by Stefani Andrews

Created on: May 12, 2011

Anyone who can honestly sit there and blame a restaurant for their child being overweight, is living in a world full of denial and looking for someone else to blame.  There are a thousand different political and social lines about who we should blame.  First it was the school lunches, but they fixed that so it can't be that.  Then it was genetics, but that hasn't ever been proven so it can't be that either.  Then it was a thyroid problem, but that only applied to a small portion of cases so it can't be that.  Now it's fast food restaurants, Happy Meals, and "food deserts". 

There are a lot of reasons that kids, and Americans in general, are becoming increasingly overweight but Happy Meals have nothing to do with it.  Everyone who goes to a fast food restaurant knows that what they are eating is not good for them, just look at the grease on the burger wrapper and you know that.  But it tastes good and it's easy so we continue to spend millions of dollars at these establishments.  And on occasion there is nothing wrong with that.  The weight problem with kids in today's world comes down to two things for me: lack of movement and permission to eat junk. 

A child is not being smuggled Happy Meals by Ronald McDonald behind a parent's back, so the company cannot be to blame.  It is the parent that puts the child in the car, takes them to the restaurant, buys them the food, and allows them to eat the food.  All along that path it is the parent who should be to blame for the fact that their child is eating the Happy Meal.  Every once in a awhile will not present a problem if the child is getting healthy, balanced, and nutritious meals at home.  A Happy Meal once a month is not going to make any child fat.  But there are the parents that drag their kid to McDonald's and feed them the Happy Meal constantly because it's far easier to give in to the child's demand to have it than to be a responsible parent and say no.  Every child I have ever met would live off of pizza, chicken nuggets, fries, and ice cream if they could.  It's the parent's job to teach the child that these are "sometimes foods" because they are not healthy for your body.  If the Happy Meals are really making the child fat, stop giving the child the Happy Meals, it's the simplest solution in the world if the parent isn't afraid of actually parenting.

The second biggest contributor to child obesity is that

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