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SPECIAL MEDICAL PROGRESS ISSUE |
“STRONG LINK” BETWEEN
OVEREATING AND OBESITY
Multiple Or Large Servings Of Food Could Affect This Glutton’s Body Size, Say Researchers. By Nate Carboy CAMBRIDGE, MA, November 4 – A 60-member team of researchers at Harvard Medical School has spent the last decade exploring the tenuous link between food intake and obesity. Today, Senior Researcher Dr. Michael Vagus announced that, “We have found strong, if inferential evidence that overeating is one cause—and we stress that it is just one of many causes—of excess body fat.” Dr. Vagus described the double-blind experiments in which subjects were given food in both regular and supersize portions. Thirty percent of subjects were given placebos disguised to look like food, “obtained from Japanese restaurant windows.” In a majority of cases, the subjects who selected and consumed the supersize portions, “gained a significantly more weight than those who ate less.” The findings were immediately attacked by the National Association of Fatty Foods who termed the report “junk food science.” Association Director Roscoe Arbuckle said Harvard failed to take into account the fact that “most obese people are simply struck fat while on the way to the store or somewhere. It has nothing to do with how much food they buy…or consume.” Later today, Guy Plebney of the free-market Cato Institute in Washington said that the Harvard report was “simply tired old regulatory philosophy dressed up as medicine. It’s just a way to undermine consumer choice. And Milton Friedman wouldn’t like it.” Nevertheless, Dr. Vagus insisted that his findings were “pretty OK,” and that Americans “ought to sort of eat less occasionally.”
BE JOINED AT THE HEAD 
The Bannerji Twins: One Head Too Many By Dr. Kneepack Chopra CALCUTTA, October 31 – Bhatu and Bishwa Bannerji, 19, have begun a public campaign for an operation which will permanently join them together at the skull. Only one hospital in the world, The Stockholm Center for Reverse Surgery, is capable of the complex operation, and the boys need to raise $1 million before the work can begin. At a press conference here today, Bhatu and Bishwa told reporters that they did not want to go public with the matter, but that the Indian government had refused to foot the bill. “It seems like rank injustice,” Bhatu said, “after all the Iranian government spent much more in a tragic attempt to have two girls separated. We just want to be together.” The boys, who are sophomores at the Bengal Engineering College in Howrah, first formed the idea when studying the tensile strength of silico-cement. “We are convinced,” said Bishwa, “that surgeons can create a sort of skull bridge that will bond our two half-skulls together.” If they succeed in raising the money, the Bannerji twins say they plan to be carried around the country and charge people to stare at them. “That would sure be a lot easier than studying engineering,” said Bhatu, “and it might inspire others to follow their dreams, like we are.” Their father, Vishal Bannerji, spoke with The Pox by phone later and said that he was sorry that he could not attend the media event. “Too many children these days,” he said, “show no initiative at all, but my sons are different…maybe too different it’s true. But in their new condition, they will only need a one-bedroom flat and at most one car. Maybe one wife will suffice, too.” |
  By Gabriela Bocagrande Twenty-eight Days Later, my darlings, here at the Big Rock Coca Mountain Rehab with Rush Limbaugh and other recovering human oddities. Rush reports that he’s feeling much better, thank you for asking, although he has not been allowed access to the impressive number of supportive e-mails pouring in from dittoheads dispersed throughout the Homeland and now deprived of their daily doses Limbaugh lunacy. I am here undercover, of course, without any substances of my own to take the edge off of the intense therapy sessions, which I must say, has been taxing—taxing and spending, as the Rusher might say. Limbaugh himself has had a hard time graduating from detox and has been relapsing with distressing frequency, I am sorry to report. Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike orderlies have repeatedly extracted him from the janitors’ closet where he has been discovered gulping Mr. Clean and snorting Easy-Off. We’re not sure now just exactly how much, if anything, is left of his brain, which, as you are aware, was not working all that well to start with. Yesterday morning, at the kick-off of Pre-Release week, we had a soul-bearing exercise on fear and loathing, and Rush seemed to have a hard time sharing. His remarks kept veering off-topic to revenge, until he was unexpectedly bitch-slapped by our facilitator, an ex-fashion model who took her own career down the toilet on Dexedrine and gin, a lethal combination, judging from the looks of her. She has no patience with the retrograde claptrap compulsively issuing from the fat man, and made him go sit in a corner and wear a crudely-lettered sign that said “Tell me to shut up.” This silenced everyone for a good 10 minutes, during which we contemplated the suffering of those garbage heads “still out there” and then we were forced to supply details about our respective “bottoms.” For those of you unfamiliar with addict concepts, this unappealing label refers to that last dreadful incident when each participant was forced to confront the destructive nature of substance abuse in his or her particular case. There was a certain amount of perverse competition on this topic, with the tacit agreement that whosoever can recount the most humiliating and public bottom wins. Rush was hard to beat. Getting outed in a tabloid by your bigmouth cleaning lady was an unstoppable contender in the Bad Bottom Pageant, although the hopeless drunk who heaved on the cocktail cart during a transatlantic Air France flight ran a close second, I must say. We all got a lift on Family Day this past weekend, when Ann Coulter showed up for Rush, although judging from her aroma, she was fueled entirely by nicotine and booze. A frightening Nurse Ratchet-type grabbed her by the halter top as she tried to sneak past the drug detector and hauled her off kicking and screaming for urine testing. I was taking bets on whether or not she turns up ‘In-Patient’ before this is over, but no one liked the odds. Rush was understandably distressed; he was hoping to take delivery on a surreptitious supply of OxyContin, courtesy of Coulter, but it looks like that’s not going to pan out. For my part, I’m checking myself out of here pronto, so I can get on to my next assignment and I don’t care where it is. After this I’ll take Baghdad or Beirut, where at least they have a Happy Hour when the shooting stops. Has anyone seen my Vicks Inhaler? Rush and I could use a hit. Ciao now, GB
© The Washington Pox 2003
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