My personal favorite topic for Thanksgiving Day family banter is an editorial from the Chicago Tribune, reprinted on Wednesday's op-ed page in The Bee. It's called the "Brain/butt theory," and this is the best news since Great Harvest Bread Company's cinnamon chip bread.
Get this:
Are fat-bottomed girls smarter? Answer: Yes. They also have smarter kids, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California at Santa Barbara.Middle-age women reacted with glee -- "We're getting smarter every day!" -- and men with trepidation. (What's the right answer to the question, "Does this PhD make my butt look big?") Skeptics, most of whom likely tend toward the skinny side, seem to want to file the wider-is-wiser theory with that old baloney about men with bigger noses having bigger, um, noses. We've never seen any empirical evidence on that one.
The data on the brain/butt theory, though, is pretty convincing. In a study of more than 16,000 women, the curvy girls consistently outscored their slender counterparts on cognitive tests. Their kids outscored the skinny moms' kids too. But the researchers don't posit that bigger is automatically better. What matters is the size of the hips relative to the waist. That's because fat stored around the buttocks and thighs is high in omega-3 acids, which promote brain growth, while fat stored around the middle is loaded with omega-6 acids, which make your pants too tight.
Women with "pear" or "hourglass" shapes have greater reserves of omega-3, which nourishes their own brains and is essential to fetal brain development in the third trimester of pregnancy.
Read the whole, wonderful editorial by clicking here.
If this is true then that explains why my daughter is so smart and I thought she got it from her dad.
Wow, I must be a total genius then.