02 August, 2011

Happy Meals for Happier Parents

There is an interesting article on Wall Street Journal about children’s meal combinations at fast food restaurants. With rising child obesity as a serious problem, there have been attempts to regulate what fast food restaurants serve to kids. A number of municipal governments banned fast food restaurants from offering toys with kids’ meals unless they meet a certain health criteria. McDonald’s Happy Meal is probably the most popular and well known kid’s meal. McDonald has been pressured by many health professionals and organizations to retire Ronald McDonald and remove the toys from Happy Meals. McDonald’s isn’t either retiring Ronald McDonald or removing the toys from their kids’ meals, saying those are what make the Happy Meals ‘happy.’ To make the parents happy, however, McDonald’s will include a quarter cup of sliced apples and reduce the portion of french fries in all Happy Meals. Whether this will make the parents happy is still uncertain. Yeah, serving fruits and less French fries is better than including no fruits at all with a larger portion fries but I don’t know how much, if at all, that can improve Happy Meals. 

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