March 25, 2004

• ahh.. we're talking about the second photo down I guess eh? I was so puzzled for 30 seconds starring at the top one. I agree - the photo is ridiculous. It's not really accurately portraying 99% of the children who go to McDonald's. And I'm pretty sure that your children wearing a piece of McDonald's clothing won't become automatically overweight either. Assuming that the kid doesn't have some sort of conidtion, I don't know what can be done. How do you administer punishment to parents based upon the child's weignt. At extreme cases, it might be abuse... but most of the time I think it's just lack of time and understanding on the part of the parents.
• I'm assuming your talking about the second picture in the article. He doesn't look like he's wearing McDonald's clothes...(kidding) Anyway, I know I saw this somewhere else one time. I feel that it was in AdBusters, but I couldn't find anything there. It is a disturbing image, but I judging by children that I see in public not so uncommon, though maybe not this young. Maybe cowering in fear is all we can do.
• There has got to be a PR person in the McDonald's HQ right now looking at that picture and shitting partially hydrogenated bricks. The children in the photo are Russian. I know that there's a "little fatty" (xiao pangzi) (tried to paste the Chinese but it didn't work) fetish for chubby moon-faced children in some parts of China; perhaps in Russia, too?
• wow, goetter, you're good. I was wondering how you knew those kids were Russian; the magic of right-click on the mouse...
• Chinese: 小胖子 (got it!) The New York Times had an article on the "little fatties" [PDF, sorry] last year.
• I'm sure the parents of that kid are just as big (proportionately speaking of course), so if you're gonna argue with the parents about how they treat their children, your basically gonna be arguing about how they treat themselves.
• What business is it of yours how fat these children are? I'm not being a snark here, but seriously. The suggestion that "something should be done" about parents who don't enfore the dietary discipline/ideology you espouse is offensive and puritanical.
• So if a kid thinks it's ok and perfectly healthy to maintain that kind of diet throughout his life (after all, Ronald McDonald hasn't died of a heart attack yet) then no one should get the blame for the obesity problem? Come on, it's unhealthy to be that overweight and kids don't know better, so who would you blame? It's not puritanical, it's common sense.
• I think he looks cute. Like a little piggy!
• What I found most interesting from the article was not the overweightness issue, but the fact that the clothes will be "designed, made, and distributed by Chinese firm Shanghai Longhurst." This is almost one hundred percent outsourcing - apart from royalties, I suppose. Sometimes it seems the west is trying to build its whole economy on intellectual property. However, you could consider McDonalds more of an international entity than being American.
• Well, the person who eats the food is responsible for their own conduct. Blame parents all you want, but what I object to is the interveintionist suggestion of the post that 'something should be done' to stop parents from letting their kids get fat. What does this mean? Laws subjecting parents of fat kids to fines or jail time? State run fat camps?
• Morning exercise, maybe. Compuslory physical education is so communist, though...
• Yeah, shotsy. Get the facist government out of how people raise their kids. Next thing the jackbooted Nazis of the State will stop people hitting their kids with jug cords.
• Ok, I just gotta say, I think its hard to get a kid that fat unless there's something wrong with him physiologically. I have no studies to back me up or anything, but I, perhaps unreasonably, feel pretty sure of myself. My son has the opposite problem-- he's unhealthily skinny. He sees a dietician and everything, but you can only make a person who feels inappropriately full eat so much, and I think its the other way around for some people. If you're set point is wrong, and you're hungry all the time, you're gonna eat, and parental discipline only goes so far. I'm not talking about chubby kids, which I think is a result of a variety of factors (too much junk food, not enough exercise, etc.). But the kid in this picture is so morbidly obese there's gotta be something wrong with him.
• that kid looks a bit familiar.
• Here's his father (on the right).
• shotsy: I agree that fines, jailtime, etc. are not the answer, but parents do answer for their children when you're talking about a child that young. If a 6 year old starts smoking I think parents have a responsibility to step in on the health issues of that. Of course I think this child is more obese than just a couple happy meals could have caused.
