Personally I think that any step is a good step...
being overweight is a massive problem in America, and it's becoming a massive problem in the UK too.
trying to stop fast food appealing to kids by reducing the appealling factors is a good thing...
I guess that what I'm thinking is this;
corporate responsibility: this is something that corporations should have.
corporate responsibility should have stopped banks selling loans to people who had no hope of paying it back.
corporate responsibility should stop McDonalds activly marketting fast food to kids.
I think that it's astonishingly obvious in todays society that you can't trust people to look after themselves, you can't trust corporations to act in the best interests of their customers...
it's like with banks and loans, the banks couldn't care that they sold people loans that they couldn't aford, they were happy to take the money, then take the houses, then continue to chase for the money.
it's the same with McDonalds, they don't care that kids don't have the capacity nor education to know what's good for them, they'll reel them in with the promise of toys. give them food loaded with fat and sugars.
They'll honestly keep selling to kid until they are too fat to leave the house, and after that I hear that some McDonalds restaurants in the states will even deliver!
I know it's the parents that decide what their kids eat, I know it's the parents that decide to drive there, and I know it' the parents that pay for the meals, (it's not like kids are taking themselves there!). but you can't underestimate the power of pester-power!
you can almost bet on the fact that the kids are pestering their parents to be taken there, and a lot of adults lack the education to even know that it's bad for their kids to eat there often.
there are 550 calories in a kids cheeseburger happy meal.
when you look at the nutritional requiremnts of children
http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/children/nutrition_calorie_needs.htm
that could be as much as almost half the daily requirements for a child of 3...
heck it's more than a quarter of a days intake of calories for a fully grown adult woman! (and it is a patheticall small amount of food)...
back to the point, McDonalds appear to lack tohe corporate responsibility necessary to run a business.
I don't think that you can in any way consider it responsible to actively market to kids almost half their daily nutritional requirements of calories, (with very little actual nutritional benefit).
thus, just as it's probably right to slap the banks around and force them into order, it's probably also right that McDonads also need a bit of a slap!
I don't think that government should intefere with every aspect of life and society, (quite the opposite, I think that society generally functions a lot better when left to it's own devices).
but sometimes any government is going to have to step in and say that enough is enough...
By all means McDonalds should have a kids size portion, but to activly market to kids, in the hopes that they pester their parents into buying them food that just plain isn't good for them. fully aware that the kids have no concept that it isn't good for them, then I think that's wrong...
and I don't think that just telling kids that McDonalds is bad for them is the answer.
because frankly, it's not,
over indulgence in McDonalds is the problem.