(Colorado ranked near the middle of the pack, at nineteenth. The "best" states, needless to say, were Connecticut, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts, where lawmakers will soon regulate when children can go to the bathroom, if they haven't gotten around to it yet.)

Karen Cicero, food and nutrition director for the magazine, explained the rankings were compiled by a panel of experts ranging from dieticians to pediatricians.

Their conclusion? A primary reason Nevada children are not physically fit is that the state does not mandate physical fitness classes in elementary school.

And what were the benchmarks used to determine Nevada children are less physically fit than those in other states? The ratio of their weight to their height? The speed at which they can run the half mile? The number of sit-ups or pull-ups they can do?

None of the above, actually.

“We weren’t looking at if the kids were lean or heavy,” Ms. Cicero cheerfully admits. “We were looking more at what were states doing to take on the (child obesity) crisis that is going on in every state.”

So the magazine concluded that the solution to the problem is to mandate gym classes in elementary school, and the measure they used to determine how Nevada’s kids measure up to the kids of other states in physical fitness was ... yep, whether physical education classes are required in the schools.

Ms. Cicero’s “experts” didn’t weigh or measure a single child, didn’t watch a single Nevada child try to climb a rope or run the hundred yard dash. For all they know our kids could be out running marathons all afternoon; they wouldn’t care.

They define physically unfit children as children who aren’t mandated by the state to take gym class (even if the local school district does mandate gym classes, as Clark County’s does), and then decide the solution is mandatory gym class.

By this perfectly sealed and hermetic system, the people of Kenya — who for years dominated the Olympic marathon event due to the fact their herdsmen run long distances at high altitude in their bare feet — would be judged less physically fit than the pasty-faced pizza-munchers of New York City.

Other measures of “child fitness” used by the magazine included “whether state legislators have tried to combat unhealthy foods offered in the schools,” and “the number of fast-food restaurants in the state.”

So your kid is more fit if lawmakers “tried” to remove the soda pop machines from his or her school -- even if they failed?

Your kid might be swimming laps till dark or lifting weights till he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and never darkening the door of a fast-food joint. But if there are four such calorie arcades within a mile of your house, the magazine’s “committee of experts” would conclude he or she isn’t physically fit, based on the proximity of the burger joints.

What: does obesity spread as a contagious miasma in the vicinity of these eateries, like a cloud of mosquitoes issuing forth from a swamp?

This is about as scientific as defining “areas with serious outbreaks of the plague” as areas where witch-burning is not practiced, and then ranking the seriousness of plague outbreaks according to which regions are burning the most or fewest witches (without actually journeying to any of these locales to see whether anyone there really suffers from the plague, you understand), and finally concluding the best way for these areas to rid themselves of the plague is by burning more witches!

A completely sealed and hermetic system! 100 percent correlation! It’s perfect!

The magazine also counted what percentage of children participate in organized youth softball or soccer leagues — with the city-dwellers’ predictable obliviousness to the fact that children in rural areas where no such programs are available may be the fittest of all, since they tend to spend their time outside, tending the herds and running up and down mountains.

It may indeed seem, intuitively, that children will be healthier if politicians take away some of their already limited school day for government supervised dodge-ball, or if families spend less time patronizing fast-food joints. But science is that discipline which actually tests such intuition -- it requires that someone actually go out and do some measurement, to find out if these assumptions prove out in the real world.

Sometimes it turns out the heavier ball doesn’t fall any faster than the lighter ball, and the old theories have to be rewritten.

Ms. Cicero and her team at “Child” magazine did not expose themselves to any such risk of having real-world results confound their smug intuitions. Therefore, their “findings” are nothing but prejudiced hot air and worthless guff, which are all the more pernicious and reprehensible when they have the nerve to masquerade as “science.”

And here we thought the magazine was about children -- not composed by them.