“C’mere, a you. I’m a gonna slap a you aside da head.”

I heard that twice in the twilight during my seventh summer and last one living in Reading, Pennsylvania. Both times, Mr. Palumbo shouted it from his front porch after returning home from work and listening to his wife say something to him in Italian and point at their older son.

Johnny was a broad-shouldered boy of 11 or 12, but still carrying a good bit of baby fat elsewhere. Which came as no surprise to me after eating one of Mrs. Palumbo’s cannolis while visiting her younger son, deciding it was the best thing I’d ever eaten, and having her offer me another one — as she gave Johnny his third.

At this moment, though, Johnny, Tony, and I weren’t eating anything sweet. We were playing kickball in the street with a half dozen other kids.

And yes, kids actually played together in big groups, outside, and in the street back then. But no, I was neither surprised to watch Johnny do what he was told to do nor witness his father do what he said.

Nor was I surprised that none of the other porch-sitting parents protested. And yes, again: that’s what parents did back then before their favorite TV shows came on back then.

Oh, how the times have changed.

Although most psychologists at that time were advocating against it, many parents still believed that when the situation warranted it, corporal punishment wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Similarly, many parents at that time — as well as many in the medical community — felt it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for young boys and girls, and even those Johnny’s age, to carry a good bit of baby fat. That it kept kids healthy, helped them grow, and that once they did, they’d lose it.

Numerous studies since then, however, have found that to be otherwise, such as the one published in the January 2010 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. When researchers weighed and measured 2802 third graders and weighed them again as 12th graders, they discovered that 79 percent of the overweight third graders were still overweight.

Add the results of similar studies together, and what you get is essentially this: that children who go to first grade overweight are twice as likely to go to their first full-time job that way when compared to healthy-weight first graders. A sobering stat, for sure, but it doesn’t explain why this article incorporates the Oh-how-the-times-have-changed story — or opens with Mr. Palumbo’s dialect.

The latter’s because of what he once told my dad in equally broken English. That he and his wife came to the United States so their boys could have better lives than the ones they’d have in Sicily.

So it’s safe to say Mr. Palumbo wasn’t trying to harm Johnny’s head when he disciplined him and that the same held true for Mrs. Palumbo when she fed him.

The former’s because even though the world’s a far different place than it was in the mid-60s, parents still want what the Palumbos wanted for their children. That’s why the times need to change, and we now need to see feeding kids a diet of mainly ultra-processed foods as no different from slapping them aside the head.

To wit: the study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that finds eating too many UPFs is certainly not good for what’s in “da head” of children. The brain.

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles recruited 144 Latino/Hispanic mothers with infants who agreed to provide two 24-hour dietary recalls when their children were six months, one year, two years, and six years old as well as allow MRI’s and cognitive tests to be performed on them.

After all the recalls were tabulated and the tests assessed, what the researchers found was a link between the amount of UPFs the children consumed and brain volume. On average, a 10 percent higher proportion of cumulative UPF intake was associated with a nearly 2 percent lower volume in the parts of the brain involved in creating emotion and motivation.

This held true at every age and regardless of the types of UPFs consumed.

No link, however, was detected between ultra-processed food consumption and cognitive performance. But what this could mean, as the paper suggests, is “subcortical variation [in the brain] may precede functional deficits.”

Which could very well be the case in light of previous research that has linked higher UPF consumption in adults with a lessening of brain volume and cognitive impairment, impairment significant enough to increase the risk of dementia.

So if you want what’s best for your children as well as yourself, you need do what you’ve been advised to do in this column many times before. Cut back on the amount UPFs they and you consume as much as you can and make your own food as often as you can.

Just go easy, real easy, on the cannolis.