• My son has the opposite problem-- he's unhealthily skinny. He sees a dietician and everything, but you can only make a person who feels inappropriately full eat so much Same here. I am underweight and find it impossible to bulk up. Overeating stresses my already weak digestive system, and weight training (with a personal trainer, even) does little for me. I've seen many physicians, dieticians, alternative therapists. Nothing works. It's practically impossible for some to change their body shapes, however unhealthy-looking they may be. Sometimes *any* discipline only goes so far.
• He's not fat, you guys. He has a different life choice. Too obvious, I know. Sorry.
• And didn't McDonald's have kids clothing in the early 90's? I have distinct memories of seeing it at Wal-Mart and knowing, though my own mind was still young and fragile, that something was desperately wrong.
• babywannasofa: I was thinking the exact thing when I saw this article, I could swear I've seen clothing lines by them before.
• Slightly off-topic: The article ends with "...and a burger made from Quorn." I thought that I might have missed the memo on a new spelling of "corn" so I googled quorn and the top response was Quorn.com. Suprised, I clicked and the site said in part: "Welcome
• Yeah, there is something other than just eating bad going on with that kid. He would seriously have to be doing nothing BUT eating to become like that. Plus, I think that his skin would look different. If he wasn't already predisposed to being round, his skin would look unaturally stretched. Still, it's obviously not a good idea for him to be in McD's at all.
• Vapidave, I tried Quorn's "chicken" patties. Mostly so I could walk around my apartment to saying things like, "I'm hankering for a hunk Quorn!" etc. It was like most fake meats (fmeats), the texture and taste is sort of ... eh. They have a lot of other options besides patties, which might be better. Gardenburger's line of stuff is better I think.
• shotsy - part of the problem is that (a) kids this age don't have any clue about what's healthy or not, just what tastes good, so they're not going to object to what mom'n'dad feed them, and (b) they aren't the ones buying the food for themselves, putting themselves into this condition. if a parent starved a kid we'd call it abuse. if a parent feeds a kid so many calories that he or she can't walk by the time they reach their teens, or develop diabetes as a 9-year old, you're saying that nobody has the right to step in and say enough is enough? don't forget that all of us pay higher health care premiums to pay the insurance companies back for the dough they have to shell out treating kids for obesity-related diseases we used to only see in adults. any time anyone costs the insurance companies money, it costs all of us a little more. i think the public has a right at some point to stop a parent from endangering their child and/or making the rest of us pay for that child's 100% preventable obesity-related diseases. (before you respond to me on this, keep in mind that i'm not talking about pudgy kids, either; i'm talking about the grossly obese ones you see in that photo and usually on talk shows... a lot of us could stand to lose a few pounds, a small percentage of us are eating ourselves to death or allowing our kids to do so.) ps - anybody take a look at the source code for that page? the picture is named (random numbers plus) "mckidsfatty203.jpg"... kinda says it all, huh?
• Off topic but... Quorn is fantastic, and despite my Carnivorous nature I eat it quite a lot. There was a big hoo ha about it a while ago. You'll need to dig about a bit more, but the whole anti-Quorn movement looks suspiciously like the noise of American Vegetarian food manufacturers rying to protect their share of the Veggie market.
• "Mycoprotein is based on the fungal mycelium... If blue ringers count I guess I used to subject myself to this experiment weekly. I think I might wait a couple of weeks and see if seanyboy reports a hand growing out of where it shouldn't though.
• Quorn can be ok, the sausages are OK, the 'minced' version is a bit crumbly for my liking. Seanyboy, have you tried the Cauldron rnage of veggie products? Pretty good.
• The photo is from an AP story a year or two ago about those two boys. They are Russian, I think, and they hold the Guinness World Record for something like 'youngest heavyweight wrestlers'. The kid on the right is celebrating his 5th birthday, and I think they were also at a wrestling tournament earlier that day.
• Wedge you're right, more here.
• Oh, well done, y'all. I thought that Quorn was a nu metal band.
• Quorn, SA. Which, incidentally, is an anagram of QuonSAr.
• I like "chicken nugget" style Quorn. By itself, though, with no breading or sauce or anything, Quorn is pretty blah. I just wish it were easier to find around here; I only know of one store that carries it & the price seems kind of high.
• Quorn has only been allowed to be sold in the US for a couple of years now - the FDA kept blocking it before, for whatever reason. Quorn is also one of the only food stuffs which is entirely owned by a single company, who have the patent on the process to produce it.