All in all, this is probably not the best of times for the fast-food industry.
I say this because of the latest alarming study, which indicates that greasy hamburgers and other fatty foods may diminish intelligence.
Apparently it wasn't enough that these foods can make you heavy. Now it seems they could make you stupid, too.
In any event, the study, conducted by a dietitian and a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, measured the responses of 40 rats kept on a high-fat diet for six months.
On the face of it, it doesn't seem like a bad deal if you're a rat. Basically, you get to hang out in your cage all day while people bring you burgers, fries and chocolate thick shakes and say: "Here, eat, eat. And there's plenty more where that came from."
But some of these rats became so stupid you wanted to smack them upside their little heads.
Over the course of the study, the rats' behavior was charted and they were tested for learning and memory.
But by the end of the six months, even given the simplest tasks to perform, the rats were like: "Yeah, whatever. Gimme another cheeseburger over here, chief."
No matter what you asked these rats to do, they'd just sort of stare at you and go: "Huh?"
Anyway, even though the study was done on rats, the researchers concluded that it "has implications for the human condition. There is enough similarity between our basic physiologies."
Which shouldn't surprise anyone who's ever sat in a McDonald's during lunch hour. I love these people who wait in line at McDonald's for 10 minutes, and when it's finally their turn to order, they look up at the menu.
Tell me something: Why would anyone have to look at the menu at McDonald's?!
The menu's been the same for what, 30 years?! Hamburger, cheeseburger, Big Mac, Quarter-pounder . . . is it really so hard to remember this stuff?!
What do you think they're serving now, salmon amandine?
Or are you afraid you're going to get to the cashier and go blank? ("Yeah, gimme a hamburger and . . . oh, those yellow, crunchy things . . . lemme look at the menu here. Fries! That's what they're called!")
And if it is a little tough to remember this stuff, couldn't you have looked at the menu while you were standing in line for 10 minutes?
Look, I'm not the brightest guy in the world. But there are times I walk out of there feeling like Louis Pasteur.
Anyway, the University of Toronto researchers now plan to study humans. They want to know whether people who make a diet change late in life because of high cholesterol show an improvement in cognitive ability.
Which is fine by me.
Look, I don't care what all these greasy burgers and fatty foods do to rats.
I don't care how stupid they make them, or what it does to their SAT scores.
I want to know what these foods do to me.
I want to know if I'm headed in the same direction as some of those dimwits at McDonald's.
The whole thing reminds me of the creepy feeling I get whenever I use Sweet 'N Low, the sugar substitute.
On the back of each packet, there's a warning that reads: "Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This product contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals."
Great. Here we have rats dropping dead on their little treadmills and white mice convulsing in the most horrible death throes after ingesting one or two grains of this stuff.
And me, I go through five or six packs a day with my coffee.
Now, you talk to some people and they say: "Oh, well, sure, it kills rats. But rats are, y'know, real tiny. You'd have to eat a dump truckful of the stuff in order for it to kill you."
I don't know.
It seems to me that any food that makes rats keel over will make me keel over, too. And any food that makes rats stupid will probably do the same to me.
You ask my wife, it already has.