This is historically bad news for my household:

First, it hit the workers. From Milwaukee to Missouri and California, the fake butter flavor they mixed for use in microwave popcorn poisoned their lungs. Now, in the first case of its kind, a doctor has found a possible link between serious lung disease and consumers of microwave popcorn.

\”I was as surprised as I could be,\” said Cecile Rose, the chief occupational and environmental medicine physician at National Jewish Medical and Research Center, one of the nation\’s most prestigious lung disease hospitals. Rose has seen many cases of factory workers\’ lungs destroyed by a chemical called diacetyl, responsible for giving microwave popcorn its buttery flavor, but never in a consumer of the popcorn. Until she started seeing a 53-year-old Colorado man whose favorite snack was microwave popcorn.

I probably down two or three bags of this stuff per week while watching sports. All this time I thought it was going to be the Brewers that finally killed me – instead, it\’s going to be what I\’ve been eating while watching them. Now I\’m going to have to eat more of my wife\’s all-natural hippie popcorn.