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Debit cards can make your kids fat.  Really.  It sounds ridiculous but a new study has shown that people, even kids, and alas I'm in here, too, make more frivolous choices when they use a debit card. To expedite long lunch lines and enable cleaner accounting, about 80 percent of schools use debit cards or accounts that parents can add money to for cafeteria lunch transactions, write David Just and Brian Wansink, co-directors of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs, according to newswise.com. “There may be a reason for concern about the popularity of cashless systems,” the Website quotes researchers. “Debit cards have been shown to induce more frivolous purchases or greater overall spending.” Researchers compared purchases at school cafeterias that use debit-only systems with those that accept debit or cash. They found that students in first through 12th grades at debit/cash cafeterias consumed about 721 calories for lunch compared with...

Sadly, exactly the audience that shouldn't be showered with high-fat ads for food is exactly the one getting them.  Even sadder, it's their kids the advertisers are after. A new study has found that the majority of ads found on Spanish-languagae TV channels are for food that is not healthy, according to nbcnews.com. Jacquellena Carrero  notes that Latinos have one of the highest obesity rates in the nation and these commercials are not at all productive or helpful. Carrero pointed out in her article that Dale Kunkel, Professor of Communication at the University of Arizona at Tucson and the lead author of the study, "said that researchers used an independent food rating system by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to designate foods as healthy or unhealthy." The HHS used a clever scale to measure foods' capacity to for calories. Carrero reported that scale goes from “'go'” foods that are low in fat and calories to ...

It used to be the hour between feeding and bed was the "witching" hour for babies. But a new study has found that it can be just as harmful for kids and teens, only, with them, it starts earlier in the day. According to a story by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public School, which ran the study, 60% of parents said their kids ate or drank something unhealthy that could lead to weight gain in the period between getting home from school and sleep. Another trend that could result in weight gain? Only one-half of the families surveyed said they ate dinner together six or seven nights out of the week. And it's not just eating that gets out of hand, but the lack of exercise most kids are getting these days after school and on weekends, Richard Knox and Patti Neighmond write.  Added together, they add up to a mountain of calories each year that may lead to heart disease, stroke, even cancer in your children's later years. Overall, it...