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McDonald's UK CEO Blames Video Games for Childhood Obesity
BoingBoing is reporting that Steve Eaterbrook, McDonald's UK CEO, says that video games are leading the charge in obesity. He does have the decency to at least admit fatty foods are a part of the problem, but points the finger at interactive games for keeping kids indoors and not out burning off energy. "According to The Times, McDonalds UK is 'on the brink of its best year for two decades'. The firm has enjoyed six per cent like-for-like sales growth in the last year. More than 88 million visits were made to McDonald's restaurants last month, up 10 million on the previous year." Don't forget, we have known for ages that video games make us fat and mean.
We have a problem with obesity--increasingly with children.
Disappointment Level One: Someone, somewhere decided that it is one single factor contributing to this, not a combination. Blame is absolute and illogically must be placed on one thing.
Disappointment Level Two: The media reinforces Lvl 1 idea and is on a witch hunt.
Disappointment Level Three: Each alleged witch further exacerbates by shifting blame to another witch, none of them ever admitting to being part of the problem. Once a new target is acquired, they escape the public eye.
Disappointment Level Four: Lvls 1-3 act as a free pass to parents. There are so many witches to point at, surely nothing they have done resulted in this. Again, no responsibility is taken.
And all the while, we're setting ourselves up for a diabetes explosion. Although many have claimed it's been on the horizon for a long time, the numbers are starting to creep. Enjoy eating through all four layers of that cake!
My work here is dung.
does fast food cause violence?
As I said on this site:
There's a lot to be said for this, but I think the finger should be pointed past the video games and towards an overprotective and overly litigious society.
When I was growing up we had our Nintendos and Segas and Ataris and Intellivisions and Apple IIe computers, but we only played around with those for a few hours, and then we'd go outside and play baseball or football or street hockey, or merely ride our bikes around the neighborhood for a few more hours.
But nowadays it seems like everyone is scared to get up out of their chair. Are you going to ride a bike? Better wear a helmet, get some reflectors, ride with a friend, attach a siren, etc. Going to play street hockey? Better wear a helmet and a bunch of pads and secure the services of a lawyer so you can sue the first person who body checks you into a parked car. Going for a walk? Better rethink that - you might get abducted by a stranger. Gym class? Recess? Are you mad? You might fall and skin a knee.
We didn't take precautions when we played when I was growing up. And you know what? We survived. We did amazing crazy things. We played tackle football in the street. We threw rocks at each other. And no matter what we did we didn't wear helmets. And the worst that came from all of it is one of my friends got a broken arm once.
I think we need more Nietzsche and less nurture. "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Because that which does not make me stronger is killing me.
He must not have heard of the Wii ;)
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
The tobacco industry claimed that great sex causes lung cancer.
So McDonald's emphasizes personal responsibility when it involves what people eat, but not when it involves their recreational activities?
Is this guy really called 'Eaterbrook'?
1) Philip Morris say video games are promoting smoking among children.
2) KKK Grand Wizard says video games are making children racist.
3) Exxon-Mobil says video games make children averse to renewable energy.
4) McDonald's CEO is a peen.
I like basketball!!1!
In a statement made by the United Video Game Designers of the UK, stated ...
"Clearly our reliance on fast food, particularly McDonald's, has caused us to become unimaginative and lackluster in our new game designs. By buying initially from the value menu and then going to super sized items we have replicated this trained up-sell response in our own games. We haven't made an original game since Doom. We even tried watching Super Size Me 10 times, but that only made one designer go completely mad and make a copy of Burger Time. We can only hope that McDonald's changes the way they sell food items so that we can again create new and innovative games that people around the world will become lethargic blobs of goo playing. Thank you."
What do you blame?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Soda companies blamed video games a bit back, and then back peddled on their statement.
http://kotaku.com/335546/soda-companies-blame-videogames-for-fat-kids
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Yes, you can get fat if you stay home just playing and eating. But this don't make McDonald's less guilty.
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
It is also a well documented and scientifically proven fact that video games also cause AIDS. But seriously, when was the last time a CEO knew anything about anything (besides, of course, the fine art of scapegoating)? I can just see this guy with his thumbs up his ass and one day saying, 'Its not fatty foods that make people fat, its video games.' Yeah, the nutritional label on the back of GTA says that 1 serving has 1500 calories. Eat McDonalds, not GTA!
We recently heard about a very obese black hole. Who gets the blame for that?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
never take diet advice from a fast food CEO
Subject pretty much says it all.
My god -- I think childhood obesity is directly linked to the decline in pirates!
Or perhaps it is the video game playing that eliminates pirates?
Hmm... is that a good or bad thing?
I suppose it depends on whether you're a ninja or not.
Does your significant other love shoes?
There are lots of things causing the problem.
Blaming McDonald's is kind of silly. Don't raise your kids on a diet of McDonald's. It is supposed to be a treat and not a diet.
You feed your kids the big breakfast at IHOP the same thing will happen. Again it is supposed to be a treat and not a diet.
Letting your kids play video games for hours on end. Also not a good plan.
Letting them sit in front of the TV is also not a good plan.
Frankly I am amazed at the amount of passive entertainment we have available to all of us. With NetFlix, PVP, PVRs, Cable, Video Games, and the Internet there is always something worth while to watch or read or play.
A kid today doesn't need to find something to entertain themselves with.
Combine that with traffic today and all the fears over safety, and both parents working kids are often raised on a diet of video and fast food. It isn't bread and circuses it is Burgers and Playstations.
I have noticed that McDonald's is offering some better choices on the menu as well.
So don't dismiss video games just because you like them.
