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 kids these days don't get any exercise. There used to be a time when a child would wake up and eat breakfast and then go outside to play. The child would run around outside, riding bikes, running around the neighborhood, playing tag, playing dodgeball and other active games all day. And after a full day of being active the child would come home for dinner and then go to bed. Shockingly, childhood obesity was not a problem when that was the normal routine in the neighborhood. Today's kids generally don't really do much of anything. They wake up and eat breakfast before plopping down in front of the tv to numb their brains with the inane programming or play their video games until its dinner time. Then they eat some more and go to bed. That lack of movement and quantity of food is always going to lead to obesity no matter what the food actually is.
The solution to obesity in kids is very simple, parents need to be parents and encourage their children to get exercise and play and to not feed their kids a bunch of junk food that is not good for them. So unless someone finds Ronald McDonald peddling chicken nuggets in a dark alley somewhere, that is not where the blame and the solution for obese children should lie.