RantSome: A Personal Soapbox Site

I've got the news on in the background, and there was just a story about a lawsuit against McDonald's on behalf of several obese children in New York (I did have a link to a news article about it, but the link is gone now, so I've removed it, sorry). One of the children is apparently fifteen and weighs four hundred pounds (that's 181.44 Kg) and is diabetic, probably as a result of his weight.

The lawsuit, according to the report I just heard on television, apparently argues that the parents of these children are not educated or lack the time to properly supervise their children's nutrition.

So that's McDonald's fault? I heard this four-hundred-pound kid's mother say she had "no idea" that his eating at McDonald's every day, sometimes several times per day, was bad for him.

Did this woman spend her life under a frickin rock somewhere? How can any American with a television or who has ever seen a newspaper not know that McDonald's every day, several times a day, is bad for you? And where the hell was she when her son was two hundred, three hundred pounds? Surely he didn't go from normal, healthy weight to morbidly obese just overnight. Didn't she notice he was getting fatter and fatter and fatter, and wonder why?

And totally aside from that, since when is it the responsibility of a corporation to look after someone's children because the parents lack the education and the time to do it themselves? What kind of stupid reasoning is that? What the hell has happened to make people think that anyone, everyone, is at fault, except for themselves?

I do think that McDonald's probably targets children a little too much, and that the children's meals they sell are awfully high in fat, but that's a different issue. The point here is that no matter how cute and appealing the advertising is, it's still your own choice (or that of your parents) to put the food into your mouth.

Hey, I'm fat... Do you think I could sue someone for it? How about Hershey's and Cadbury's? After all, they didn't tell me that if I sat around and ate chocolate all the time and didn't exercise enough I'd get fat...

But no, wait. I've been fat since I was a kid, and we mostly ate at home. Maybe I can sue my parents for filling me up with whole milk and high fat foods all the time and insisting that I eat all of the food they served, despite the fact that the portions were far too big for a kid!

No, wait. They lacked the education to know that this was an unhealty diet, so... I've got it! I'll sue the American dairy industry for not warning my mother that all that high-fat milk was bad for me! Yeah, that's it!

Woohoo, I'm gonna be a millionaire, baby! Because, you see, it couldn't possibly be my own fault that despite my early poor training I've never really taken the time to deliberately adopt healthy eating and exercise habits...

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If you're fat and you know it, sue McDonald's