Absolutely. I cringe anytime I hear someone talk about how much running etc it takes to “work off” a given food item. That’s not how it works! If you tried to literally exercise enough to negate all calories you consume, you would die. You exercise to burn off the additional calories you consume above what you…

Most people don’t feed their kids a Happy Meal every day, and they don’t need a fucking guilt trip because they decide to feed something perfectly reasonable to their kid now and then.

Yawn. You aren’t good at this.

This is where I see a discrepency in the “McDonalds makes you fat” logic. Does it? No, but it can be a part of a worse habit of eating. Chances are, if you’re eating 3 chicken nugget happy meals a day, your diet away from McDonalds is just as bad.

Yup. The idea that because the food comes from McDonald’s, so it must be bad and that the only way to reverse the negative effects is to burn all the calories away, is stupid. If we were to burn away all the calories of everything we ate in a day by exercising, I think we’d all be dead.

McDonald’s! Why, only the awful peasants eat there! ::adjusts monocle::

That’s the best you could do? With all that time? You went with “you work at McDonald’s!” Followed up by “you’re fat!” Quality work there!

your comment seems more of an effort to justify feeding your kid crap than any sort of real rebuttal.... just skip McD’s and make them a lunch. Pretty sure you could make it healthier with out a lot of effort.

Also I guess that for a kid, that is in constant move all day is not that hard to “burn” those calories, maybe sugar and fat is what is more damaging than just the calories. I don't think a Happy Meal every few months is a problem.

Yep, and presumably any meal has calories that must be burned off. The article reads as if children should have 0 calories.

The kid doesnt need to burn all those calories. Do you do enough exercise to burn all of your caloric intake every day? I’m guessing no, because that’s dumb. The author is using a dumb metric to make a point about the unhealthy food. There’s other crap in there it would be best they don’t eat, but calories aren’t…

THIS.

And your comment seems to have missed the point entirely.

Yes, since every study shows that owning a health tracker makes people healthier (if they are not already).

I am not justifying anything. I am pointing out that crap information and crap math was used to make a crap point. If you want to argue about how you can make a child a more healthy lunch than chicken, apple slices (or yogurt), apple juice and about 16 french fries then by all means do so, just don’t use crap data.

This article is premised on the idea that the Happy Meal calories are in addition to the regular calories consumed by a child. If someone is scarfing full meals as snacks, that’s not a McDonald’s issue, that’s a family issue.

Eating a Happy Meal as a regular meal isn’t ideal, but it’s not the end of the world, either.…

It’s a McDonald’s article on a Gawker website. Are you really surprised that it has a negative snarky tone? You must be new here.

The problem is that a chicken McNugget kids meal is only 420 calories, 470 with barbeque sauce. Considering an active 4-8 year old is supposed to consume as much as 1,800 calories/day (1,600 for a sedentary child) then feeding them 3 chicken nugget happy meals a day is not going to make them fat. They are also not…

Also, the burgers by themselves are not really a caloric issue. It’s when you add a soft drink and fries that a McDonald’s meal becomes an issue. A hamburger is 250 calories. Add a medium fries and a sweet tea, and you’re at 720. I’m not sure what items the author was using for his “840 calories in a Happy Meal”…

What a negative way to write about something that’s generally positive. Kids are going to get pointless little plastic toys with their happy meals anyways, at least this one might make them want to walk a bit more.