[Brayker]

Congratulations California! No more happy meals for your fat ass kids!

http://news.yahoo.co...llegal-19362009

This post has been edited by Brayker: 29 April 2010 - 12:16 PM

[Vigilous]

This will be prove to be.......


A fucking useless gesture. Watch Food, Inc. and you'll understand why. It's not that kids are clamoring for the cheap-ass toys, it's that parents are feeding it to them because it's cheaper than buying produce and healthier foods.

[Brayker]

Vigilous, on 29 April 2010 - 12:18 PM, said:

This will be prove to be.......


A fucking useless gesture. Watch Food, Inc. and you'll understand why. It's not that kids are clamoring for the cheap-ass toys, it's that parents are feeding it to them because it's cheaper than buying produce and healthier foods.

True, most healthy food is more expensive then Mcdonalds warty cow crap that they feed kids. Both parents and kids are attracted to this kind of thing. Most parents dont have much money due to the unplanned kid, and they want to shut the kids up for a while. What shuts them up better than toys? The kid gets cheap food, and the parents get momentary silence. Its a win win.

[Logan Draconia]

Communism, here we come.

[Vigilous]

Quote

money due to the unplanned kid

Wow, does it hurt to be that fucking stupid, or are all your nerves just dead? It doesn't matter if the kid was planned or not, middle-class America can't afford real food.

Quote

Communism, here we come.

Fail comment is fail, considering the toys are made in China.

[Brayker]

Vigilous, on 29 April 2010 - 12:40 PM, said:

It doesn't matter if the kid was planned or not, middle-class America can't afford real food.

Actually, it does. If your trying to raise a kid with a wal-mart paycheck due to not expecting a kid and being irresponsible with protective sex then your going to buy cheap shit. All the parents that I know have no time or money due to having a kid when they weren't ready financially or emotionally. "Single Mom" is the most used term in america, we hear it everyday.

On the other side is the kids that are planned. Both parents want kids and plan for them financially and emotionally. They save money for expenses that come with children like clothes and food. One or both parents are usually in a successful career so if one has to stay home with the kid, the financial blow isnt as hard as if they weren't prepared for it.

Go talk to some parents and see what the majority of situations are.

As far as the "Middle class American" thing. My wife and I are both middle class Americans, we go out to eat sushi and at restaurants twice a week and still have over $200 weekend spending money. The parents that I see cant even afford to spend $10.

This post has been edited by Brayker: 29 April 2010 - 12:57 PM

[Zombuh]

And in the picture right up there, anyone notice the fat kids aren't even eating happy meals? Like this is going to matter. Fat kids don't get fat by eating toys, it's by eating a large burgers with large fries with a large sugary soda. They're really placing the blame on toys when that's not even the problem. Honestly, ban that 48 oz. double gulp that kid up there is nursing. Besides, the media says "happy meals banned" but it's really just the "toy" part of the meal that's been banned. What's to stop them from putting a coloring book or something that can be legally defined as "not a toy" or some other thing to promote it, if they really wanted to. This is the same as getting rid of "super-size". As if that is going to make up for the way that fat people irresponsibly put these high calorie/fat/sodium, low nutrition foods down their pie holes.

[Vigilous]

Quote

On the other side is the kids that are planned. Both parents want kids and plan for them financially and emotionally. They save money for expenses that come with children like clothes and food. One or both parents are usually in a successful career so if one has to stay home with the kid, the financial blow isnt as hard as if they weren't prepared for it.

Go talk to some parents and see what the majority of situations are.

As far as the "Middle class American" thing. My wife and I are both middle class Americans, we go out to eat sushi and at restaurants twice a week and still have over $200 weekend spending money. The parents that I see cant even afford to spend $10.

What fantasy world do you live in? No one is ever prepared financially or emotionally to raise a kid, even when they expect to have one. And your notion that one parent "is usually in a successful career" just proves how far out of touch you are with the rest of the country. Especially when you just said "we hear the term 'single mom" a lot."

[pathwriter]

I remember when I was a kid, my brothers and I regarded McDonald's very highly because of the toys we could get. We spent hours playing with them, too, not just 5 minutes in the restaurant and then no longer interested (poverty teaches even the youngest people to appreciate what they have). Frankly, the meals were largely inconsequential, though at the time, McDonald's was one of the few places we were likely to get soda in spite of my father giving himself diabetes by way of a serious sweets habit.

