Thanks for proving it but ... didn’t we know this?

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And from this week’s ‘we’re no longer a challenge to researchers’ files:

On TV: Watching a lot of television seems to be a risk factor for eating a lot of snacks.

College kids who watched more TV than is apparently healthy snacked more frequently while watching their glowing boxy friend and recognized more advertising than those students who said they had other things to do, according to research from the University of Alberta in Canada.

I suppose it’s possible that Canadian college students are somehow different from their U.S. counterparts. But if that’s the case, they’re likely more restrained. We could eat them under the table!(USA! USA!) The research was published in the American Journal of Health Promotion.

On memory: Alliteration, that bane of the easily irritated (i.e. me), helps us remember things.

When researchers from Macalester College and other institutions asked study participants to read poetry and prose both with and without alliterative sounds, they found that those repetitive consonants helped folks recall content and themes. Perhaps that’s why we (i.e. me) can’t do higher math -- our heads got filled up with nursery rhymes too early.

Here’s a straightforward, and condensed, version of the research from the Assn. for Pyschological Science. And here’s an abstract of the study, published in the journal Psychological Science.

And on calcium: It’s good for kids.

Researchers at the University of South Carolina and Pennsylvania State University looked at a bunch of studies of kids and calcium intake and found that, yep, boosting calcium intake, with or without Vitamin D, increases their bone mineral content. It’s especially important for kids who weren’t getting as much as the USDA recommends.

Here’s the abstract, published in the journal Bone, and some information on kids and calcium. Snort, as if they really need it...

No, no, of course they do. And of course, it’s good to know why I can recall ‘Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut’ so much better than a host of other children’s books -- and that it has nothing to do with a pinheaded prince with piles of pin money. But that one about TV watching and mindless eating...

-- Tami Dennis