Can I ask you a question? Does anybody think that French fries, hamburgers, cheeseburgers and milkshakes are healthy foods?

Does anybody think that eating a steady diet of this junk is good for you?

Does anybody REALLY think that taking Ronald McDonald out and shooting him is going to make kids eat less of this stuff?

Okay, look. We’ve got a childhood obesity problem in this country right now.  It’s true, and I don’t deny it.  Nor do I deny that it is a serious problem. It truly is.

Obesity will shorten your life.  No question. It will also lower the quality of your shortened life. Plus, it will drive up the medical costs in this country, because these fat kids are going to have more medical problems, and they will be visiting doctors and hospitals much more often, on average, than their normal-weighted counterparts. Obesity can lead to diabetes, heart problems, pulmonary problems, strokes, increased allergies and joint problems.

The latest survey on childhood obesity shows that 16% of all children between the ages of 6 and 19 in this country are obese. That means one out every six kids in this country is fat. That’s an amazing and alarming statistic and we should be addressing the problem in earnest!

There is a group of concerned people out there who call themselves Corporate Accountability International. Currently, their main goal is to get rid of childhood obesity, and their main focal point is McDonald’s Corporation. They are demanding that McDonald’s provide a “health footprint” for their menu. They are also demanding that McDonald’s euthanize Ronald McDonald, claiming that the character entices kids to overeat McDonald’s food.

You know something? I really don’t think that Ronald McDonald is the problem.  He is just an easy target. Attacking him makes people feel better, but it does nothing to actually tackle the problem.

Okay, look.  Perhaps old Ronald does put a happy face on French fries and fatty burgers for kids.  However, who are the people who BUY this garbage for the kids to consume?  Last time I checked, kids under sixteen years old do not have driver’s licenses.  So, that means that SOMEBODY ELSE has to be driving them to these fast food joints in order to purchase said offending foods. Now, who do you think these “somebody elses” might be?  Do you think maybe . . . parents?

Without parents enabling the kids, these kids would have extremely limited access to these foods!

Did you know that Ronald McDonald has been around since 1963?

Uh-huh!

The very first actor to portray Ronald McDonald was a man by the name of Willard Scott. (Yup! That Willard Scott…the weatherman.) And he first portrayed Ronald McDonald, The Hamburger-Happy Clown in television commercials back in 1963.

Just for the hell of it, do you know what the childhood obesity rate was in this country from 1963 to 1970?

Less than 5%. (Less than 1 in 20 kids, as opposed to 1 in 6 kids today.)

That’s right, even though Ronald McDonald was on television and radio back then, for some reason, the childhood obesity rate was more than 11 percentage points lower than it is today.  Is Ronald more effective today than back then? Or is something else coming into play?

You know something? My mother used to take me to McDonald’s, and I used to eat French fries and shakes and hamburgers all the time.  I also ate Pop Tarts, and sugar-coated cereals for breakfast every single morning.

Tony The Tiger was always telling us that SUGAR Frosted Flakes were “G-G-G-GREAT!” and SUGAR Pops Pete was pushing sugar-coated cereal made out of corn balls to us every day. (Have you noticed that the cereal-makers have deleted the word “Sugar” from the names of their products these days? Sugar Frosted Flakes are now Frosted Flakes.  Sugar Pops are now Corn Pops. They all have the same amount of sugar.  Just the names have been changed.)

For supper when I was a kid, we always had things like red meat and mashed potatoes with gravy. We used real butter on everything. My mother cooked and baked with Crisco lard, and we ALWAYS had homemade brownies, fudge, cakes and pies for desert, every single day!

There was one drawer in the kitchen that contained nothing but candy bars. (Hershey’s Chocolate Bars, Bolsters, Clark Bars, PayDays…). There was also one kitchen cabinet that contained nothing but store-bought cookies and crackers.

We used to drink Coca-Cola all of the time.  (Diet Coke wasn’t even invented 1982. It replaced Tab, which was first introduced in 1960, but we didn’t drink it because it tasted like crap.)

And it was the same way in most families back in the fifties and sixties.

In fact, we probably ate more crap back in those days than the kids eat today, and yet the obesity rate is through the roof today, and, back in the “old days”, obesity was more the exception than the rule.

What’s changed then?

Perhaps it isn’t so much what the kids are putting into their bodies as it is what they do with the stuff after they ingest it.  In other words, perhaps the kids back then were more active and burned off those calories more than the kids of today do.

We were always outside back in those days.  I spent my childhood riding my bike, climbing trees, playing pick-up baseball and football, etc., etc., etc. (And almost all of these activities were done without any adult supervision whatsoever.)

Now-a-days, it is easier for helicopter, overly-protective parents to monitor their children when thekids are safely cocooned in the house, ensconced in front the computer or big-screen tv. When the children are involved with sedentary, indoor activities, parents don’t have to worry about “protecting” them  from scraping their knees, riding their bikes without helmets and other assorted suits of armor, or being assaulted and infected by dreaded ticks, mosquitoes and bees.

( I can remember my mom coming into the family room on Saturday mornings, turning off the television, and telling my brothers and I to go outside and play.)

So, ladies and gentlemen, as far as the childhood obesity problem is concerned, I contend that the culprits are not Ronald McDonald, Tony The Tiger or Sugar Pops Pete; the culprits are folks who are much more real, and who live in the same houses as these fat kids.

As Walt Kelly’s comic strip character Pogo once said, “We have seen the enemy,  and he is us.”