But, you know, for all that the marketing and the calories were screaming, "Come here, come here!" to us as kids, we didn't go very often. In fact, my parents preferred either the sit-down pizza place down the street or, more often than not, the family-style restaurant. I still drool thinking about the almost-perfect french fries that latter served and they've been closed for damned near two decades now. My brothers and I much preferred going there in spite of the toys at McDonald's, and I can assure you that it isn't because our palates are more mature. Moreover, we didn't eat out very often, period. Go figure, the people with the money were also the ones in charge of determining where we ate and our parents instilled in us at a very young age that mom and dad are in charge of dictating what is for dinner.

Taking the toys away doesn't take away the fundamental problem: parents either don't care or perceive that they do not have the time to make real food at home. That's pretty much it. I'm a home cook and, trust me, there are nights I walk into my kitchen and say to myself, "I really do not want to spend an hour making dinner tonight." Some nights I spend upwards of 3 hours preparing a meal for just myself, usually because I'm working with some kind of bread that needs to rise and be formed. But that doesn't need to be an every-night ordeal nor are most meals impossible to prepare ahead of time.

In the long run, though, if we really want to improve the value of fast food, kill the sodas. Until a zero-calorie or nearly zero-calorie sweetener can be put on the market that is undetectable or virtually undetectable from real sugar, sugared sodas are pretty much the most amazing source of calories a child is likely to be exposed to. Yeah, cheap beef and fried potatoes are certainly not at the top of the health food list, either, but they carry with them a host of actual nutrients and it's a lot harder to pack away half a dozen hamburgers than it is to suck down a two liters of soda. I hear good things about stevia, a plant extract from South America that has been popular in Japan for years, but the FDA keeps dragging its feet about it. Most people can detect sugar replacements. Growing up with a diabetic, I'm very used to the flavor of unsugared sodas, but I understand most people don't have the motivation or interest in becoming used to them (I'm at the point that I can barely touch sugared sodas, actually, because they're so sickeningly sweet).

But toys? That's a red herring. Like most legislation, it is some half-ass measure meant to appease a loudmouth protester or lobbyist. Honestly, I wouldn't be the least bit shocked if McDonald's is in cahoots with the CA legislature and offered this as a way for both groups to skirt responsibility and give people a comfortable and irrelevant blame figure. If I was running a corporation that necessarily gives sub-standard nutrition with a heavy dose of useless calories in an environment of increasing health and weight consciousness, I'd be the first one to offer up a sacrificial piece of Iron Man-themed plastic to get the heat off me.

[Corrderio]

What the fuck....

[Brayker]

Vigilous, on 29 April 2010 - 01:27 PM, said:

What fantasy world do you live in? No one is ever prepared financially or emotionally to raise a kid, even when they expect to have one.

I could argue all day about the benefits, opportunities and outcomes of an unplanned kid who is raised in a ghetto and goes to a shitty school Vs. a kid who has 2 college educated parents with successful careers who actually planned and wanted a child.

Quote

And your notion that one parent "is usually in a successful career" just proves how far out of touch you are with the rest of the country. Especially when you just said "we hear the term 'single mom" a lot."

Having a child when its planned and having the financial means to support it is a rarity in this country, having an unplanned one is alot more common, hence the 'single mom' comment.

[pathwriter]

Brayker, on 29 April 2010 - 02:18 PM, said:

Having a child when its planned and having the financial means to support it is a rarity in this country, having an unplanned one is alot more common, hence the 'single mom' comment.

One more argument in favor of adoption by same-sex couples, but that's wandering off on a tangent of a tangent.

On the subject of planned pregnancy, I rarely see it outside of couples that are infertile or have limited fertility. My experience is biased as I went to a Roman Catholic high school, but of all my ex-classmates, virtually every single one of them that is married has a kid and there are several unmarried with children. I can only think of one couple that has made it past their first year of marriage without a pregnancy and, oddly enough, they're some of the most devout and fanatical (in a good way... sort of... point being that they're not protesting at soldier's funerals) Christians I know. My own parents waited almost a decade between marriage and having kids and, even then, they weren't particularly financially stable when I was born. Financial stability in American terms is a funny thing, though, when parents in third world countries are squatting out their 20th kid and still managing to raise at least half of them to adulthood on the equivalent of a nickle a day.