BTW if you don't think the techie life style contributes to the problem take a look around your office.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This explains a lot! I roll up burgers and frieds a lot in Katamari Damacy games. I had no idea it was going straight to my waist!!!
Ooops. Forgot the fact that the two most videogame obsessed countries don't have obesity problems.
Doh!
Being a larger guy myself I'd put it down to a number of factors including:
;-)
- Eating too fast
- Forgeting to enjoy food (fat people enjoy their food less than thin people while eating it)
- Very concentrated sugar / fat foods (e.g. Soft Drinks, Burgers)
- Society encourages us to stay home (Safer, Entertainment, and for Computer Geeks even work-useful activities like coding)
- Very little "good" help available (Doctors throwing pills, diets selling useless books, but nobody wants to give good advice except perhaps Paul Mckenna and a couple of others)
I wouldn't pin it down to Games or any other single form of entertainment. Well except perhaps World of Warcraft but that is a different kind of crack within its self.
While McDonald's blames video games on the obesity trend, let's not forget the millions of Americans who work in physically inactive jobs for many hours per week, come home to eat a full dinner (while skimping on more important meals, like Breakfast) and then finish it off by watching a good amount of TV. Never mind the lack of (or committment to) exercise, eating healthier (which isn't as important as exercise) or even trying to be active.
When one sees public service announcements telling people to play at least ONE HOUR a day, then I think we know where a lot of the blame can be shifted. Ironically enough, in my mind it wouldn't be fast food...
Okay, I'm going home, and I will play video games nonstop for a month. Someone else about 5'10" and 200lbs needs to go to McDonalds and eat Big Macs nonstop for a month. Someone else needs to get us federal grants for obesity research so I can get paid to play video games all month, and to cover that other poor fat bastard's Big Macs. Then at the end of the month, we'll see who gained more weight.
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
A few months ago I downloaded Prince of Persia: Sands of Time from some game site. It was some trial that Ubisoft was doing where they were putting advertisements into games. Interestingly enough, the only advertisement I ever saw was for McDonalds.
1. Fructose and corn syrup
2. Paranoid and over protective parents not letting their kids play outside
3. Lazy parents buying ready meals and junk food
4. Lack of room in the school timetable for PE (physical exercise)
5. Computer games (parents should limit this)
6. Film and TV programme tie-ins with McDonalds and sugary foods such as cereals
7. Kids being driven to school
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I'll accept that video games are the sole reason we're getting fatter -- if McDonalds accepts that fast food is making us violent. It seems just as logical to me.
Personally, I know why I'm fat (although I'm currently working on that problem). Soft drinks, pure and simple. I used to consume at least 1,000kcal/day of the stuff. At 3500kcal/lb, that adds up fast!
At least I don't smoke -- but as a soda addict, I do sympathize with smokers. It's hard to give up (or even cut back on) something you really enjoy.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
So eating a pair of syrup soaked muffin shaped pancakes with a wedge of sausage crammed between doesn't make you fat but consumer electronics will?
If only there were some sort of activity that is possibly known to combat obesity? Obviously not a diet or anything...
It's the books! The books are making us fat. Damn those kids and their eight hour reading marathons! They need to go outside and get in trouble like normal kids! That'll get rid of the problem.
We must...like...eat less food or something...
I play videogames all the time and my figure is utterly ganglian, QED
OTOH, everyone over 40 was pretty much raised in front of the TV, and though it is probably easier to kick a kid out the house to go and play in the garden when the kid is watching TV, the fact is that many kids spent 40 hours a week in front of the TV, doing nothing buy drinking cokes and eating chips.
But here is something that has changed in the past 15 years. foodstuff, be it frozen dinners, McDonald's or whatever, is considered acceptable food, and more importantly it the only cheap sustenance that some families know how to eat. How many families will make pancakes, or casseroles, or a bunch or rice and beans. Sure one may say that there is no time to cook, or that such food is more expensive, but that just is a matter of priorities. If one does not know who to make dinner in a hour, or does not put down the video, then dinner will not get made and bad cheap food will be eaten instead.
Which is why I believe the problem is fast food. When I was a kid fast food was expensive. One did not see kids spending $2 for a snack at McDonalds, because $2 was hard to get. Now it seems that almost all kids, no matter how poor the family appears to be, has money to go to McDonalds, where the get calories but no nutrition. And then a school, where they are supposed to get the nutrition, the fast food concerns have bribed government officials so the kids again can get calories, but no nutrition. So hopefully at home they will be forced to eat some decent food. But in the process they have eaten 4000 calories, but only gotten 50% of the nutrition they need. Honestly if the fast food would supply 100% of the calories and 100% of the nutrition, that would be great. But it seems they supply 200% of the calories and a small fraction of the nutrition. Now that fast pseudo food is considered food, that is a unsustainable condition.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I don't know how he can say that video games leads to obesity. South Koreans probably play the most video games out of any nationality. A big portion of their economy is based on it. They have pro-gamers that practice 10+ hours a day and the last time I saw none of them were obese.
GL HF!
I blame my fat for being fat.
Seriously - it puts out a chemical that stimulates my appetite, and makes extended exercise very difficult.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
My friend asked me how he could lose weight. Hes over 300 pounds an hes only 21, I told him he needs to make some lifestyle changes. For one I told him to play less WoW and start being more active, of course he didn't want to give up his precious WoW over his health. Now whenever I go over to his house, hes sitting there playing WoW with a bag of potato chips.
Its not completely video games fault but its definitely a key contributor and it doesn't help that its contributing to the problem at an early age. And to those that say they grew up playing video games and their still healthy, that can happen, if you watch Super Size Me theres a man in that film that ate over 10,000 big macs in his life time and looks completely fine. Some people can get away with it, but the majority cant.
