You want to control what people eat and stop so many from becoming the unsightly fatties of the world? Start teaching home-ec classes in kindergarten for both boys and girls and hang pictures of Twiggy on all the walls, but don’t ban fast food ads.
Fast food is the staple of a huge number of Americans’ diets. If it weren’t, all the fast food places would have gone in the garbage disposal long ago.
Speeding up to the drive-thru is a way of life for many parents, both of whom might be holding down more than one job just to keep body and soul together.
If the fanatical we-know-what’s-good-for-you-but-you-don’t fast food fascists get their way fast food ads will be banned from television.
In a report by economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and published in the Journal of Law & Economics, on Nov. 20th, kids -- aged six through 11 -- have gotten fatter by 13% since 1970, because they watch television with fast food-laden commercials for hour on end and their ends.Isn’t that more or less the bottom line?
It’s not the fast food ads that are driving them through the drive-thru that’s making them fat, it’s parents whose means to the end of feeding them is fast food. It‘s the fault of those same parents who allow their children to sit on their asses watching Thee TV all day instead of going outside to play, and who drive them up to fast food take-out windows.
First, I always want to know who paid for this or any study.
In this case, was it the lean meat chicken people? Vegans? The leaner other white meat people? Self-loathing fatties? Or a bunch of freakin’ busy body control freaks, who have nothing better to do with their time than tell us how we should eat?
Second, I was never a fast food freak, and rarely zipped through the drive-thru on my way home from work so I could throw any kind of food at my kids.
Either I made dinner before leaving the house or when I got home, or called them from my desk and told them how to start preparing dinner.
It wasn’t that hard to do, nor did it make me a saint for doing it. It was just the way it was, and I didn’t feel particularly burdened by the task of providing them with a reasonably wholesome meal at the end of the day.
Banning advertising by legal, legitimate enterprises is not the way to get people to become svelte, or to live a lifetime of healthful eating.
Education from an early age is part of the answer. Getting McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr, Taco Bell and the hundreds of other fast food chains to voluntarily co-operate and reduce the calories in their meals is another way.
Of course, that would also make their food more expensive, because they’d be forced to stop using fillers and to use higher grade, lower fat content meat in their burgers, or switch to turkey burgers, which are totally disgusting and unpalatable unless they’re drowned in an ocean of condiments.
For all practical purposes, during our current economic crisis this is not the time to be talking about banning advertising for multi-million-billion dollar businesses that employ hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers.
Being out of a job would be far more unhealthful for them and the economy in general than eating the food at their work places.
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