It always bugs me when people begin tossing around blame. This causes this. These people are responsible for that. Something is the reason something else is happening. In most cases, it’s just not that simple. This may be contributing to that and so on, but it’s just never a good idea to talk in generalities. Last week, researchers bugged me a little bit when they said children are being exposed to an alarming amount of junk food commercials when they’re watching TV and that this is a key ingredient to childhood obesity. I’m not standing up for commercials or even television in general, but I would think it’s fair to say that there’s plenty of blame to go around. I’m sure they aren’t exactly helping, but junk food commercials aren’t the reason our children are overweight.

First off, I’m not sure how much money was spent on this little study, but I’m guessing it was far too much. Kids love to eat crap. People who make crap need to sell crap. A good way to sell crap is to make a commercial for it. Kids want to eat more crap after they see a commercial for it. There, those previous four sentences took me about a minute to figure out. If the folks ponying up for the research would have just called, I could have saved them about four years and the crapload of money they spent looking deeper into this particular topic.

Still, since they went to all the work, I suppose we should look closer at the study. Actually, I’m being sort of hard on them. In the United States and Germany, 90 percent of the commercials shown when kids are likely to be watching TV are junk food advertisements. That’s pretty significant. Britain and Australia fare much better with about 50 percent, but that’s still a whole bunch. The thing is, I’m not arguing that there aren’t too many commercials advertising too many bad products because there obviously are. I’m just saying we probably need to look at the problem a little closer.

A really good question to ask would be why the piss are the kids watching so much damned television, and who the piss is buying all the junk food for them? Television is pretty awesome, and kids will watch as much of it as they can. On the other hand, kids would also be more than happy to play grabass in the yard. TV isn’t supposed to be a babysitter, and if you use it that way, you’ll end up with a kid who’s just about as smart as the TV characters they’re watching. Regardless of what some people may think, that’s not really a good thing.

This leads us to the other question of who’s buying these kids all this junk food or, at the very least, who’s giving them the money to buy all this junk food? If a kid is working night and day at a low-paying job in order to keep themselves stocked up with Dilly Bars and pasta pathetically stuffed into a pizza crust, good for them. It’s sad, but you at least have to admire their work ethic. If a small child is waiting until his or her parents go to bed and then taking money and the family car down to the local grocery store to get his fix on a couple of boxes of Lucky Charms, that’s pretty scary, but you have to admire the diligence.

I’m guessing not much of this happens, though. I’m guessing that the kid sees a commercial and then throws a hissy fit until the junk food is purchased for them. There’s some shame on the pusher, but there’s also some shame on the enabler. At least there’s some interaction in that scenario, though. The other, probably more popular way kids get junk food is that their parents give them money and set them loose. Either way, the kid gets exactly what he or she wants. It’s not really the kid’s fault, and it’s not really the fault of advertisers. It’s the fault of the people who are supposed to be training the kid to be a productive adult someday.

I ate a ton of crap when I was growing up, but back then, we called it “getting a treat,” not breakfast or lunch or dinner. I also feel like I watched a lot of TV, but it wasn’t the only damned thing I did. I’d much rather have had a good meal or played baseball all evening, and that’s usually what I did. Throwing back fast food for dinner seemed kind of special and fun because we didn’t do it very often. It doesn’t seem like that now. It may just be that the poor kids these days are bored with the constant influx of special stuff.

Hey, the problem isn’t just limited to children. I’ll be the first to admit I’m too damned fat. I suppose it would be easy to blame all the commercials. After all, I often find myself watching TV and seeing a commercial for some chain store pizza. Sometimes I end up even ordering a pizza after one of those commercials. Granted, I don’t order a chain store pizza, you know, because it’s sort of crap, but regardless, the damage is pretty much done, no matter what the specific culprit. I’m an adult, though, and that’s my fault. I’m guessing in most of the children’s cases, the adult is also the one to blame.