When it comes down to it. Theres two key factors, lifestyle and respect. You cant expect the problem to go away with changing your lifestyle and learning to respect your body.
...long live the carbohydrates theory.
Keys lipid hypothesis is dead... scientist are fleeing it like rats from a sinking ship. The media just hasn't caught up yet.
The truly frightening thing is that the diet that US and Canadian governments have been recommending over that last 30 years is pretty much the same thing that we use to fatten cattle up for slaughter.
Both are white. Both are wrong.
Barring certain metabolic syndromes, it is the choices that people make that are responsible for obesity.
I play video games. I eat at toadburgers. I have a decent BMI. I exercise. I practice moderation.
The "fast food nation" folks are hardly any better than Jack Thomspon's lot.
I'm not totally disagreeing with what he said. I think there are elements here that may actually lead to obesity. I know personally when I'm sitting there playing a video gaming I'm usually eating some kind of snack or whatnot. Whatever the case, I would think for one second this guy might actually realize his firms role in the problem and not pass the buck off.
It's not the fat, it's the CARBS !!
I'm 22 and have good genes, but I ride my bike to a friend's house to play co-op Guitar Hero. That's two 20-minute aerobic sessions per day, and I spend several hours playing video games. When I was a kid, we'd ride to the house of whoever's mom would let them have Mortal Kombat. Point being, there's no reason that kids can't play a seemingly unhealthy amount of video games while still getting some exercise.
How about putting Xenical (drug which prevents the body from absorbing fat) in fatty foods? Once the burger-loving youngsters have soiled themselves in the presence of their peers once or twice they'll be screaming for fruit and veg! I tried one once as an experiment, went out for a curry, woke up the next day and tried to slip a discreet fart out - bad idea.
None of this means much.
In fifty years, once robots and AI have taken over, and humans are managed like pets, most people in the developed world will have their brains removed and placed in "brain farms", where they will enjoy an effortless(and meaningless) existence of endless virtual life.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Kids are going to do what their parents do. If they are over-consuming then more than likely their parents are as well.
IMO, a major problem with the overweight issue in society is that food is used to fill missing holes, mostly those of a
spiritual and pyschological nature. It is also about the time that is spent in actually eating the food. I got in the bad
habit of wolfing down every meal after I went through Army Infantry basic back in 90 and over the years the calorie burning
fell off but the eating habits didn't. It takes a lot of work to break that kind of habit. A lot of people basically eat too fast
and don't give their systems time enough to deactivate the hunger signals.
It is up to parents to monitor the kid's habits and to guide them in healthy and positive ways (as well as leading by example, which is the most important)
which include all aspects of their existence. Sticking kid's in front of television to keep them busy while they are toddlers usually
ends up developing a kid that has a need to watch tv all the time and I think without moderation of virtual environments you develop kids
that can't function well in non-vr or projected environments. I think that this is the reason for so many kids being prescribed Adderal and Ritalin
in order to keep them "calm". I think the most important way to handle these issues (too much immersion in video based play or watching, overeating and
the inability to function in group environments) is through guidance and moderation. It will take a holistic approach that I believe should include
meditation and quiet time for introspection without the constant onslaught of our media saturated world. I also think that kids have to be shown how important
exercise and outdoor/nature play is to a healthy mind and body.
I suppose he's thinking that since he has the title of CEO that there is some credibility to anything he says. I suppose there is for quite a lot of people.
It's sad.
I'm running out of tinfoil.
By the same logic, tobacco companies will argue that people who play video games are more likely to stay indoors, where second-hand smoke is concentrated, rather than spending their time outdoors.
Fucktards.
Kevin Smith on Prince
I have noticed that compter techs have an average higher rate of beer belly's than for example, the rest of the world. I know my ass gets more than its fair share of sitting in one day, but that doesn't keep me from going to the gym every once in a while so i don't look like Cartman from the WoW episode.
I think the oompa loompas said it best, "who do you think's to blame? the mother and the father."
Ever since the evil Chimpy McBushitler declared all children under the age of 16 eat Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese twice a day the children of this nation have had NO chance!
When are we going to stop allowing evil fascist corporations to stuff foods high in fat, sugars, and salt down our children's throats?
Can't the U.N. do something?
If the calories eaten outweigh the calories burned then weight is gained. Steve Easterbrook is stating the blisteringly obvious, and in doing so completely misses the point.
Increasing obesity levels are not as straight forward as blaming fast food or video games though, there are several other factors:
A thistle is a fat salad for an ass's mouth...
I worked at McDonald's. So would eat a quarter pounder or two every day. I also played a lot of video games, and played with computers. But I wasn't fat. Am now, however.
Being captain of the cross country team and also in the marching band probably helped. I think 'social networks' (to include networked video games) are more to blame than just games themselves. It is much harder to pull yourself away from interaction with other people online. It's just so much easier than doing it in real life. It's that need to belong, and being in your element thing. We didn't have those electronics networks when we were younger, so getting away from the computer or game was a lot easier.
Really, communicating online is the addiction here, I think.
I'm lovin' it.
So, we know, or at least should, that to decrease our weight and increase our fitness we need to change the way we eat and exercise more. The more calories we burn in exercise, the more high calorie foods we can eat. But, if we didn't want to work out, we could very easily (if you have will power when it comes to food) maintain our weight by just eating the proper amount and avoiding fast food like McDonalds. So what I am saying is, I can play video games all I want and not become obese as long as I alter what I eat. I won't win any body building contests, but I can stay thin. On the other hand, if I eat only McDonalds food, I will become obese. You don't need large quantities of that stuff to get fat.
