Will this really help with the "obesity epidemic" hitting kids?

[IDrinkaRum]

Santa Clara county in California has banned toys in "Happy Meals" in hopes to start battling childhood obesity

The only meals that can offer toys for their children's meals are ones which meet specific nutritional standards.

Is this really going to help?

Heck the parents can get toys at the dollar store (like a whole batch of little play cars) order a happy meal from Mickey D's or Burger King or wherever and give the kid the Happy Meal and the toy! So yeah I don't know/think if this will really work.

[Teysa]

Personally, I think the obesity epidemic is more due to the lack of recess in many schools. With all of the running around and jumping and climbing and everything else kids do during recess they have to be burning quite a few calories. Recess takes away from valuable test-prep time though.

As far as the toys go, why not make them something that encourages the kids to go outside and be active? A mini Frisbee or a Nerf ball might be good.

[draggar]

Personally, I think the obesity epidemic is more due to the lack of recess in many schools. With all of the running around and jumping and climbing and everything else kids do during recess they have to be burning quite a few calories. Recess takes away from valuable test-prep time though.

As far as the toys go, why not make them something that encourages the kids to go outside and be active? A mini Frisbee or a Nerf ball might be good.

I never even thought of that nor did I realize it(about the recess) and the toy idea is a great one.

Happy Meals, while unhealthy, won't cause obesity on it's own (unless it's like that parent who fed their kids McDonalds every meal for years).

Children need to be taught a responsible and healthy lifestyle but sadly, it's far easier to sit them down in front of the TV or video game (well, at least the Wii gats them a little physical) as opposed to having kids getting together for a neighborhood soccer game (really, all you need is a ball and an open area!),

Banning happy meals won't solve the issue and will only hur tthe local McDonalds.

[daleduke17]

And the government just gets bigger....


What happened to freedom of choice?

[Lace Neil Singer]

It won't make the slightest difference, due to the small fact that it's up to the parents to, um, parent their children and get them off the sofa and outside. -.-

[HYHYBT]

This will never work. There are hardly any calories in the toy!

Remember, too, that the idea of putting a toy in there* was to get people to come back once a week, which wouldn't be harmful, especially when there was only one chain doing it. Now they run through 16 in 3 weeks, more or less, simply because people have gotten to where they bring the kids through every day regardless and then complain if they ever get a toy they already have.

*Actually, if I understood rightly, it was originally supposed to be the packaging you collected, and the toys were an afterthought. Sounds stupid, I know... but I remember getting things like an inch-wide, airplane-shaped eraser in mine.

[jackfaire]

One of the neighborhoods in my city has a place where kids can go hang with other kids and play DVR and such. It's a place to let the kids play video game yet still be active.

As far as the toy thing I agree it is about the eating habits not the toy. Kids need to be taught good eating habits. That being said screw this making fast food healthy thing.

I don't go to a fast food place to eat healthy I go to get a burger, soda and fries. This is not a healthy meal and thus I rarely go. I know it's not the healthiest meal because my parents taught me so.

[Red Panda]

They already make it so the food hasta be healthy, just leave the toy alone for pete's sake. Its not like not having the toy will change where the kid eats, the kid doens't get to choose because he is a kid

[ThePhoneGoddess]

Like a lot of other misguided attempts to turn back time, this one is not going to work unless people understand what it's trying to do, and I seriously doubt that's going to happen. Most Americans have no idea how the modern American diet came to be. The American diet is what it is because for nearly a hundred years food corporations have very specifically used advertising to associate food with certain positive attributes.

In the twenties, when advertising first became big business, magazine ads for packaged processed foods (Jello, Bis-quick, Cream of Wheat, Campbell's soup, Carnation Milk, Kellogg's corn flakes, Heinz ketchup, Green Giant canned veggies, Del Monte canned fruits, Post raisin bran, Aunt Jemima, Oval-tine, the list goes on and on and on and on and on... ) were directed towards women, and the ads were designed to associate the products with health and love. In other words, feeding packaged processed products to your families was good for them, and showed how much you loved them. This was pushed heavily for decades, and over the years these products became so ubiquitous many people today have never had homemade versions of such things. When was the last time you had real, homemade ketchup?

