McDonald’s finds a way around San Francisco’s ‘Happy Meal ban’

San Francisco’s so-called "Happy Meal ban" goes into effect Thursday, but McDonald’s has already found a way around it.

The ordinance prohibits fast-food restaurants from including free toys with children’s meals that don’t comply with nutritional standards.

McDonald’s answer? It will charge 10 cents for the toy. The proceeds will be donated to Ronald McDonald House, the company’s charity for children with cancer.

It would be more behooving to start a charity for childhood diabetes and other obesity related diseases.  An NGO for promotion of exercise also could help undo the damage.

[...] that McDonald’s response "allows them to continue marketing this unhealthful food to children in the midst of an obesity crisis."

Eric Mar, the member of the Board of Supervisors who led adoption of the law, called the 10-cent charge a "marketing ploy," but he told The Associated Press that he didn’t plan to seek any changes to address the tactic.

Maybe he should change his plans. We are talking hundreds of millions of children, world wide, heading towards a life of obesity, disease and early death. And almost nothing is being done about it.

• "Child Food-Porn" (Junk food advertising) makes our children obese & unhealthy
• Childhood Obesity Promotion: Cartoon characters attract kids to junk food
• Food Porn arouses Lust for Food with No Nutritional Value

McDonald’s, said all of the company’s U.S. stores would offer Happy Meals with apples and smaller servings of french fries by March.

We are amazed how McDonald’s escapes through a loop hole huge as a barn door and can continue to cause grave damage to children. The damage is not just the one happy meal, but conditioning malleable children to a life-long preference of wrong foods.

Human-Stupidity is amazed, how, on the other hand, any loop-hole gets closed to prevent people from seeing so called child porn, due to voodoo theory. In spite of evidence by professor Milton Diamond that Child pornography viewing reduces child abuse.

We would like to invert the situation: seducing children to grievous bodily harm should be a crime, whose damage has been clearly proven.

Should Parents of Obese Kids Lose Custody? Yes. They expose children to harm. Our entire system needs to be revamped. Feeding children into obesity, allowing them to sit all day on video games and in boring schools, all this needs to be seriously changed. Social workers, advertising, public relations, all need to work together to save our children.

How many vegetables are in this picture? Yes, 3. Strangely Coca Cola is not yet defined a vegetable, but it seems that french fries already were defined vegetables.

In case you were wondering where all of the healthy vegetables were on your child’s lunch menu at school, they’re in the pizza they’ve been eating everyday. Congress recently declared that Pizza constitutes a vegetable requirement even though it only contains an average of two tablespoons of tomato sauce. inquisitr

Who needs leafy greens and carrots when pizza and french fries will do?  In an effort many 9-year-olds will cheer, Congress wants pizza and french fries to stay on school lunch lines and is fighting the Obama administration’s efforts to take unhealthy foods out of schools. KSPR

"While it’s unfortunate that some members of Congress continue to put special interests ahead of the health of America’s children, USDA remains committed to practical, science-based standards for school meals," says a USDA spokesperson. Newser

Like many of you, when I heard this I thought it had to be a headline from The Onion. But sadly I’ve realized that there are too many agri-businesses and politicians who are willing to allow our childhood obesity epidemic to continue. They don’t care that our military is telling us that young people are too fat to fight, with only one in four meeting the fitness requirements for military service. They don’t care that one in three children under the age of 18 will develop Type II Diabetes within their lifetime. They don’t care that the rate of childhood obesity has doubled since 1980.   TheStateColumn

Human-Stupidity analysis

1. Children are endangered, made obese, sick, diabetic for life. Not only is this tolerated, active advertising for child food porn is legal.
2. This dangerous deadly child abuse (yes people die earlier because of obesity) is a world wide epidemic and almost nothing is done against it.
3. This human stupidity is "normal". The entire world is getting obese due to wrong nutrition and lack of exercise. And it starts with children, their parent’s mistakes, and child food porn propaganda
4. *Language abuse helps to deceive the common person into accepting rules that otherwise would create more resistance. A law saying that a healthy meal has to contain milk, meat, and pizza would cause more resistance.
5. It is all about influential special interest groups! Healthy food brings economic benefits to small farmers, small enterprises, and of course to the entire (healthier) population.
6. Hundreds of millions of children get sick because of false nutrition they were unable to give informed consent to. On the other hand, the "best interest of the child" is used as pretext to condemn men to ruinous child (wife) support payments, debtor’s prison. Alleged concern about children’s welfare is used as excuse for the child porn witch hunt and legal morass created around teenage sexuality. All this is hypocrisy

• Did the Reagan-era USDA really classify ketchup as a vegetable?

(Reuters) – The House of Representatives dealt a blow to childhood obesity warriors on Thursday by passing a bill that abandons proposals that threatened to end the reign of pizza and French fries on federally funded school lunch menus.

The scuttled changes, which would have stripped pizza’s status as a vegetable and limited how often French fries could be served, stemmed from a 2010 child nutrition law calling on schools to improve the nutritional quality of lunches served to almost 32 million U.S. school children.

