In recent days, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to ban restaurants from offering toys with calorie packed children’s meals. In doing so, San Francisco joins Santa Clara County, CA which banned toys from unhealthy children’s meals just last spring.
The ban goes into effect at the end of 2011, so fast food chains like McDonald’s have time to change the ingredients in the ever popular “Happy Meal” to total less than 600 calories and under 35% fat in order to continue including toys. The Happy Meal in its current form (cheeseburger, soda, fries) totals 640 calories.
Will this Nanny State Strategy work to reduce skyrocketing childhood obesity or deter parents from lining up at the drive thru to buy these unhealthy meals for their kids?
In a word, NO!
Perhaps I should add an “are you kidding?” onto that statement (I really dislike being sarcastic but it is just so hard not to be when stories like this come along).
First of all, reducing the caloric content of the Happy Meal from 640 to 599 calories to comply with the ban should not be a difficult feat for the chemists that work their Ingestible Magic at food production facilities that churn out McDonald’s signature franchise foods.
I can just imagine the likely conversation between the Chief Muckety Muck at McDonald’s and the Food Engineering Manager responsible for the team which synthesizes the Happy Meal:
“No problem, Chief! We’ll just replace a little more meat with MSG laced soy protein isolate and that should do the trick. Nobody will even know the difference!”
Chemicals, after all, taste just as good as the real thing – even better, right? Eating nondecomposing fast food that is essentially more chemicals than nourishment only fools the stomach for a brief period of time so the customer comes screaming back through the drive thru even more quickly for another fix!
Hooray for profits! This new law could really get the bottom line smokin’ !
The Government Cannot Legislate Health
Anytime the government tries to legislate health, there will be trouble. Look at the law that banned transfats in New York City just a few years back. Did this eliminate unhealthy factory fats from processed foods?
Absolutely not.
Food manufacturers just nimbly switched from one unhealthy factory fat (transfats) to another, even more unhealthy, form of factory fat (interesterified fats) and made money off the deal through advertising their new and improved “transfat free” fare!
On a side note, isn’t it interesting how the danger of consuming interesterified fats has not even made one media news story yet? By the time the danger of these fats becomes widely known (my guess is 5-10 years), many more folks will have had heart attacks and strokes from consuming these frankenfats.
For another example, look what happened when Congress started corn and soy subsidies way back when. Now you can drive across America’s heartland and all you can see for miles and miles are fields of GMO corn and soy. Do most conventional farmers want to grow much of anything else?
Heck no. There’s not as much money to be had in fruits and vegetables!
What’s more, the diet of Americans has become so overwhelmingly dominated by corn and soy that tests of the source of the carbon material in their tissues come up overwhelmingly corn and soy dominant. In one test, a strand of hair from an American (Dr. Sanjay Gupta, no less!) came up as 69% corn based carbon! In contrast, a strand of hair from someone living in Italy tests around 5% corn based carbon.
Ultimately, then, it is up to the parents and caregivers to “just say no” to fast food for children. There will always be snake oil salesmen like the fast food franchises that are more than willing to sell you junk – toy included – for your hard earned cash. No governmental edict will ever change that.
Personal responsibility for health is ultimately the best solution.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Girl…you got that right!! Haha! I thought about that comment regarding how they’ll manage to reduce the calories to 599 in order to be in compliance…What’ll they do, take out a fry or two? Good grief. It’s good to know people are willing to push for better food offerings, but a shame that they really don’t know how to go about it…or when they’re told, ignore the truth.
And on a related note…I was sorely grieved a few months ago to discover a fast food restaurant where my kids like to take their children was flying menu BANNERS proclaiming their switch to a ‘healthier oil’…canola oil. I haven’t had canola oil in so long I forgot what it tasted like, so I tried one of their fries. Honestly, it tasted SO nasty. They actually think (the restaurant owners) that they’re doing the customers a great service. :*( We don’t fry often, but I am planning to make some wholesome fries, fried in TALLOW today.
I hate all fast food, especially for children, but the government has no right to control what we eat.
Don't be surprised if they ban butter.Some "scientist" in England has already called for that.
Whenever the government injects itself into the affairs of our personal daily lives, it most certainly does not do so out of concern so as to benefit the people. Rather it does it to usurp our individual freedoms granted us by our Creator and not by any government man should ever conceive!
I am outraged at the banning of the Happy Meals. As stated in many of the comments already, the government is the most inept agent when it comes to making meaningful changes. How can it? It is sorely crippled by massive bureaucracy! They can't even run the Post Office, much less enact public health measures that are actually beneficial.
Good article as usual, Sarah.
Gloria 🙂
You would like this blog I just found: http://whatareyoufeedingyourkidsthesedays.blogspot.com/ it's a French-American cook posting weekly menus and recipes of what she's feeding her kids almost every day. Most of it I cannot pronounce, but it sounds delicious. She's a little WAPF whether she knows it or not–she serves homemade yogurt everyday of the week! 😉 Anyway, she wrote a very interesting post on what French school children do for lunch every day as compared to the US. http://whatareyoufeedingyourkidsthesedays.blogspot.com/2010/03/school-lunch-france-vs-us.html
I totally agree! I don't need a LAW to keep my kids from eating fast food crap. All I need is to be the MOM!
I agree with you on this post. Although, I am smiling inside that McDonald's sort of lost this one. Parents need to educate themselves on food today. It's not the good ol' days when food was simply food.
Ugg I thought this was the stupidest thing. How is banning the INEDIBLE part of the meal going to change obesity? If the meals are SO BAD they need a law- shouldn't they just ban the meal altogether (hypothetically speaking, I don't want gov't to tell me what I can or can't eat)
I wish food labeling wasn't so hard to come by. My son can't have food colors – but I had to go onlline and dig through charts to find out that McD's hamburgers have yellow #5 in the pickles. It should be clearly accessible – ingredients, at the very least!
Papa Johns is the worst for this – good luck finding out what you're eating there.
Sarah, I agree 100% about stricter labeling laws. Label it with the utmost transparency and let the consumer choose.
I really wanted to like the law. I have to admit it. Because I'm so against kids foods of the processed and/or fast food variety. But, even more than I hate that kind of food, I dislike having my food choices legislated. What I don't mind is transparency when it comes to factory food. For instance, I might be OK with a law requiring prominant labelling of the ingredients in the Happy Meal. But, on this type of law, I have to agree with you 100%. The government needs to stay out of the food choice business. (Next thing we know, they'll be handing out menus with their vaccine schedules.) Not to mention that I feel they picked the wrong thing: limiting fat and calories isn't going to solve the problem with fake factory food.
"Anytime the government tries to legislate health, there will be trouble."
100% correct. I noted a couple weeks ago that whether we're consuming twinkies or raw milk, the government has no right to legislate what we do or do not eat. There should be as much outcry from the real food community over this legislation as there has been over the Morningland Dairy shutdown or the Rawesome Foods raid (or maybe more – I feel like there's not nearly enough pressure from the real food community, but that's a whole other post!).
Whether we believe fast food is edible or safe or okay to feed kids is not the issue. The issue is that as soon as we celebrate any laws passed regarding what we can and cannot feed kids, or ourselves, we've set a precedent for the government to have control over our food choices.