The result of not learning about obesity then is quite obvious today. Those very same kids who did not develop or learn healthy eating habits have grown up to be today’s heavier adults.
According to this post on Mice Age, the Disneyland ride, “It’s a Small World After All”, will be temporarily closed for refurbishing. And one of the main reasons will be because of those very adults.
In case you’ve never been on it, the ride involves sitting in a fiberglass boat with 6-7 other riders. The song, “It’s a Small World After All,” plays continuously, changing languages as the boat snakes along through the water, on each side of which are meticulously constructed “doll houses” for lack of a better word, colorful settings depicting a multitude of multicultural tableaux that are meant to represent many of the major cultures of the world.
The ride is…cute.
Anyway, it turns out that when the ride was first designed oh, some 40 years ago, it was assumed that the typical American adult male weighed around 175 lbs, and the female 135 lbs. To say those averages no longer, er, hold water is proven by the fact that the ride has experienced numerous stoppages, stoppages not due to mechanical difficulties such as those you might find on a roller coaster, but rather because the boatloads are so heavy now that they often scrape the bottom of the flume or get stuck altogether. It’s gotten to the point where the peeps running the ride will often not fill a boat to full capacity.
Even then, according to the article, the ride will sometimes come to a stop when it turns out that a boat has gotten “stuck” due to the now much heavier ridership, resulting in some indignant riders who are too embarrassed to admit or see the truth.
Thus, Disneyland will be shutting down the ride for 10 months to put in new deeper flumes and more buoyant boats.
In the meantime, let’s continue to do our part to raise healthy kids.
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