A group of sixth graders from a Stratford, CT public school recently attended a nutrition workshop. This field trip was intended to teach children good eating habits and how to seek out healthy foods. Kids even got the chance to step into the kitchen and make their own sandwiches. So far so good, until you find out where this “nutrition workshop” took place — at a local McDonald’s.
As Change.org’s Health Editor, Brie Cadman, recently reported, for the past five years, McDonald’s has been dabbling in the nutrition education business. Local schools can bring in groups of students, and McDonald’s employees teach the kids about how to make “healthy” choices. As the Connecticut Post recently reported, the Golden Arches sponsors workshops at its restaurants where students “learn about calorie counts, sodium levels, fat content and other information about the important of nutritious foods.” This coming from a fast food joint selling Big Macs that boast more than 500 calories a pop.
Unless McDonald’s is teaching these kids that its fast food is entirely too high in “calorie counts, sodium levels, and fat content,” the restaurant has no business running any kind of nutrition workshop. It’s no secret that the Golden Arches serves up some of the most unhealthy vittles around. An Angus Bacon and Cheese sandwich, for example, holds 790 calories and 39 grams of fat. Even a kids’ meal cheeseburger has 300 calories in it — and that’s before you add on the fries and sugar-y beverage.
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Thousands of dolphins are slaughtered evrey year and hundreds upon hundreds in a month. Kids are eating this in Japan and it contains Mercury. Since people aren’t smart enough to give their kids a healtheir choice,?we can. This will also help the preventing of the dolphin slaughtering.
Save the Dolphins
This is how entrenched singlism is in U.S. society: even a successful man raised by his grandmother lets loose a disparaging comment about single mothers without a second thought, only realizing his faux pas when shamed into awareness by a media backlash.
But I have no beef with Eastern Michigan University football coach Ron English. I respect his apology for what he said: “We wanted guys that had a father in their background. A guy that’s raised by his mom all the time, and please don’t take me wrong, but the reality is that you’ve got to teach that guy how to be taught by a man.”
He later claimed temporary insanity, saying, “I don’t know how you could say that. It doesn’t even make sense.” (I assume that’s “you” as in “me.”) No, it doesn’t make sense. His first remark was so outrageous and obviously — if accidentally — sexist and singlist that everyone jumped on him. But ironically, one of the very people chastising English for his blunder actually committed arguably worse singlism and sexism than English. And it was a lot more subtle, as are many of the “isms” we deal with today, which makes them all the more destructive. Detroit Crockett coach Rod Oden described English’s statement as follows: “That’s insane. What he’s asking for, we don’t have. A lot of the kids are from broken homes. We kind of fill that void for a lot of these guys as far as being a father figure. It’s disheartening to know that he said something like that.”
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Kids are now seeing fewer TV commercials for sweets and sugary beverages than before, says a new report in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. But this good news is tempered by an increase in the number of TV ads for fast food.
The research team looked at television advertising targeted at children from 2003 to 2007. Researchers found that on average, children between the ages of two and 11 are seeing 30 percent fewer ads for fruit drinks and soft drinks. In addition, ads for candies, cookies, and other sweets went down 35 percent. But ads for fast food increased by eight percent, with two-to-five-year-olds seeing more ads for fast food than cereal. Lisa Powell, one of the researchers, commented, “That suggests a lot of branding is going on. They are starting marketing of brand loyalty at an earlier age.”
What is perhaps most shocking, however, is the disparity between children of different races. The researchers found that African-American children saw 1.4 to 1.6 times as many food ads each day as their white counterparts, and they saw double the number of fast-food ads. Just think about that for a moment along with the oft-cited statistic that one in three children born after 2000 will suffer from diabetes, and if that group is narrowed down to just minority children, the number rises to one in two. Maybe not a direct correlation, but I wouldn’t be willing to bet against a connection.
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