Look, I'm 47 and McDonalds was around when I was a kid. Children today aren't fat because McDonalds sells happy meals. Children today are fat because they sit on their asses playing video games instead of riding their bikes and playing in the park, etc.
While agreeing with your general sentiment, I just feel like pointing out that McDonalds today is not the McDonalds of 30 years ago. THey didn't use to ammonia-wash their meat, for starters.
How does that impact the weight of people who eat it? Seriously asking, not being a jerk.
"while agreeing with your general sentiment"
It doesn't. There's more to health than weight, though.
Er, yeah, right, but that wasn't my point. My point was, there was plenty of fast food around when I was a kid. But childhood obesity wasn't an epidemic in the 60's and 70's and I believe that is largely due to the fact that children were much, much more active then than they are now.
There are many facets to this issue. A big part of the problem is the fact that most families cannot afford to live on a single salary, thus, both parents now work. This, I believe, exacerbates the whole childhood obesity problem because instead of kids coming home from school and going outside to play ball or ride their bikes, they often either go to some latch-key after-school program where they sit on their asses playing video games, then they come home and sit on their asses some more to play more video games. Same thing on weekends. X-Box, Nintendo, PlayStation, whatever. Kids don't play ball or ride bikes any more, they engage in simulated combat in front of a computer screen sitting on their ass. So when you combine that with a poor diet, you have fat kids.
That's obviously a gross oversimplification, but I think it summarizes some of the problem.
It's not the fault of McDonalds that kids are fat. It's a combination of poor or inadequate supervision from parents, which isn't always 100% the fault of the parents, who are often victims of their financial circumstances and don't have the same amount of free time to devote to parenting as my generation's parents did. It's a pretty
vicious circle. You can lay some of the blame at the feet of parents, but not all of it.