Oh, here we go again ...

Yet another news story about a stupid study ... starting out as they always do with the grand TA DA! "Reseach reveals!" (paaaaleeeease!) ... taking up time and money to prove a point just about anyone could have seen was as plain as the knob on a door. This time, it's the University of Michigan finally figuring out that fat moms may be sending the cues to their kids that make them fat, too.

Dr. Lumeng states that, "A growing body of evidence suggests that maternal feeding behaviors are related to child obesity risk." Prompting may cause the child to eat more, even when full, and therefore teach to child to ignore his/her own hunger cues. However, as Dr. Lumeng points out, "Further work is needed to determine the developmental underpinnings of this phenomenon and the limits of its effect."

What do you want to bet that a proposal for grant money for "further work" is already in the hopper?

If only I had a university to hang a study on! The grant world could just stand back and eat my dust as I came up with funded stupid study upon funded stupid study.

Let's see how many I can conjure up just off the top of my head as I type this morning, shall we?

There's this one:

Will infants receiving inoculations for infectious diseases suffer short-term trauma from such injections? With the following variables: 1) mother of the child first explains the need for the injections ... will the trauma be of less intensity or duration? 2) mother suffers from needle-phobia.

(Estimated term of study: 3 years. Estimated number of research subjects: 3000. Necessary endowment: $750,000)

And, this one:

Do children who don't brush their teeth have more dental decay than those who do brush their teeth? With the following variables: 1) Parents who have lost all teeth due to decay. 2) Parents who have all their teeth, but choose not to traumatize child by forced brushing.

(Estimated term of study: 15 years. Estimated number of research subjects: 800. Necessary endowment: $1.3 million)

Or:

Toddlers and toys: given the variables that follow, what percentage of toddlers will, without prompting, choose to 1) play with one toy at a time? 2) systematically cycle through a toy selection? 3) throw toys at mother, or 4) tidy the playroom? With the following variables: 1) toys are new. 2) Mother is in the other room.

(Estimated term of study: 2 years. Estimated number of research subjects: 10,000. Necessary endowment: $15.7 million.)

Any one of these, if I could just wrangle the funding, could lead to an article like the one at the top of this page that would announce: Research reveals ...

Any other ideas?