English makes you fat

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

English Makes You Fat

According to researchers at the Mayo Clinic, speaking English as a  
second language makes you fat. ... doctors studying children enrolled  
in Head Start programs in southern Minnesota have concluded that  
being Mexican and speaking English as a second language are both  
independent predictors of childhood obesity.  Immigration reformers,  
quick to label Spanish as the language of the ghetto, are likely to  
eat this news up..... Americans are already dangerously overweight.   
The Centers for Disease Control report that one third of American  
adults and 17% of our children and teenagers are obese.  Still more  
are at risk for obesity.  Adding English to our steady diet of junk  
food and our sedentary lifestyle can only make things worse for  
immigrants. .... But before we blame bilingualism again, before we  
put a Surgeon General’s warning on our English textbooks, before we  
stamp out what little foreign language may be left in America in the  
interests of reducing the national body-mass index, there’s another  
possibility that the Mayo Clinic researchers might want to explore ...


to find out what it is, read the whole post and more on the Web of  
Language:

www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage

Best,

DB


Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

www.uiuc.edu/goto/debaron

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