McDonald's UK CEO Blames Video Games for Childhood Obesity 321
BoingBoing is reporting that Steve Eaterbrook, McDonald's UK CEO, says that video games are leading the charge in obesity. He does have the decency to at least admit fatty foods are a part of the problem, but points the finger at interactive games for keeping kids indoors and not out burning off energy. "According to The Times, McDonalds UK is 'on the brink of its best year for two decades'. The firm has enjoyed six per cent like-for-like sales growth in the last year. More than 88 million visits were made to McDonald's restaurants last month, up 10 million on the previous year." Don't forget, we have known for ages that video games make us fat and mean.
The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:5, Insightful)
Disappointment Level One: Someone, somewhere decided that it is one single factor contributing to this, not a combination. Blame is absolute and illogically must be placed on one thing.
Disappointment Level Two: The media reinforces Lvl 1 idea and is on a witch hunt.
Disappointment Level Three: Each alleged witch further exacerbates by shifting blame to another witch, none of them ever admitting to being part of the problem. Once a new target is acquired, they escape the public eye.
Disappointment Level Four: Lvls 1-3 act as a free pass to parents. There are so many witches to point at, surely nothing they have done resulted in this. Again, no responsibility is taken.
And all the while, we're setting ourselves up for a diabetes explosion [time.com]. Although many have claimed it's been on the horizon for a long time, the numbers are starting to creep. Enjoy eating through all four layers of that cake!
By that logic.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Helmet Society (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot to be said for this, but I think the finger should be pointed past the video games and towards an overprotective and overly litigious society.
When I was growing up we had our Nintendos and Segas and Ataris and Intellivisions and Apple IIe computers, but we only played around with those for a few hours, and then we'd go outside and play baseball or football or street hockey, or merely ride our bikes around the neighborhood for a few more hours.
But nowadays it seems like everyone is scared to get up out of their chair. Are you going to ride a bike? Better wear a helmet, get some reflectors, ride with a friend, attach a siren, etc. Going to play street hockey? Better wear a helmet and a bunch of pads and secure the services of a lawyer so you can sue the first person who body checks you into a parked car. Going for a walk? Better rethink that - you might get abducted by a stranger. Gym class? Recess? Are you mad? You might fall and skin a knee.
We didn't take precautions when we played when I was growing up. And you know what? We survived. We did amazing crazy things. We played tackle football in the street. We threw rocks at each other. And no matter what we did we didn't wear helmets. And the worst that came from all of it is one of my friends got a broken arm once.
I think we need more Nietzsche and less nurture. "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Because that which does not make me stronger is killing me.
A bit hypocritical? (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that he is right in part. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blaming McDonald's is kind of silly. Don't raise your kids on a diet of McDonald's. It is supposed to be a treat and not a diet.
You feed your kids the big breakfast at IHOP the same thing will happen. Again it is supposed to be a treat and not a diet.
Letting your kids play video games for hours on end. Also not a good plan.
Letting them sit in front of the TV is also not a good plan.
Frankly I am amazed at the amount of passive entertainment we have available to all of us. With NetFlix, PVP, PVRs, Cable, Video Games, and the Internet there is always something worth while to watch or read or play.
A kid today doesn't need to find something to entertain themselves with.
Combine that with traffic today and all the fears over safety, and both parents working kids are often raised on a diet of video and fast food. It isn't bread and circuses it is Burgers and Playstations.
I have noticed that McDonald's is offering some better choices on the menu as well.
So don't dismiss video games just because you like them.
BTW if you don't think the techie life style contributes to the problem take a look around your office.
Korea and Japan (Score:5, Insightful)
Doh!
Being a larger guy... (Score:5, Insightful)
- Eating too fast
- Forgeting to enjoy food (fat people enjoy their food less than thin people while eating it)
- Very concentrated sugar / fat foods (e.g. Soft Drinks, Burgers)
- Society encourages us to stay home (Safer, Entertainment, and for Computer Geeks even work-useful activities like coding)
- Very little "good" help available (Doctors throwing pills, diets selling useless books, but nobody wants to give good advice except perhaps Paul Mckenna and a couple of others)
I wouldn't pin it down to Games or any other single form of entertainment. Well except perhaps World of Warcraft but that is a different kind of crack within its self.
Who's To Blame? (Score:3, Insightful)
While McDonald's blames video games on the obesity trend, let's not forget the millions of Americans who work in physically inactive jobs for many hours per week, come home to eat a full dinner (while skimping on more important meals, like Breakfast) and then finish it off by watching a good amount of TV. Never mind the lack of (or committment to) exercise, eating healthier (which isn't as important as exercise) or even trying to be active.
When one sees public service announcements telling people to play at least ONE HOUR a day, then I think we know where a lot of the blame can be shifted. Ironically enough, in my mind it wouldn't be fast food...
