Packing Your Kids' School Lunch Will Kill Them

School lunches are vile and dangerous things that are leading our children down the path of obesity and certain death from cancer before they reach the tender age of 100. That much is a given. So what's a responsible parent to do? Pack your own kid's lunch of course.

Please, though, no peanut butter or any nut products. No violent characters on the lunch box. Actually, the lunch box itself is probably infested with lead and the plastic containers are dripping with BPA.

According to new research by people in white coats, well-meaning parents are unintentionally (perhaps) sending their little ones off to an early grave, or at least the nurse's office, because the lunches are not kept at the proper temperature.

Researchers at the University of Texas (official motto: "Meat Is A Vegetable") report that

More than 90 percent of sack lunches prepared at home and sent with kids to preschool were kept at unsafe temperatures, a new study by nutritional scientists at The University of Texas at Austin found.

The study will be published in the September 2011 issue of Pediatrics and was published online Aug. 8.

"Parents need to be aware of how important the storage temperature is for foods they pack for their young children," said Fawaz Almansour, a graduate student in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and lead author of the research.

The best storage temperature is below 40 degrees Fahrenheit for cold foods and above 140 degrees for hot foods. Between 40 and 140 degrees is the "danger zone."

Study authors suggest that parents and the public need to be educated on safe food packing practices in order to prevent bacteria from growing and potentially causing illness.

Almansour and his colleagues, including Professor Margaret Briley and postdoctoral researcher Sara Sweitzer, collected data on sack lunches from more than 700 preschoolers at nine Texas child care centers. The lunches were measured with noncontact temperature guns [Worried Dad note: They sure do love their guns in Texas] one and one-half hours before the food was served.

They found that while 45 percent of the lunches studied had at least one ice pack, 39 percent had no supplemental ice packs. Even including lunches with ice packs, 88 percent were at room temperature. Less than 2 percent of lunches with perishable items were found to be in a safe temperature zone, while more than 90 percent (even with multiple ice packs) were kept at unsafe temperatures. [Worried Dad note: basically, we're screwed.]

Perishable items studied included meats, cheeses and vegetables. Prepackaged foods produced by manufacturers were not included in the study.

"The simple addition of one extra icepack could have prevented many of the perishable items in lunches from reaching the danger zone," wrote the researchers in their study.

They go on to say that the addition of two or more icepacks in lunches could help prevent food-borne illness in children.

In an aside, inadvertently picked up because they didn't realize their mikes were still plugged in, one of the researchers was overheard muttering "I never realized how much parents hate their kids. I mean, just one ice pack could save all those kids in there. What a loss."

Reusable shopping bags will kill you

A recent study by some guys in white coats at the University of Arizona warns that those nifty reusable shopping bags (like the 20 or so I have in my trunk) are teaming with bacteria.

The researchers tested 84 bags collected from shoppers in Tucson, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area and found that just over half were contaminated with potentially harmful bacteria. Twelve percent of the bags contained E. coli, which indicates possible fecal matter and more dangerous pathogens.

According to the study co-author Charles Gerba, using a reusable bag is on a par with having your family play Russian Roulette (how do those Russian casinos keep attracting customers anyway?):

Well, it's sort of a random chance," he said. "Sometimes, there may be enough. Sometimes, there may be not. You're really always gambling with germs."

The biggest problems arise from people stuffing dripping hunks of raw meat into their bags and then leaving them in the trunk for a while.

Unacceptable alternatives include chopping down forests to create paper bags, and despoiling our pristine wetlands with offshore oil drilling to make toxic plastic bags. The study authors (who, incidentally, got $30k from the American Chemistry Council to conduct their research), recommend soaking bags overnight in Purell, or just skipping the bags entirely and stealing the store's shopping carts.

Going to the gym will kill you

[The people in the above photo were found dead moments after this picture were taken]

My two main reasons for canceling my gym membership were that I was broke and I got tired of being a straight guy surrounded by naked men in the locker room. Plus, I'm lazy.

Thankfully, people in White Coats (working for people in running shorts) have given me a better reason: gyms are covered in nasty germs.

As the staid "Gray Lady" herself, the New York Times, soberly put it:

When you go to the gym, do you wash your hands before and after using the equipment? Bring your own regularly cleaned mat for floor exercises? Shower with antibacterial soap and put on clean clothes immediately after your workout? Use only your own towels, razors, bar soap, water bottles?

If you answered "no" to any of the above, you could wind up with one of the many skin infections that can spread like wildfire in athletic settings.

Well, sure, you say, that's why they call it athlete's foot, after all. What's the big deal? Well, that's what some guy you've never heard of thought, pal:

And if you think skin problems are minor, consider what happened to Kyle Frey, a 21-year-old junior and competitive wrestler at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Mr. Frey noticed a pimple on his arm last winter but thought little of it. He competed in a match on a Saturday, but by the next morning the pimple had grown to the size of his biceps and had become very painful.

His athletic trainer sent him straight to the emergency room, where the lesion was lanced and cultured. Two days later, he learned he had MRSA, the potentially deadly staphylococcus infection that is resistant to most antibiotics.

Mr. Frey spent five days in the hospital, where the lesion was surgically cleaned and stitched and treated with antibiotics that cleared the infection. He said in an interview that he does not know how he acquired MRSA: "The wrestling mat might have been contaminated, or I wrestled with someone who had the infection."

If it could happen to Mr. Frey, who said he has always been health-conscious in the gym and careful about not sharing his belongings, it could happen to you.

According to the CDC, if you insist on going to the gym, you are advised to wear a full body protective suit, refrain from touching anything, and keep a bottle of alcohol-based disinfectant to spray at anyone who comes within ten feet of you.

Your showerhead is spraying you with bacteria

Sometimes it seems that researchers just want to mess with the heads of OCD germaphobes. Case in point: People in White Coats at the University of Colorado at Boulder looked at the gunk inside of showerheads in 45 sites around the United States. They put the showerheads inside a big centrifuge (or whatever it is scientists do) and discovered that every time you shower, you are covering yourself in filth.

It turns out that the showerheads had seven billion microbes per square liter -- or about ten times the number found in tap water. It gets worse. The microbes that the Boulder gunkologists looked at included teeming masses of Mycobacterium avium, which besides having a scary sounding Latin name and being written in italics, can cause respiratory illness.

The good news is that the microbes are harmless if swallowed (like in tap water) unless they are turned into an aerosol mist and inhaled... like, you know, when you're taking a shower (eep! eep! eep!)

Experts recommend the following steps:

* Switch to metal showerheads (the problem only appears in plastic ones).

* Hold your breath for the entire duration of your shower.

* Take baths (the soap scum appears to counteract the evil bacteria).

* Fill your water tanks with Purell.

* Go French and stop bathing altogether.