The problem is fast food is quick to get and very cheap. It is interesting how in the past, a more plump person was viewed as wealthy since they could afford lots of food with little physical effort. Now we are attracted to people who are thin and our poor population continues to get fatter and fatter.
Can video games be blamed for some people being fat? Possibly, but they could replace that activity with television, the Internet, knitting, playing cards, etc etc with the same result.
Ultimately, there is only really one person to blame in this: the individual. There is no mystery on how people are getting fat. Get out and exercise and stop eating crap. It angers me to see this guy point the finger at gaming though. It is just the popular punching bag of our time. The guy serves some of the least healthy food on the planet and he thinks that if there just wasn't gaming, we'd all be perfect.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.C._Kids/
They are fattening us up for the aliens.
Eat less and exercise more.
That's it - no gimmicks, no pills needed.
And it WORKS.
What?
All of these things are contributing factors. But it's not just as simple as "kids eat too much junk food" or "kids don't get enough exercise", as if the solution is to simply STOP these things, like flipping a switch.
Let's look at one. Why do kids eat too much bad food? Because:
1. processed crap is cheaper per calorie (and gram) than healthier foods
2. freshly made food takes more time and energy to prepare than crappy food
3. people typically have a poor understanding of what exactly is in their food
Why are these things true? Partly because we didn't evolve to eat what we eat, and our bodies sometimes have trouble coping; partly because our diet isn't varied enough, and there's been a fair amount of research showing that more varied diets improve health; allergies/reactions to foods are higher in populations that eat a lot of those foods; and, among other things, decades of giant agribusinesses lobbying the government for laws and subsidies that support their business model of mass-producing cheap junk, and (sometimes) trying to suppress research that shows that cheap junk is unhealthy. Take "enriched flour". This is wheat flour that has had the husk removed (the husk contains almost all the fiber and other good nutrients; the germ contains basically nothing but carbohydrates), and then had artificially-produced versions of the nutrients in the husk added back in. What the hell? How about we just eat the whole grain instead (or flour therefrom) and cut out the middleman?
#3 really vexes me. My son has reactions to milk protein (irritability, rash around his butt), wheat (skin rash), canola (screaming hyperactivity), and artificial food coloring (more irritability and hypersensitivity to things going wrong); since my wife is still nursing him, she has to avoid those things too. And she's discovered that she reacts to milk protein (rashiness) and soy (body temperature drops by 1-2 degrees, cold sores develop on lip every couple of weeks, versus virtually never when she's off soy).
We still like to go out to eat, but it's a chore because we have to grill our waiters about what exactly they use to prepare the food. The question "What kind of cooking oil do you use to prepare X?" is usually met with either a blank stare (why should we expect someone who works in a restaurant to be informed about what's in the food? madness!), or the answer "Vegetable oil." Uh, yeah, pretty much ALL cooking oil is vegetable oil (animal fats are solid at room temperature, and are not "oil", culinarily speaking). WHICH VEGETABLE DID IT COME FROM? It matters! We eventually started saying "What kind of vegetable oil do you use," which frequently gets the answer "Regular vegetable oil", which lead to much headdesking frustration. Now we actually cue them by saying, "What kind of vegetable oil do you use, like, canola, corn, safflower, olive oil?" and most of the time that seems to get them to provide us with an actual answer (but sometimes they still say "regular").
Hell, one time we went to a very nice restaurant, and my wife expained that she couldn't have dairy or wheat. The waiter dutifully returned later and told us that he'd checked on the desserts and found one that wasn't made with dairy or wheat flour, "just white flour." We stared at him for a second and asked what plant white flour comes from. It was priceless watching the expression on his face as it dawned on him that white flour is also made from wheat. And this guy was a waiter at a well-known upscale restaurant in Los Angeles. And we've had this experience repeated numerous times, at restaurants all along the scale.
Anyway, rant over, but if you don't already, do yourself a favor -- find out what the hell you're eating. Learn about food. Read ingredient labels. (Did you know that "rapeseed" is another name for "canola"? Did you know that "casein" is milk protein? Did you know that virtually all soy sauce contains wheat, which is a pain in the ass for us because we love sushi?) Avoid proc
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
A tad draconian / big brother but perhaps making a rule of no single order can exceed 500 calories and a certain fat percentage, if you want more, buy 2 / 3 etc. That way people will at least be aware of much they're eating.
I should be getting fatter twice as fast.
Forcing kids to run around just makes them eat more when they get home. School bullies are hyper-active all day but most of them are fat because of all the lunches they steal.
...but as others have noted, that would take some parenting.
Half an hour of running is only a couple of Oreos so it isn't hard for kids to make it up by snacking. If you don't want your kids to get fat then don't give them free access to a refrigerator/pantry full of instant foods.
No sig today...
Not that anyone actually reads TFA, but did anyone else think the baby and the bun looked like a baby trying to suck on a sesame-seeded hamburger-bun breast?
We'll ignore for the moment that McDonald's basic burgers don't have seeded buns.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
I wish people would get off their soap boxes and realize that video games aren't all bad.
Ok, so video games makes kids fat, but if parents didn't throw McBurgers at them infront of their TVs/computers to keep them "occupied", where would we be? "Give 'em what they want to shut them up" is the best way to avoid active parenting, lack of child care, or any other excuse not to be involved with your own kids. (And its hard - I have two young kids - and its exhausting trying to keep them occupied.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
You'll find a stronger correlation with obesity if you look at how many kids are allowed free access to a kitchen full of high calorie, zero-preparation foods - cookies, chips, yoghurts, peanut butter, cereals, etc.
Uncontrolled snacking = fat kid.
