced by health-conscious women. Inquiring minds, however, will be disappointed that the researchers cannot explain why this is so, which leads us to the cranky part: why are supposedly scarce health-care dollars being spent on examining the taste differences, in actuality not all that great, between men and women?
What, indeed, did federal health officials and their counterparts in the 10 states, where the food preference surveys were conducted, hope to achieve? The researchers have a definite answer for that. This study is crucial for "helping health educators better target public health messages about healthy eating."
Of course! Spend health-care funds to better tailor expensive, publicly funded messages to the people, who are paying for it all and who, according to other publicly funded pressure groups, lack adequate health care because of a lack of money. Useless, irrelevant, wasteful and plain goofy studies always have a point and that point is to enrich an entire class of parasites whose product is valueless in the real world but is worth its weight in gold in the rarefied world of big government boondoggle.
As a discordant coda the reporter tosses in some final paragraphs that are irrelevant to this study. Foodborne illness outbreaks linked to leafy vegetables have been growing steadily over the past three decades, far outpacing any percentage increase of greens being consumed by Americans. So at the same time "health educators" are nagging Americans to eat their greens, those greens have become more likely to cause disease. There’s no word from the "experts" on why this occurring or about what can be done to stop it. Their real concentration, of course, is on the green in their wallets.
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