Putting toys in breakfast cereal and happy meals is a very specific marketing tactic: it associates the food with toys in children's minds, and every time a parent buys a happy meal for a child it reinforces the association. Advertising, and brand marketing in general, is all about influencing our subconscious. Influence the subconscious minds of young children to always associate your brand or product with toys/coolness/happiness, and you've got a lifelong consumer.

As I said, this has been going on in American culture for nearly a hundred years. It's going to take a lot more than banning happy meals to undo it. The way we think about our food has to change fundamentally if we want to deal with rising obesity rates.

[Lace Neil Singer]

It also, as I said before, depends a lot on the parents.

For example; my parents did on occasion take my brothers and I to McDonalds. However, it wasn't a daily or even weekly thing; it was for a treat. However, there are some people who find nothing at all wrong in taking their kids there all the time. My boyf works with a woman who can't/won't cook, and she takes her kids to McDonalds every single day for dinner. She sees nothing wrong with that at all, and she won't even try to learn how to cook.

She's not a rarity either; there are so many people who haven't got the slightest idea of how to cook. I know how, cuz my mother taught me how. I was taught a little in school, but most of my teaching came from my mother. In order to tackle childhood obesity, perhaps it would be a better idea to direct operations at the parents; teaching the parents how to cook cheap, easy, nutritious meals for their children and also how to get their kids off the sofa and outside playing. It's not down to a toy in a happy meal; it's the parents who have the responsibility of ensuring that their kids are healthy and have a healthy attitude towards food.

[IDrinkaRum]

I take Child Rum to a fast food restaurant every wednesday. She has school, then I pick her up an hour early from school, take her the 45 minute ride to her speech therapy place, she has that for 30 minutes, then it's another 45 minute ride back up to our house (there are no local speech therapists in my area). I'm exhausted by the time we get back up to our area. Child Rum is exhausted and starving. She picks the restaurant (sometimes it's Mickey D's, sometimes it's Burger King, or whatever she wants), but she always orders the same thing: Nuggets (and in the case of BK or Mickey D's) and apples. Either sprite or chocolate milk for drink.

I have to watch her weight not because of what she eats but because she'll have a tendency to heavy. Mr. Rum, myself, and my mom have all been/are heavy so I know she'll be on the heavy side. Right now, she's 4 feet 2 inches and 72 pounds (she's in the 96th percentile for her weight considering her age/height so yeah, she's getting up there in weight a little).

[tropicsgoddess]

I don't think that banning toys from happy meals will help. It's really more a parental thing having a more active role in their kids' health and teching them healthy habits, like eating healthier foods, snacks and exercising that will help prevent kids from becoming overweight (or worse) obese.

[boringscreenname]

I don't think banning toys from kid's meals will really make any substantial impact on the obesity epedemic. If parents want to feed their kids crap all the time, they're going to do it regardless of whether or not a toy comes with the meal.

But that being said I really don't care if they ban all toys in kid's meals or not. My son is too young to care about the toys anyway so it's not a huge loss. Plus I never buy them anyway, so he's not aware of them. When we do get fast food I just get a chicken nugget meal, and give him a couple nuggets and fries and he's perfectly happy with that.

[HYHYBT]

Why would you *want* homemade gelatin, corn flakes, etc?

[Wingates_Hellsing]

I've had homemade ketchup before, it was nice and all bu not really worth the incredible effort (comparatively speaking) between making it and buying mass-produced stuff.

Seriously, the grand majority of mass produced products are just fine, maybe not as delicious as fresh, but they get the job done. The real horrible stuff is mostly snack foods (a whole new category that didn't really exist before) and frozen dinners/etc. whose whole point is quality sacrificed for convenience. Perfectly valid thing to want to have around it's just that, as with everything, some people take it too far.

Processed food is the best thing that's happened to this species in a while, coupled with GE crops. Shit's really looking up on the food front, I just don't get why that's supposed to be a bad thing...

Anywhoo, I don't think the toy's really what clinches it. It can but I think it's more to do with the fact that it's both highly caloric and convenient. Those two together opens the door for a lot of people to take it too far, but that's their fault, if indeed it's really that bad of a fault.