No sig today...
You did not understand! McDonald's CEO was referring to this specific obesity-enhancing video game :
http://www.mcvideogame.com/
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
McDonalds use in-game advertisements
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I wonder how many calories video games have? Oh right, it's the McDonald's that people while playing the video games. Personally I play a lot of video games, watch a lot of TV, and go to work. I don't go out of my way to do physical activity but I don't inhibit it either, I just do what feels natural. I eat well though. Ever since I cut out McDonald's and drinking soda, I dropped 65 lbs over like 4 months. Now I'm not overweight in the least, and even then I wasn't really fat before, but bending over made me sweat, and I didn't like that. I still eat about a bag of cookies a day (a habit which I am cutting out now, I just can't quit all my bad habits all at once you know) and it's nowhere near as aweful as McDonald's, and I don't feel like vomiting after I eat either.
Twinstiq, game news
The only real problem with obesity is that people consider obesity a problem.
I'm fat. I don't care. I don't blame anyone for it. I have no problem with being fat.
EATERbrook - , eh?
So one of the replies I always see on discussions like this is that it's about "parental responsibility". The parents aren't taking responsibility, so we don't need to do anything as a society -- let's just blame bad parents.
Well, blaming bad parents and exhorting them in Slashdot posts to do better isn't going to make a damn bit of difference, except maybe to the small percentage of the overall population who are 1) parents and 2) read Slashdot. But having parents take better care of their kids probably is the result we want, rather than relying on laws or litigation to do the parts of the job that parents should be doing themselves.
So how do we get our parents to be better parents? That's the real question.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I was born in 1959. When I was a kid, I ate all the junk food I could, and I was skinny as a rail. All kids my age did the same, but there no child obesity crises. Diet coke? Are you kidding, that sort of thing was strictly for old people. But, we didn't have video games.
This report is obviously biased, but he may be partially right.
"hes sitting there playing WoW with a bag of potato chips."
I suspect the chip-cramming causes his weight problem, not the WoW or lack of exercise.
"if you watch Super Size Me theres a man in that film that ate over 10,000 big macs in his life time and looks completely fine"
IIRC the guy ate Big Macs but didn't eat any fries or drink soda. Big difference.
No sig today...
I am 6'3 and weigh in at a whopping 140 pounds.I play loads of video games...I hardly touch McDonalds. Eating McDonalds and playing video games all day is NOT good. Try getting outside sometime...fucking hate people who put allllllll the blame on ONE thing and one thing only. TV, vid games, fast food, hell if you eat McDonalds and other crap and read books all day you will get fat from NOT MOVING. Unless you're blessed with a high metabolism then FUCKING MOVE PEOPLE.
why am I suddenly reminded of a certain german kid caught on youtube recently?
I do believe he is right in a sense. You cannot compare the US to those countries so simply as it leaves out too many variables.
One thing I do note that makes a big difference is that parents of the current and maybe even previous generation are far more concerned with themselves than their children. We have more disposable income than generations raised in the seventies which in turn has resulted in many more things for adults to have to occupy their time. We then have the cycle where some people get stuck in wanting more and more and thereby reducing the time they allot to their children.
As such the children are left idle more here than in other countries so the higher fat and calorie intakes affect children here more. Combine with the abundance of food and junk food and its a double whammy. I can compare different parents easily just in my sister's own neighborhood. You can tell those who focus on their children and those who don't simply by observing the kids. From how outgoing they are to even their weight. Sorry, there just isn't an excuse for a 200lb 8th grader. Yet I can see the same in the parents. But wait you say, its genetic. Yeah, until I look at their wedding pictures and wonder where the dashing young man went and his hard body wife went...
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
(Calories In) - (Calories Burned) = (Net Calories)
If (Net Calories) > 0, Weight++
If (Net Calories) 0, Weight--
McDonald's could negatively contribute to the (Calories In) part of the equation.
Video games could negatively contribute to the (Calories Burned) part of the equation, if video games edge out enough physical activity.
Do you *really* think today's society has more "creeps" in it than previous generations??
I'd argue that the numbers haven't changed a bit. The only thing that HAS changed, really, is our communications abilities. Just as before the advent of motorized transportation, most people had very little idea about social differences in communities other than their own, we're learning a LOT more about all the "fetishes", "variants of normal", and "alternate lifestyles" of people with the advent of "Internet access for all".
Right now, if I really wanted to, I could probably search around IRC and other chat rooms on the net for 30 or 45 minutes, and eventually find some little group of individuals exchanging child porn, or a group devoted to teens hooking up with older men, or you name it. This doesn't prove that society has more creeps in it today than in the past. It just means that now, they have a visibility that wasn't present before, because of the new methods of communications they employ.
By the same token, law enforcement has leveraged the Internet as a means to warn people of those convicted of such crimes. 20 or 30 years ago, if a child molester lived on your block, chances are you never knew (or it was just some unsubstantiated rumor floating around). Now, you can do a lookup on a web page and get a map showing their exact location.
Well if the major media companies can get the public to listen to this FUD then they can increase your monthly cable bill as a quasi sin tax. "You have to pay more to offset the cost of health care for the fat children affected by the violent video games." Oh crap I forgot, don't give them any ideas!
Why are gamers so defensive? How can you even deny games have hurt the american physiquie? Just because you might consider yourself fit doesn't mean you A) Are, or B) are representitive of every gamer
No, of course McDonalds doesn't help. But it doesn't hurt either, what hurts is people who eat there full well knowing how unhealthy it is. People who eat there and then decide to go home and play Tekken for 6 hours, or WoW, or any game, and then doing it again tomorrow.
