Your Kid Is Fat Because of Cookie Monster - Another Idiom Expose

Another Idiom Expose: Blame it all on Cookie Monster. It's all his fault. Your kid is fat because of Cookie Monster. USA Today reports that the childhood icon of Sesame Street will tone down his cookie addiction:

'H' is for healthy eating
Think Sesame Street's Cookie Monster and think ... broccoli? In a fit of drastic behavior modification, the cookie-addicted bundle of fur is declaring that cookies are, in fact, only a "sometime food."

With any luck, the PBS kids show is onto something significant as it opens its 36th season next week: a new way to tackle childhood obesity affecting even preschoolers...

Without change, the future kids face is alarming. Two-thirds of American adults are obese or overweight. Some experts believe obesity will reduce life expectancy by months during the next half-century, after decades of progress. Financial costs are soaring. Medicare is increasingly strained by treating obesity-related diseases.

A Kaiser Family Foundation report says junk food ads now dominate TV pitches to kids, often with cartoon characters. Perhaps Sesame Street really can make "C," as the new Cookie Monster might say, for carrot sticks and change — besides that sometime cookie.

At first glance, this sounds like another attempt to siphon the last morsel of fun out of childhood, more public television political correctness to stifle the last gasp of whimsy. "Broccoli Monster" is not very funny or endearing. But then again maybe something nefarious is afoot. Maybe kids are fat because of Sesame Street and maybe someone is making a tidy profit on it. Something here reminds me of the half-hearted attempt by Philip Morris to convince kids not to smoke by airing really lame ads that subliminally make kids want to smoke.

Doesn't McDonalds underwrite Sesame Street? The Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit foundation behind Sesame Street, lists Mrs. Fields and Great American Cookies as product licensees. I'll have a Happy Meal with a Cookie Monster size serving of McBroccoli and a box of Mrs. Fields' "sometimes cookies."

J' accuse Sesame Street! 'H' is also for hypocrisy!

What's next? On today's Sesame Street we have a frank and open discussion about Cookie Monster's impulse control disorder. Remember kids 'P' is for Prozac. Maybe they will sign up Eli Lilly as a corporate sponor? Your kids are sick, so be sure to medicate them often.

Cookie Monster eat broccoli, sometimes cookies, and PROZAC! Umm num num num!