[Deo2]

Next, they'll take away the crosswords, wordsearch, and mazes off the placematts (the paper liner on the serving trays).

[Brayker]

Deo2, on 29 April 2010 - 04:00 PM, said:

Next, they'll take away the crosswords, wordsearch, and mazes off the placematts (the paper liner on the serving trays).

nah, lets torture them! Keep the crosswords and coloring activities but take away the crayons.

[MrReinhardt]

the toys they put in happy meals nowadays are absolute shit. my kids lose interest in them very quickly because they either break or they suck. only time my wife or I get mcdonalds food for them is as a treat and we feed them as healthy food as much as possible.

[Metticus]

Quote

Being fat isn't all that bad. THis kids FATNESS saved his life. rofl

[pathwriter]

Metticus, on 01 May 2010 - 10:05 AM, said:

I have a question relating to this video.

When people think of a person that they classify as "fat," do they think of the loud man who is the subject of the video, or do they also think about the employee in the red shirt? A researcher at my university decided to document her weight loss a year or two ago. She started out somewhere around 220 lbs. and noted that pretty much no one believed she actually weighed that much. She was definitely overweight, that was not in question, but do most people really have any idea what 200 lbs. looks like without having been that weight themselves?

Of course, it varies from person to person. If you pull up the last season of VH1's Celebrity Fit Club, you'll see that Jay Carroll and Kevin Federline both weighed in the same kind of weight range and are about the same height. They also both finished around the same weight range, but they look nothing alike. Part of it is fat-to-lean ratio, but there have been more than a few times that I've hung out with guys who are several inches taller than me, several pounds lighter than me, and people would still identify them as the more plump one. Certain builds seem to be designed to carry fat better.

This is why I find the BMI so frustrating. You take someone with an athletic background (or even a Hollywood actor who has to keep his bare stomach screen-presentable) and assign them a BMI that says they're overweight or even obese, then you take someone who gets winded walking up a flight of stairs and say they have the same BMI. No one with eyes would suggest that Brad Pitt and the employee from that video are remotely alike in build or fat content, but the BMI that is at the heart of the health-and-weight movement makes no distinction between them. And, to add insult to injury, the BMI isn't particularly accurate as more and more studies show that people who are in the "overweight" range tend to live longer. Why? Probably because they carry more muscle mass in addition to 10-15 lbs. of extraneous fat (which, of course, is ready and waiting to be burned if you injure yourself or contract an illness -- we act like 1% body fat is a smart thing, but it sort of isn't). How do we really judge what fat is when we use an intrinsically broken metric (that is based on weight data from Scottish soldiers from 150 years ago)? Friends of mine in the military are quick to point out their sergeants and even fellow recruits who can run a damned marathon in spite of having a beer belly.

But, yeah, what do people consider fat? If I list my weight, which is atrocious right now, no one would have any trouble saying I'm a lardass and they'd be right in spite of my athletic endurance. If I post a picture (albeit clothed), the line gets a lot more blurry. I have this idea in my head that when people think of "fat," they think of the psycho in that video, but I'm really not sure. As someone with weight issues, I have a tendency to think of anyone the slightest bit overweight as "fat" because I'm clearly neurotic, which means that my opinion isn't very useful.

[Keylime]

pathwriter, on 29 April 2010 - 01:45 PM, said:

I remember when I was a kid, my brothers and I regarded McDonald's very highly because of the toys we could get. We spent hours playing with them, too, not just 5 minutes in the restaurant and then no longer interested (poverty teaches even the youngest people to appreciate what they have). Frankly, the meals were largely inconsequential, though at the time, McDonald's was one of the few places we were likely to get soda in spite of my father giving himself diabetes by way of a serious sweets habit.