I just read through most of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Taubes), and he makes a convincing case for the notion that fat is not the evil we've been taught to believe by the medical community and the popular press. I'll be reviewing the original literature source Taubes himself used (one of the benefits of access to Medline etc) to make my own conclusions, but the facts point to excess carbohydrates, not fat and inactivity as the cause for the current obesity epidemic.
One should of course take this with a grain of salt (watch the blood pressure) - nutrition science is terribly complex. But I prefer rigorous analysis of the facts over "buy my diet book because I need to pay the rent and get on Oprah". The fact that the book is a painstaking slog through the research data is almost enough by itself to convince me to take it seriously - the target audience is definitely not the "just tell me what to eat" crowd.
We always get this same argument over and over again. Video games are bad because they are apparently keeping kids indoors and making them socially inept and fat.
But my question is, why doesn't anyone ever have the same problem with books?
Books, like video games:
1. Keep you indoors (the glare from trying to read outside stops me reading outdoors anyway)
2. Are a sit-down sit-still activity (discounting the Wii, and overzealous gamers)
3. Allow people to escape into sometimes inappropriate fantasy worlds
But, I have to admit, I sort of wanted some cake to go with it. The cake is a lie.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Given that McDonalds are blasting video games for contributing to obesity, it's funny to note that their main competitor, Burger King, put out three video games for kids to play.
It might even be ironic, but the proper usage of that term probably doesn't apply (If it did, then this comment would be ironic).
While some brands of peanut butter have a small amount of trans fats (very small to make it negligible), it is one of the healthiest things you can eat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_butter
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Wii Fit
Two more words...Wii Boxing
Where does this greedy atery-clogging, "Super-Size Me" executive get off blaming video games for something that the fast-food industry's focus on cheap and un-healthy food is largely responsible for?
With this ridiculous statement from McDonald's as our reason for it. I think I feel my blood boiling as my "nerd rage" overflows.
Don't forget, we have known for ages that video games make us fat and mean.
In actuality there are a lot of well-controlled studies showing that kids on high-carb diets get fat whether they exercise or not (which explains why Americans on the whole are getting more obese at the same time that they are exercising more and eating less fat). The poison at McDonalds is not the fat but the sugar—an addictive drug.
"Fat makes you fat" is attractive because it's easy to understand. But it's dead wrong. The truth is more complicated than that—complicated enough to be beyond the ken of most journalists, politicians and health bureaucrats. So they keep telling us that fat is bad for us, not because it's true, but because it's simple, and they have to tell us something.
To put it into a familiar context, they're telling us to cure buffer overflows by eliminating buffers.
To learn more, search on insulin, adenosine, lipolysis, read the journal papers, follow the trail. You may want dictionary.com in another window—I did. The good news for most of us is that caffeine counteracts adenosine—not only keeping us alert but helping to keep us skinny.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Real revenge!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's foolish, as many have pointed out, to take advice from a fast-food company's CEO.
There's also a large component of lifestyle in addition to food intake that contributes to obesity. Lifestyle includes the level of daily activity, and certainly flailing around a WII or getting worked-up at a game is still pretty low on the activity scale, while still a bit above, say, sleeping or reading. Lifestyle also includes dietary choices, such as what to eat and how much.
The latter is what I'm getting at in my subject line. For some reason, hunger is somehow "evil" and must be waged war upon! I can confidently say that starving is a bad thing. This notion that, if a child anywhere in the USA (and apparently the UK too per this article) is experiencing a pang of hunger from missing a meal or an afternoon snack, the society will collapse into a bloody revolution or something, is almost as silly as my hyperbole in this sentence. I think if more kids were brought-up to eat when they became hungry, and only eat enough to "not be hungry for a few hours", obesity wouldn't be such a problem. Choices on what to eat also factor in, but McDonald's isn't the sole culprit. When I'm hungry, I eat at the first reasonable opportunity, and eat only enough to keep me from being hungry until slightly before my next opportunity to eat. If I get too hungry between opportunities, I'll graze on snacks. If I'm not hungry at a given opportunity to eat (such as lunch), I pass up the opportunity. I'm on the lean side, that's probably one of the factors.
I also think a lot of the bad eating habits have to do with that crap kids' parents insist on, such as "cleaning your plate" and "thinking of the starving waifs in Ethiopia who have no food". You know what? I came to the realization when I was rather young that eating all my food, when I KNEW it would make me uncomfortably full, simply wasn't going to vicariously help ANY of the suffering, starving children in Ethiopia. I was happy I wasn't starving, but being uncomfortable by eating too much wasn't going to make me any more grateful for having food.
Moreover, I think anytime a parent has to tell a kid to clean a plate on a regular basis, they're not paying enough attention and are basically force-feeding the poor thing. I have four animals in my household (cat, dog, horses), and they usually aren't hitting weight extremes. All it takes is paying attention to whether they're looking a bit too much on the fleshy or thin side, and adjusting the amount or richness of their diets accordingly. I don't worry too much if they *want* more, I do make note of if they're leaving a lot behind (except in the case of the cat, who regulates her intake on free-choice well enough), and go by the old rule of thumb, "ribs shouldn't be seen, but should be easily felt with minimal pressure". Parents and caretakers who fail to pay attention to these things with an objective eye and make decisions accordingly are responsible for their fat-ass kids, not video games, not McDonald's, not society, Iran, or anyone else. The buck stops with the parents. You just can't generally trust children or animals to make appropriate dietary decisions for themselves.
does fast food cause violence?