There are many causes (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Paranoid and over protective parents not letting their kids play outside
3. Lazy parents buying ready meals and junk food
4. Lack of room in the school timetable for PE (physical exercise)
5. Computer games (parents should limit this)
6. Film and TV programme tie-ins with McDonalds and sugary foods such as cereals
7. Kids being driven to school
Re:Helmet Society (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a friend that just recently had his fourth child (they are all 5 and under) and he said to me, "I need to buy a farm. I can't allow my children to do what I was able to do -- like ride my bike all over town." I asked, "why not?" Now, I want to mention that I wasn't allowed out of sight of my house on a bike until I was probably 12 and even then I had to be within earshot and 5 minutes of my father's whistle (which had quite a range). His reply, "They can't be trusted."
So it has nothing to do with litigious society, etc, it has to do with parents realizing what they got away with as kids (surviving, yes) and attempting to stop it for their children. What these people don't realize is that kids are still going to get hurt, get abducted, steal shit, fuck, drink and do drugs. All that's going to happen is that they are going to find ways that we didn't think of to get it done.
Back on topic:
While what McDonald's UK douche says is true, it's also very true that the "Fast Food Nation" (sponsored heartily by communities like the one I live in where the little guy is ignored while the big box and chain restaurants are encouraged to thrive by the Council) is also killing us. I've read several books like Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally [amazon.com] and similarly Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life [amazon.com] which mention the advantages of local eating, home cooking, and healthy lifestyles. I'm really going to attempt to get into Community Supported Agriculture [localharvest.org], get out to our local farmers' market more than 1x a month, and stop eating out nearly as much as I was.
We've traded dangers from biking without a helmet, pads and an orange flag with blinking LEDs to eating foods with 50% of your daily need of fat, 75% of your calories and loaded with high fructose corn syrup. One might take 15 to 20 years to kill you rather than 15 to 20 seconds but we need to decide which is better.
Happy Meals need to be replaced with Happy Medium.
Video Games != Obesity (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Except that he is right in part. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually you can blame them for marketing. It is a known fact that marketing affects people and they market a lot. Their marketing is directly connected to the amount of fast food people buy. If it wouldn't be, they wouldn't do the marketing as that wouldn't be worth of it.
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just games, food, or even parenting (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's look at one. Why do kids eat too much bad food? Because:
1. processed crap is cheaper per calorie (and gram) than healthier foods
2. freshly made food takes more time and energy to prepare than crappy food
3. people typically have a poor understanding of what exactly is in their food
Why are these things true? Partly because we didn't evolve to eat what we eat, and our bodies sometimes have trouble coping; partly because our diet isn't varied enough, and there's been a fair amount of research showing that more varied diets improve health; allergies/reactions to foods are higher in populations that eat a lot of those foods; and, among other things, decades of giant agribusinesses lobbying the government for laws and subsidies that support their business model of mass-producing cheap junk, and (sometimes) trying to suppress research that shows that cheap junk is unhealthy. Take "enriched flour". This is wheat flour that has had the husk removed (the husk contains almost all the fiber and other good nutrients; the germ contains basically nothing but carbohydrates), and then had artificially-produced versions of the nutrients in the husk added back in. What the hell? How about we just eat the whole grain instead (or flour therefrom) and cut out the middleman?
#3 really vexes me. My son has reactions to milk protein (irritability, rash around his butt), wheat (skin rash), canola (screaming hyperactivity), and artificial food coloring (more irritability and hypersensitivity to things going wrong); since my wife is still nursing him, she has to avoid those things too. And she's discovered that she reacts to milk protein (rashiness) and soy (body temperature drops by 1-2 degrees, cold sores develop on lip every couple of weeks, versus virtually never when she's off soy).
We still like to go out to eat, but it's a chore because we have to grill our waiters about what exactly they use to prepare the food. The question "What kind of cooking oil do you use to prepare X?" is usually met with either a blank stare (why should we expect someone who works in a restaurant to be informed about what's in the food? madness!), or the answer "Vegetable oil." Uh, yeah, pretty much ALL cooking oil is vegetable oil (animal fats are solid at room temperature, and are not "oil", culinarily speaking). WHICH VEGETABLE DID IT COME FROM? It matters! We eventually started saying "What kind of vegetable oil do you use," which frequently gets the answer "Regular vegetable oil", which lead to much headdesking frustration. Now we actually cue them by saying, "What kind of vegetable oil do you use, like, canola, corn, safflower, olive oil?" and most of the time that seems to get them to provide us with an actual answer (but sometimes they still say "regular").
Hell, one time we went to a very nice restaurant, and my wife expained that she couldn't have dairy or wheat. The waiter dutifully returned later and told us that he'd checked on the desserts and found one that wasn't made with dairy or wheat flour, "just white flour." We stared at him for a second and asked what plant white flour comes from. It was priceless watching the expression on his face as it dawned on him that white flour is also made from wheat. And this guy was a waiter at a well-known upscale restaurant in Los Angeles. And we've had this experience repeated numerous times, at restaurants all along the scale.
Anyway, rant over, but if you don't already, do yourself a favor -- find out what the hell you're eating. Learn about food. Read ingredient labels. (Did you know that "rapeseed" is another name for "canola"? Did you know that "casein" is milk protein? Did you know that virtually all soy sauce contains wheat, which is a pain in the ass for us because we love sushi?) Avoid proc
Re:Helmet Society (Score:2, Insightful)
Skinny doesn't necessarily mean healthy, though.
