As recently seen in the news, the American Academy of Pediatrics has a new policy stating that the hot dog is a hazard for kids, because it is associated with more choking deaths among children than any other food.
“If you were to find the best engineers in the world and ask them to design the perfect plug for a child’s airway, you couldn’t do much better than the hot dog,” said Dr. Gary Smith, lead author of the AAP policy statement.
They also cite nuts, popcorn, grapes, seeds and raw carrots as “high-risk foods.”
Each year, they estimate up to 77 young people die from hotdogs (out of our population of 310 million).
All of this may be prevented, the academy says, with warning labels and the “redesign” of risky products like the hot dog.
As hot dogs are a common element of the government funded school lunch program, it is therefore clear that Hawaii’s public school’s decision to have “Furlough Fridays,” or no school days because of budget cuts, will lessening the exposure to this dangerous activity. So in effect, keeping kids out of school is actually saving lives.
Think how many more lives would be saved if furloughs could be extended to other days, too.
Hey, if even one life is saved, it would be worth it.
Also, our government should insist on genetically modifying and redesigning the Macadamia nut at the same time, too.
After all, it’s for the children.
‘Keoni Yamada is a resident of Hilo, Hawaii. Reach him at mailto:keoniyamada@gmail.com/’