Though sugar- and caffeine-laden drinks can perhaps wind a person up, most of a typical fast-food menu would probably leave you feeling lethargic and feeling a bit calmer, due to the high-fat content and other chemicals such as the enzymes in the cheese on your burger. That's what's a bit perverse about a lot of restaurant meals--not only will they make you feel fat, they'll put you in a lazy mood so you are less motivated to be active. When those effects wear off you'll feel tired and grumpy, then you'll want to eat more bad food to get that mild euphoria again.
Anyways, this McDonalds bigwig is actually talking out of hid butt. Video games don't make people fat--the lack of physical activity is what partly contributes to weight gain. Some video games are GOOD for your health...how many morbidly obese people have YOU seen playing the advanced levels on DDR for example? And many Nintendo Wii titles certainly encourage people to get up and move. In any case, sedentary video-game playing is only partly the cause of weight gain. The other much bigger contributer to weight gain is excessive caloric intake. Kids who don't snack and skip meals because they are compulsively playing video games are SKINNY kids (still unhealthy, but skinny). Kids who snack on junk food and eat Big Macs between levels are FAT kids.
Research has now widely shown that thoguh exercise is essential to good health, by far the largest single contributer to obesity is DIET. It only takes moments longer to eat a supersized value meal than it does to eat a regular value meal, but it takes a half-hour of moderate activity to burn off the extra calories...worse yet, you can eat a fast food meal faster than you can eat a home-cooked meal, but it would take an extra hour of moderate activity to burn off the calories. As far as fixing obesity goes, priority one should be fixing people's over-processed, carb-loaded, calorie-dense diet.
That said, though, McDonald's is not the most evil of offenders in providing us with easy access to a nasty diet and it really does get far more flak than it deserves (perhaps because it is a big corporation that markets toward children which amplifies the focus on McDo). The baddest, most evil food-mongers are most of the "casual dining" restaurant franchises, primarily because of their insanely huge portions (especially in the United States). Appetiser platters at these eateries are actually large enough for 2 to 4 complete meals. "Meal sized" salads can approach 1500 Calories. Surveys have been done that show that "healthy choice" or "lighter fare" meals even have excessive portions...too much of even a good thing will make you fat.
I am a gamer. I play like 15hrs a week plus I am a developer. That is 60 -80 hrs a week on a chair.
The funny part is that I am not fat!!!!
The only reason that I have for my non fatness is that
I DON'T EAT AT MCDONALDS!!!
Could McDonald's be being paid by a politician (or Jack Thompson), to say that??? And what about the Wii. All though the Will can't compare to actual excersize, but it's a start. Hey McDonalds, you want the truth: your to blame. See, I did what the McDonald's CEO did. I decide I believe a right-wing conspiracy theory, then, using inductive reasoning, decided to blame an entire industry for one problem, that doesn't even make seanse. What McDonald's just said is the equivalent to saying: Microsoft Windows powers many computers Lots of kids are spending too much time online Microsoft is to blame for childhood obesity! Now he'll go find a politician or well-respected figure, tell him this, and force him to say it to the world, or just say it himself.
My kids love hearing tales of horrible injuries for some reason. I started to rattle off the bike and car accidents that hit our family over the years. In one, my dad had part of his scalp peeled back (no helmet) when hit by a car on his bike. In another, my 3 year-old sister was in the back seat without a seat belt during a car accident. Then there was the time I was hit by a motorcycle while on my bike - neither one was wearing a helmet and the motorcycle rider got some serious hospital bills.
I think there's some risks, such as abduction, which are completely overblown. My wife was admitting she sometimes worries about it last night. I told her she should worry about heart disease instead. I tell my kids they shouldn't worry about monsters, they should worry about dogs off their leashes or walking in the street.
Personally I'm quite happy with the level of parenting I give my kids, which includes managing their screen time and amount of exercise. Plus they're not doing the crazy things I used to do, like ride the bus downtown at age five or climb cliffs in the rain without ropes when I was twelve. Insanity . . .
Kids who have TV or Video games taken away do not lose the weight. They just do another activity that is Just as sedentary.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
at least the one I was one in the fall did. When was the last time you were on a school bus?
Thanks mom & dad!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
that you were abused by being let outside to play and exercise so often, are you still able to live a normal life?
Just because an idea is popular doesn't make it right.
Just a short time ago, Slashdot ran an article that talked about Gary Taubes latest book Good Calories Bad Calories: Challenging the Convention Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. How many Slashdot'ers actually examined what this article was all about? It appears that many posters have not given this topic the consideration it needs.
In short, Taubes argues very thoroughly and persuasively that there is much known about the cause of fat accumulation, and it goes very much against what the medical establishment claims. Anyone who has not closely looked at this matter is very likely in the dark about what is going on in our bodies, regardless of what they've heard or believe. Carbohydrates, specifically refined carbohydrates like white flour and sugar are the main culprits. Obesity is a disease that occurs because of poor nutrition, not because of poor willpower, gluttony, and sloth.
Here are the relevant links:
New York Times Magazine article from 2002: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63
MIT interview about the above article: http://web.mit.edu/knight-science/fellows/interviews/taubes.html
Taubes' recent article about the role of exercise: http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/
Happy reading! And good luck staying healthy!
If video games cause people to get fat then why don't just they start putting the nutrition facts on the labels? This way we can better work them into our diets.
Video games have no calories, therefore are not fattening.
Food intake is the soul source of body fat.
I'll make you a deal.
Tell Ronald to pull his creepy pedophile advertising from all the children's shows. Tell him to quit bribing my school board for access to the classroom for his "special presentations." Tell him to keep his Richard-Simmons fat ass away from whispering in my children's ears 24/7 "McDonald's is cool and magical and if your Mommy and Daddy will take you there Grimace has a special present for you."