I'm still in college, and there are still students in college that literally go to class, get food to-go from the cafeteria, and sit and play video games until 2am. Some of them are still "good students," others definitely let their grades slide because of computer games.
Do computer games help obesity/health? No, they don't, I hope we can ALL agree on that. Do they hinder it? I think they do hinder it a little bit. How many people spend hours upon hours, each day, often late into the night (loss of sleep? not healthy!) playing WoW? Of course, you could argue that this is because they weren't taught that they need to go to bed, or perhaps that their parents told them to and they don't, or whatever... but, at the very least, WoW is the way they choose to lose their sleep. And it's not out of boredom all the time. I don't have TIME to play games while I'm in school... there's plenty more to do, but some people HAVE decided that WoW is the single most important thing in their life.
Back to being skinny, by the way, I know a lot of gamers that look very unhealthy, look like they don't sleep, are always eating fast food, and are very skinny, hehe. Actually, I know some gamers, too, that are quite healthy, drink tons of water, don't eat fast food, work out, etc... but they still spend a ton of time playing games, and a ton of money buying 8800GTS video cards for their computers to play a virtual reality.
Maybe part of the problem is we have taught our kids to ignore reality and to try to seek a virtual reality, instead of trying to make the REAL reality better? Hm.
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:4, Insightful)
What is Fatty restaurant's responsibility involved here? or Video game industry? It's all about education...
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually it is a lot worse than that. Part of the problem is that the media jump all over new results and publicize them before they have been scientifically confirmed (although the huge number of conflicting reports which the medical profession apparently produces does give one pause to consider the level of scientific rigour). As a result the message tends to be: X is good and Y is bad. Oops sorry, actually X is bad too, oh now Y is good, err...sorry actually neither are particularly great, have you tried Z?
Keeping kids indoors? (Score:1, Insightful)
But my question is, why doesn't anyone ever have the same problem with books?
Books, like video games:
1. Keep you indoors (the glare from trying to read outside stops me reading outdoors anyway)
2. Are a sit-down sit-still activity (discounting the Wii, and overzealous gamers)
3. Allow people to escape into sometimes inappropriate fantasy worlds
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans are sickeningly fat, but it isn't video games or McDonalds -- its their love of sugar and sugar-like products (HFCS). I can't believe how many unbelievably fat people I know, and I know I'll have to pay for their early retirement because they won't stop shoving candy into their mouths. Cola soda is candy. "Healthy" Granola is candy. Most of the products on Weight Watchers are candy. Don't these fat people see that they're not only killing themselves, but they're putting the cost on me and others who decide to live healthy?
Here's a reason why I detest single-payer healthcare: because people will have LESS reason to live a healthy lifestyle. I haven't been to the doctor in years except for my annual checkup. I haven't been sick in years, either. And yet I know my health costs go up because of the people who refuse to look into what ails them in terms of weight problems.
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was six, I used to walk a mile to school - and a mile back - every day. In the summer all through my chidhood, I'd make myself a sandwich before anyone else was up, and be out in the woods until evening - or else, later on, drop down river in my boat on the outgoing tide and come back in on the next. When I was twelve, I used to cycle twenty miles up into the hills with a friend - and, at the end of the day, twenty miles back. Kids these days aren't allowed to do that sort of thing. They're driven everywhere. They get no time to be out by themselves. The sea - the roads - the woods - are all suddenly 'too dangerous' for kids.
It isn't video games - at least, not mostly. It's over-protection. Of course, the over-protected, housebound kids then have to be entertained, so they get given video games. Diet doesn't help, this much is true. But the real problem is over-protection.
Re:It's not just games, food, or even parenting (Score:2, Insightful)
On the upside, I'm sure its doing me a lot of good, although my caloric intake is too high, and my amount of excercise is too low. Home-made bread is just too good!
Tell Ronald to stay the frack away from my kids (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell Ronald to pull his creepy pedophile advertising from all the children's shows. Tell him to quit bribing my school board for access to the classroom for his "special presentations." Tell him to keep his Richard-Simmons fat ass away from whispering in my children's ears 24/7 "McDonald's is cool and magical and if your Mommy and Daddy will take you there Grimace has a special present for you."
Pull his multi-billion dollar marketing machine away from my children's playground. Stop cramming preternatural amounts of fat, sugar and salt into their food so that my children's hindbrains don't scream "My God, we found the mother lode, we'll never need to eat again!" at the first whiff. Tell Ronald to quit fucking around with the peace in my home, and I'll lay off trying to shove him in jail with all the other fat, middle-aged men who wanna wear makeup and play with little kids.
Yes, I keep my kids away from that crap, but I'm sick of Ronald spending billions of dollars worming his way into my kids' dreams telling them that Mommy and Daddy are keeping them from something special.
Parental Responsibility?! How would you react if I followed your kid around all day telling them "I'll take you to McMagicFairyLand if your Mommy and Daddy will let me..."