But, you know, for all that the marketing and the calories were screaming, "Come here, come here!" to us as kids, we didn't go very often. In fact, my parents preferred either the sit-down pizza place down the street or, more often than not, the family-style restaurant. I still drool thinking about the almost-perfect french fries that latter served and they've been closed for damned near two decades now. My brothers and I much preferred going there in spite of the toys at McDonald's, and I can assure you that it isn't because our palates are more mature. Moreover, we didn't eat out very often, period. Go figure, the people with the money were also the ones in charge of determining where we ate and our parents instilled in us at a very young age that mom and dad are in charge of dictating what is for dinner.

Taking the toys away doesn't take away the fundamental problem: parents either don't care or perceive that they do not have the time to make real food at home. That's pretty much it. I'm a home cook and, trust me, there are nights I walk into my kitchen and say to myself, "I really do not want to spend an hour making dinner tonight." Some nights I spend upwards of 3 hours preparing a meal for just myself, usually because I'm working with some kind of bread that needs to rise and be formed. But that doesn't need to be an every-night ordeal nor are most meals impossible to prepare ahead of time.

In the long run, though, if we really want to improve the value of fast food, kill the sodas. Until a zero-calorie or nearly zero-calorie sweetener can be put on the market that is undetectable or virtually undetectable from real sugar, sugared sodas are pretty much the most amazing source of calories a child is likely to be exposed to. Yeah, cheap beef and fried potatoes are certainly not at the top of the health food list, either, but they carry with them a host of actual nutrients and it's a lot harder to pack away half a dozen hamburgers than it is to suck down a two liters of soda. I hear good things about stevia, a plant extract from South America that has been popular in Japan for years, but the FDA keeps dragging its feet about it. Most people can detect sugar replacements. Growing up with a diabetic, I'm very used to the flavor of unsugared sodas, but I understand most people don't have the motivation or interest in becoming used to them (I'm at the point that I can barely touch sugared sodas, actually, because they're so sickeningly sweet).

But toys? That's a red herring. Like most legislation, it is some half-ass measure meant to appease a loudmouth protester or lobbyist. Honestly, I wouldn't be the least bit shocked if McDonald's is in cahoots with the CA legislature and offered this as a way for both groups to skirt responsibility and give people a comfortable and irrelevant blame figure. If I was running a corporation that necessarily gives sub-standard nutrition with a heavy dose of useless calories in an environment of increasing health and weight consciousness, I'd be the first one to offer up a sacrificial piece of Iron Man-themed plastic to get the heat off me.

I have to QFT Path for this because he is absolutely right. I am one of those 'single parent' kids, my mother, sister and I would often have McDonalds or pizza for supper. Not because it was cheap, not because of the toy, but because it was fast. My mother had two children, a very good career, and a dead beat alcoholic husband she was divorcing. She didn't often have the time or energy to prepare a normal healthy meal for us; she was to busy working herself dead just trying to keep a roof over our heads as well as something to eat. But fast foods weren't all that we ate, she would make us pasta or chicken a lot too. But the coveted object of fast food was it speed, because it allowed her time to spend with us.

[Metticus]

Me personally. I concider people fat if they have two+ chins and a gut. A persons weight is effected by their fat and their muscle mass, which weighs more than fat. So if two people, same height, weight 200 lbs ,they may look different if one has more muscle than the other. I weight a good amount but I have alot of muscle mass. I posted a pic of me when Tres Dunes was ranting about KI people being "fat asses" Here it is, I weight about 190 here

Spoiler

This post has been edited by Metticus: 02 May 2010 - 02:43 AM

[firefeng]

Ditto on the BMI system being egregiously under-equipped as a valid method of establishing health or physical appeal. Back when I weighed 145 lbs., I was still in the "normal" BMI range for my height, despite the fact that for years I had been healthily hovering between 165-175 lbs. assuming my moderately active lifestyle. Lo and behold, as soon as I got a job and got back to the same (arguably...) healthy lifestyle, my weight crept up from its near-anorexic 145 to the 170 lbs. I am right now.

Fast food is only problematic in children who spurn physical activity, and in those whose diets are comprised solely of greaseburgers and who otherwise lack other sources of vitamins and nutrients. California isn't fixing any problems, it's just haplessly flailing its legislature at red herrings, interfering with business's freedom in the process, when the real problem is that they can't legislate stupidity out of parents.