The First Lady is jogging a victory lap after McDonald's decided to put apple slices in their Happy Meals. She says it will go a long way toward preventing childhood obesity. That would be true only if McDonald's was the only place that children ate. Not every child loves apples - and certainly not at the expense of french fries - the original finger food.
Regulating or impacting only a small slice of life does not impact the entirety of it. If children go home from McDonald's and eat a bag of potato chips, I'd say the apples were offset. Maybe the milkshake or the sundae did it while still at the restaurant.
Fruit is fabulous. That's not the point. The point - and the one that is missed - is that changing one part of a fast food menu - for kids - is not changing their lifestyle and cannot be claimed - under any stretch of the imagination - to be making strides toward reducing childhood obesity.
Parents have a role to play, and it most cases kids don't drive themselves to McDonald's and order and pay for their own Happy Meals. So now, parental choices have been limited because they presumably liked the contents of the Happy Meal or the contents would have changed long ago through the free market.
Michael Phelps consumes over 12.000 calories a day while he is training so it's not the caloric intake at issue. It's the exercise and activity that burns those calories. Put gym class and recess back in schools if you want to make a dent in obesity. Get kids involved in intramural sports. Stop driving kids to school and let them walk or ride their bikes. Leave the Happy Meals alone.
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