"Watch out, there young fella - a Coke! Quick, run away! Go back to sitting on your can all day, playing Nintendo or Playstation, and eat some chips and Twinkies and cookies. But for goodness sake, don't drink a Coke!"

Does this seem odd to anybody else? Does the Maine Bureau of Health really have nothing better to do? And more importantly, do they not realize how important Coke is to the very fabric of our national consciousness? If cotton is 'the fabric of our lives', then Coke is the dye we use to color it American. Coke is 'spin the bottle' and 'corner store gossip.' Coke is little-league baseball. Coke is little 8 oz bottles (remember when they were 6 oz?) of joy at a-nickel-a-piece. Coke is 'Enjoy' signs on the sides of barns and shops in little downtowns all across the country. Coke was even a major force in fashioning our modern Santa Claus. And Coke is the official soft-drink of all eight Disney theme parks. Don't even get me started on Cherry Coke (my personal favorite) or the new Vanilla Coke (not so much so). Coke is also one of those great universal consistencies - no matter where you go, in this country and in most parts of the world, you'll not be far from a vendor who will sell you a Coke and the reassurance that comes with familiarity and that tells you we're all really not that different after all.

But I digress. Somebody from Maine needs to take a trip to Atlanta to visit the World of Coca-Cola Museum and get a little perspective.

This isn't to say these girth-reduction-challenged youths should be having five or six or seven Cokes a day, mind you. I'll never forget the summer of my caffeine addiction. I was a farmhand, and in our mechanic shop (which also served as a break room) one of the other hands had an old-timey Coke machine. Back then it was 30 cents for a 16 ounce Coke in the tall, thin glass bottle (to this day I cannot find one that tastes as good from a plastic bottle). Most of these guys were pretty hardcore Coke drinkers, and I soon fell right in line with them. We drank one when we got there at 8am, one on a break around 10:30, another with lunch at noon, one at around 3:30, and often one before we left at 6pm. Now that's a lot of coke. The first few days of summer 4-H camp that year, I had horrible fatigue and headaches, and couldn't figure out why, until I realized that I had gone two full days without a Coke. I cut back to just 2 or 3 a day after that. And I still didn't get fat!

Do we have a national obesity problem? Of course we do. Is it caused by Coke? I think not. Coke has been a major part of America since long before video games and Internet and satellite TV created the now-standard sedentary lifestyle that plagues today's kids - especially the ones with parents who won't tell them to get up and get outside (or worse yet, the ones who's parents can't tell them that because they aren't there). Try turning off the TV, the computer, the game console - you'll likely have much better results on more than just the obesity problem. I have news for you: simply cutting out Coke will not make anyone any thinner. I know; I've tried.

In fact, I say let them have two Cokes at once - maybe the caffeine rush will act as a catalyst to getting them off the couch and out into some healthy exercise. Backyard football is very popular this time of year, or at least it used to be…