Pull his multi-billion dollar marketing machine away from my children's playground. Stop cramming preternatural amounts of fat, sugar and salt into their food so that my children's hindbrains don't scream "My God, we found the mother lode, we'll never need to eat again!" at the first whiff. Tell Ronald to quit fucking around with the peace in my home, and I'll lay off trying to shove him in jail with all the other fat, middle-aged men who wanna wear makeup and play with little kids.
Yes, I keep my kids away from that crap, but I'm sick of Ronald spending billions of dollars worming his way into my kids' dreams telling them that Mommy and Daddy are keeping them from something special.
Parental Responsibility?! How would you react if I followed your kid around all day telling them "I'll take you to McMagicFairyLand if your Mommy and Daddy will let me..."
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
When I was a kid, video games were in their toddlership; the Apple ][ and the C64 were big when I was 'Stand By Me' age. --And I played a LOT of them. And I read tons of books. And watched too much TV, and was engaged in a bunch of other quiet desk-y activities which included things like dice and soldering irons. But I also liked to climb trees and ride my bike all over creation, and play the odd sports and even cross a suicidal train bridge with by friends now and again. --And in gym class, we had to run around the school yard perimeter three times every school day. That's about a mile! Every day. Running. What the heck? We were all in pretty great shape!
.
Life hasn't changed that much for kids except that the TV and video game quotient has crept up, (but not by so much), and McFries along with much of our food supply now uses GM vegetable oil. (McFries used to be cooked with animal fat back in the good old days when the oils wouldn't break down under heating into toxins; but that's another story. . ).
And yet there has been a distinct change, and I don't think it is linked to any one thing; not to video games or TV or our diets. I think it's a collective build-up of unhealthy and limiting forces, no one of which is going to tip the scales on its own. But it's there. People today are in general, less interesting. I'm sorry, you youngsters our there, but it's true. There's a curve of sorts going on. Want to test it? Do the following. .
Sit down with a sampling of regular burger-eating, TV-watching twenty-year-olds, (I should note that this does not apply to people who have disengaged from all the normal culprit lifestyles), and ask about their lives and their childhoods. Listen to their stories. Then do the same thing with a bunch of people in their late thirties and early forties. Move through the decades. --You'll begin to really notice the trend with people who were born in the fifties and sixties.
I did that for a while without particularly planning to measure anything; I was just in a phase where I was meeting lots of people, and was stunned by just how much more alive people seemed who had been born in the earlier decades. --I knew this one girl who must be in her late forties by now, who when she was a kid burned down a garage in the middle of one of her adventures. She and her gang also used to hike through the city ravine system which back then could take you from one end of the city to the other without needing to abandon the tree line, and they knew when all their various abusive parents would be away so that they could raid their separate kitchens en masse for lunch without being spotted. They'd take in fifty-cent films down at the Kingsway with the gang sitting along the entire front row passing roaches made from wild marijuana they'd picked in the forest and rolled into joints the size of 12 gage cigars. --One time they went to their favorite baseball field only to find that the Toronto chapter of the Hell's Angels had settled in for the day. --So they challenged them to a baseball game, and everybody ended up having one of the most exciting days of their lives.
Shit. I was born in the early Seventies, and my stories weren't nearly so bloody or amazing. --I did a few cool things; I burned down a fence one time trying to reverse-engineer fireworks, and I stole a shipment of wonderbread from a grocery store with my friends one night on a whim.
But I know a guy who was born in the fifties who has stories like Indiana Jones. And a thirteen year-old today whose big adventure was that she lost her cell phone and had to go looking for it in the woods.
--Now, I know this is not the norm. There are placid people in all times. --And adventurous ones, too. But it's the style and depth of adventure which I notice seems to have diminished over the decades. George Lucas used to be into street racing and hot rods; American Graffiti was drawn from his own teen years. Most of the young wannabe directors I meet today just watch movies. And
I played BurgerTime on my old NES when I was a kid, yet I didn't get fat.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Oh Steve. You are a blueberry muffin of creamy, creamy fun. Jibber on about your salads and your apples (Apples! At McDonalds!) until the cows come home, but in the end you'll have to admit that next to no-one buys those and that those dumpling-shaped kids your company has raised still love the taste of your Lard Burger and that parents still buy them.
Peanut butter is healthy, sure, but one of the most calorie-laden foods in the house.
No sig today...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
You could argue that the other way around (blaming obesity for video games), but I wouldn't want to try...
Yeah, that is probably why people like me (lots of games, nearly no fast-food) are slim and so many of the "typical american fuckups" (lots of TV, very little games, lots of fast-food) are fat like hell.
Sorry, dude, if you live on a diet of McShit food, there is no way you can move enough to burn that amount of fat and calories unless you are hyperactive and a pro in at least three different sports.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Facts are now that I stopped patronizing them because I really got tired of ordering food that came swimming (literally) in the box full of cooking oil!!
They just don't want a federal law being passed that requires them to change the product they push. Many people here have gotten tired of going to Micky-D's and having to talk to someone on a lousy speaker that barely understands English, then getting a sandwich that usually is completely wrong, and that swims in a half-inch of oil in the box, along with it leaking out and soaking the bag, which then soaks your car seats.... you get the picture.
Stop buying the stuff and the obesity issue should begin to alleviate.
Cheers!
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Fastfood chains are KNOWN for promoting action movies and video games spin out as a result or vise versa. So merit equals zero to what they said here.
Maybe that CEO should be aware that McDonald's has a deal with Nintendo to put N64s and GameCubes in their PlayPlace areas, and that they've also made it completely kid-friendly to play their DS systems online with McDonalds' WiFi connection.
Born to Play