Study Reveals: Pregnancy Makes You Fat

On the heels of the the trans-fat travesty , a new public health menace rears its porcine head. In a word, kids:

Adults living with young children eat significantly more fat than grown-ups with no kids at home, a new study shows.

Adults with kids consumed nearly 5 more grams of fat and 1.7 more grams of saturated fat every day, the equivalent of an individual pepperoni pizza a week, Dr. Helena Laroche of the University of Iowa in Iowa City and her colleagues found. Adults living with children younger than 17 also ate more salty snacks, cheese, beef, ice cream, cakes and cookies, pizza, and processed meats like bacon.

Here are a few excruciatingly obvious reasons why this would be true: Kids are stressful and annoying enough to send the entire pro-ana movement headed for a vat of corn syrup; eating well takes more time than frazzled parents are likely to have; parents buy empty calories for their carb-happy kids and then engorge themselves on the same stuff. Or this:

"These findings suggest that food advertising aimed at children may influence not only the child's diet but also indirectly affect parents' diets," they note in their report.

The report comes out in February; expect to see a push to limit kid-friendly food advertising, lest overfed parents be forced to cave to their kids' demands at the supermarket and then cave to their own cravings at home.

Via To the People.