Ban Happy Meal Toys and Save the Children

Riiiiiight. And then flying monkeys will sprinkle us all with sparkly dust that makes us magically thin, rich and happy!!!

Yeah. So you can already see I’m less than enthused about this new move made by Santa Clara County officials to ban happy meal toys and other promotions they claim “lure” kids into eating junk food.

This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children’s’ love of toys” to sell high-calorie, unhealthful food, said Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure. “This ordinance breaks the link between unhealthy food and prizes.”

Reality Check Calling Mr. Yeager. What this really only does is annoy people who like the freedom of choice. Kids will still ask for chicken nuggets and fries. Why? BECAUSE THEY LIKE THEM. When my kids were little and we ate at McDonalds, I didn’t have to force them to eat the foods they liked (unless there was a playplace, then I couldn’t keep them close enough to their food to eat it.)  I promise if you threw those toys in with a happy meal that consisted of  a salad and grilled chicken, odds are the kids would still ask for chicken nuggets and fries.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great to have healthier choices for everyone, but come on, blaming obese kids on toys? It’s asinine at best. Yes, the toy may play a role in a child asking for a specific meal, but parents are ultimately the ones that make that choice. If your child is obese, DON’T BUY THE HAPPY MEAL. Instead choose a better option for your child – something you know they will actually eat and not snub their nose at, and if the toy is that important simply ask the counter help if you can buy the toy. Most McDonalds will sell you the toy at a cheap price.

At least one person on the council had some common sense:

Voting against the measure was Supervisor Donald Gage, who said parents should be responsible for their children.

“If you can’t control a 3-year-old child for a toy, God save you when they get to be teenagers,” he said. Gage, who is overweight, said he was a living example of how obese children can become obese adults.

Finally… Someone that believes the parent should make decisions for their child.  Gage goes on to tell how there were no fast food joints in his area as a kid and he was overweight anyway.

Here’s my other issue:

…unless the restaurants meet nutritional guidelines approved Tuesday by the county Board of Supervisors.

And those guidelines would be what? Most likely low-fat. They are concerned with high calorie content and will be shoving low-fat milk in our faces. Milk that deprive young growing children of the fat they need for their brains to develop. They likely also suggest such healthy alternatives as apple dippers in caramel sauce. Or low-fat yogurt full of sugar.

So what is the answer? Assuming that most kids don’t get to McDonalds on their own OR pay for their own meals, I’d say it’s the responsibility of the parent to make healthy choices for their child. If you don’t feel you can do that at McDonalds, don’t go there. Or if you do go there, make it a once in a while trip and not a daily part of your meal planning. Having chicken nuggets and fries once in a great while will not make a child obese. It’s eating refined, process junk food on a regular basis that causes the problems we see today. And I’m not just talking fast food. We bring it into our homes – chips, ice cream, pop tarts, mashed potatoes, pasta… the list could go on and on.

I don’t eat cake because I don’t think it’s healthy, but you don’t see me telling people they should never have cake because it contributes to the obesity epidemic. Cake once in a while is perfectly fine for most people, and I’d be an idiot to believe that someone eating cake on their birthday once a year will kill them. If you eat cake everyday, you obviously aren’t going to be healthy… ahh, but there I go again, using common sense.

This seriously ticks me off to no end. The reason being that this is not their choice. It’s my choice. It’s your choice.  If I want to buy my kids a happy meal with a toy, I should be able to. (I don’t want to, but that’s not the point.) If McDonalds wants to sell me a happy meal with a toy, they should have that right.  As my friend Tom says in Fat Head, “That’s between me and McDonalds”.  Many of you know how I feel about high fructose corn syrup – I despise the stuff. And yet there is a Facebook group trying to get it banned – and I refuse to join. Why? Because if we start banning foods, it starts us on a slippery slope. What if we’d banned foods with saturated fats 30 odd years ago when so many “experts” believed it was unhealthy? Look at what happened when the idiots at CSPI got real fat banned from restaurants and they had to start frying in transfats! Now we know transfats are unhealthy and people were eating them for years thinking it was healthier, simply because some moron got it in their head that saturated fat was bad for us, despite the lack of scientific evidence to prove it.

My point is that banning junk foods, or toys that go with junk foods, is not the answer. The answer is educating people to make the best choices. And I love this country because I have the right to choose. I can choose junk food if I want to. I can choose to eat healthy food if I want to, despite my definition of healthy very different from “expert” opinions.

Again, it’s not forced opinions or coercion that will make the difference, it’s education. If we focused more on teaching people, and less on trying to run their lives, we’d all be in better shape.