$30,000 to Study Obese Latino Kids Who Drink Soda

By Alexander Abad-Santos, The Atlantic

Fans of conservative scientific outrage and the railing against senseless Obama administration-backed spending therein, have no fear: We’ve got the early word on a study recently funded by the National Institutes of Health that might just hit your sweet spot—if you want to ignore the actual facts, data, and reality behind it. Readying itself for the inevitable response that bedeviled previous NIH-funded research on obese lesbians (and obese straight men) and that infamous “shrimp on a treadmill” story (a.k.a. an irresponsible government spending fable or Senator Tom Coburn’s favorite stump speech) is this project from Anisha Indravadan Patel at the University of California, San Francisco, entitled  “Increasing Water Intake In Lieu of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages among Latino Youth.” The study’s initial project information report reads:

This issue is of particular significance among Latino youth as they are more likely to drink SSBs and less likely to drink tap water than White and Asian children. To date, few interventions have focused on increasing water intake among children and there have been no interventions that have focused on increasing tap water intake among Latino children.

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