The action is a win for the makers of frozen French fries and pizza and comes just weeks after the deep-pocketed food, beverage and restaurant industries successfully weakened government proposals for voluntary food marketing guidelines to children.  

"It’s an important victory," said Corey Henry, spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute (AFFI). That trade association lobbied Congress on behalf of frozen pizza sellers like ConAgra Foods Inc. and Schwan Food Co and French fry makers McCain Foods Ltd and J.R. Simplot Co, the latter best known as a supplier to fast-food company McDonald’s Corp.

"Our concern is that the standards would force companies in many respects to change their products in a way that would make them unpalatable to students," Henry said.  Reuters

TRX suspension training: a 2 pound contraption made of low tech straps. It can replace an entire gym. The resistance is provided by the body weight of the trainee, and can be easily adjusted by simply changing the angle the person pulls at.

(hover your mouse over pictures to read explanations)

TRX almost always uses the important but rarely trained core muscles, the lower back, stomach and oblique muscles. Unlike weight machines, TRX exercises (like push-ups with hand in the straps) also train the small muscles that stabilize joints.

TRX became first popular in the US armed forces. It is hard to carry a fully equipped gym to war in Iraq. A few straps are not only easier to carry around but also a lot cheaper.

Human-Stupidity Analysis

Exercise straps? Is Human-Stupidity changing this blog’s topic? No.

Human-Stupidity is about fixed ideas, dogmas, mental restrictions, and about overcoming such limitations.

We are intrigued that TRX was not invented 2000 years ago. There is no high technology in TRX. But we have been restricted by fixed ideas like

1. weights are needed. Even in gym machines that use ropes and pulleys
2. elastic tapes are needed. This requires us to have various straps of differing strength, that also can snap and injure the trainee.

To be fair, Wikipedia quotes a few predecessors of TRX Suspension Training, but seemingly they were never successful enough to become famous.

You have to watch a few pictures, a few movies, and then try yourself to understand the genius simplicity of TRX.

TRX Pro Pack + Door Anchor  Fitness Anywhere  $199.95

You can even carry TRX on a business trip and mount it on hour hotel room door. You can carry it to the park and strap it to a tree. No more excuses for not exercising.

TRX & FUNCTIONAL TRAINING: 50 exercises by Coach Miletto | YouTube

TRX Exercise Columbus Ohio|YouTube

Abdominal exercises with TRX Suspension Trainer: YouTube Video

Suspension training requires placing your feet in stirrups suspended from straps attached to a thick branch or metal bar and exercise hanging upside down. Makers of the two most popular devices (TRX and Inkaflexx) claim there are more than 300 strengthening and toning moves – from knee-tucks to push-ups – that can be performed in this dangling position and it is said to work every part of the body.

Practicalities

For those not quite ready to be hoisted to the ceiling in stirrups, there is the option with some suspension training equipment of leaning back while gripping the straps to perform moves. Changing the angle of your body will make an exercise seem easier or harder.

Is it worth the rush of blood to the head?

Advocates claim the beauty of suspension training is that you can’t help engaging the core stability muscles (those closest to the spine) when you do it which is good news for posture and the back. But critics warn that the instability of suspension straps can predispose people with inadequate core strength to injury. Fabio Comana, a research scientist for the American Council on Exercise says it may be helpful to well-conditioned athletes and gym-goers, but is potentially dangerous for the less fit. "A segment of the population doesn’t have the joint integrity and the ability to stabilise their entire body when doing this," he says. [...]

Expert view

Bristol Rugby club’s strength and conditioning coach, Dave Bell, describes the TRX system as "the most effective and functional piece of equipment I’ve seen for years".  Suspension training | The Guardian

2002, when a Navy Seal turned entrepreneur sent Mr. Baldwin a test model of the TRX system, a suspension gadget made of a pair of straps with handles joined by a metal clasp ring. To set it up, he only had to wrap the straps around a freestanding pole or over a thick branch. Strength training became as simple as placing his feet in stirrups to suspend them off the ground, then performing dozens of exercises like knee tucks or pushups.

After 45 minutes of so-called suspension training, Mr. Baldwin exhausted his body from shoulders to calves using just the 170 pounds of his weight. Better yet, the two-pound straps rolled up to the size of a military bag lunch.

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In the last year suspension training has entered the mainstream after two kinds of straps landed on the market: TRX and Inkaflexx. They have attracted the attention of personal trainers and group fitness directors as strengthening tools that also improve balance and flexibility. Suspension workouts consist of either hanging the legs or leaning back while gripping the straps and then performing a variety of moves.

The beauty of suspension training, its advocates say, is that you can’t help engaging your core to steady yourself. On the other hand, critics warn that the instability of suspension straps can result in injury, especially if you have a history of joint or back injuries, or inadequate core strength.    Suspension Training: How Risky Is It? | New York Times

We think the critics are talking about the hard-core exercises being dangerous for couch potatoes. The lighter exercises shown above don’t look dangerous.  Out-of-shape people can not indiscriminately use all exercises meant for elite Navy Seals.