Health Advisory for Briarwood Mall Gumball Machine Users

Juan Pablo loves going to the mall: there is a lot to do, a lot of room to run, and other kids to play with in the play area. Since it got too cold to play outside, we've been going there a lot. He's developed a little routine over the last couple months, which includes getting a sample of tea from Teavana and drinking it while sitting next to one of the sculptures nearby, high-fiving the big hand on the Footprints store sign, getting a pretzel from Aunt Annie's, and trying to climb on top of the big turtle in the play area. Recently though, he's added an item to the routine that may have implications for the health of any shoppers who stop to buy candy from the gumball machines. There are three sets of gumball machines on our regular mall route between the entrance we use and the play area. Each set has about 15 different machines, each of which is loaded with a different kind of brightly colored sugar and additive loaded candy. Juan Pablo is also huge into sorting anything he can by shape, color, size, etc. And since he is much closer to the ground than I am, and can therefore see all sorts of things down there that I miss, he also recently realized that people sometime drop candy as it comes out of the machine, and so it ends up on the floor underneath the candy machines. So, his new favorite mall activity is to he get down on the floor, grab any candy that he can find, and put it all back in its proper machine. This means that the next person to buy, for example, Mike and Ikes, will not only get a handful of clean Mike and Ikes, but perhaps also one or two that have been sitting on the floor under the machine for who knows how long. And why, you ask, don't I try to stop him? I actually do, but he is very fast. And very perceptive- it's hard to get the candy back out of the machines without him noticing. And I'll admit that my attempts to stop him are pretty half-hearted. I guess it's my public health degree working: if people notice a gross-looking candy in their overpriced little handful, or get sick after eating a handful of this candy, maybe they'll stop eating it. And that will help to in some really small way decrease rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and all other diseases that can result from a diet that includes, among other things, gumball machine candy from the mall. It's Juan Pablo's first public health intervention. Now he just needs to learn how to write so he can publish the results...

Juan Pablo, at the mall, being a dinosaur (his left foot is the dinosaur's tail).