What do you think about toddlers being fed McDonalds or KFC?

I can understand the convenience of it,but if I had kids,they would be health nuts at an early age and probably hate their mother for it ;)

Toddlers under three need a high-fat diet. Just sayin’.

Once in a while is fine. As long it’s not like every single day.
just saying the obvious

@Seek_Kolinahr… thats very true.

@Mike_Hunt…. although McDonalds, on a programme called Watchdog, last year, advised that adults only eat it once in a while. So are you sure it’s ever ok for toddlers?

A warning label? Certainly not. If people can’t use good judgment in feeding their children, that’s their own problem. There’s nothing wrong with McDonald’s food, even for children under five, if it is in moderation.

That said, I do think that McDonald’s marketing and advertising is designed to make kids who have no judgment want McDonald’s so much that they’ll throw a tantrum if they don’t get it, and I would not be opposed to limiting their advertising, but I’m not sure how you even begin to go about that without really interfering too much.

There’s parents that give it to their kids all the time, then there are busy parents that need the convenience of it. It’s unrealistic to make your kid a balanced meal every single day, people have jobs. So the parents that seem to not care at all, of course, are bad influences on their childs health.

@Seek_Kolinahr Children under two need a high fat diet, children over two still need more fat than adults, but they’ll get plenty of it without ever going to McDonald’s, and it’s still best for that fat to come from vegetable sources.

There is nothing wrong with an occasional Happy Meal. It becomes a problem when you let them have one more than once a week.

Well, if I wanted to kill my baby, or wanted it to become morbidly obese in the future, for which dulling their tastes with flavour enhancers is one of the core necessities, then I guess I would do that too.

@Snarp

I’m a big fan of healthy, organic food. Just playing devil’s advocate. ^_^

Ok, I’ll be the honest one.. fast food is a parents guardian angel.. just like television. And before everyone gets in a ruckus… no… not in abundance.. but occasionally.

On road trips.. the boys are getting fast food.. It’s convenient, they love it, and it makes them quiet so mommy and daddy don’t have an aneurysm. The same goes with tv.. sometimes it’s good. They don’t veg out and watch it all day long.. but when we need a break, or some… less than quiet time… it’s a life saver.

@NaturalMineralWater

Hear, here.

If it weren’t for The Wonder Pets, I’d never have time to wash my son’s cloth diapers or prepare his homemade chicken nuggets.

@NaturalMineralWater Heck, if you’re on the turnpike you don’t have any choice other than fast food. And yes, sometimes even when you’re not on a road trip you end up with such a busy day that stopping at McDonald’s is the only way to get the family fed. Again, as long as it’s not three times a week, it’s fine.

@Snarp… I’ve just done a little check about what you said in regards to McDonalds food being ok. If a child ate 4 McNuggets & fries they would have consumed half their daily allowance for salt. Do you really think it’s ok for a meal thats popular with young children to be so ill balanced?

@ragingloli…. thank you. I think you’re about the only one who seems to get it.

When my kids were little, we did get fast food on occasion, but not often. I don’t think it’s a big problem as long as it’s only a ‘sometimes’ thing. (I used to tell my husband it doesn’t count as ‘going out’ for a meal if I have to unwrap my food.)

@TheJoker
Fast food once in a while is ok…for adults. But it should be kept away from babies, toddlers and small children at all costs, because you ruin them permanently for the rest of their lives if you start poisoning them that early. There is a reason it is called ‘Junk Food’.

@TheJoker The science on fast food is pretty rock solid and blatant. Fast food (as a whole) is not healthy. That said, I’m not going to tell my kids they can never go to Chucky Cheese because the pizza is greasy. Unhealthy things, in moderation, can have a healthy benefit.. even if it’s less than obvious (such as a kid not having childhood nightmares of eating salad every day at school and drinking water whilst all the other kids got pepsi.) XD

The toddler years of a child are the most important. Even feeding them these high fat, high salt and highly sugary foods once a month is too much. It sets up the child to wanting these types of foods more in the future, the addictive properties of fast foods are what causes this.

Just like someone who smokes one cigarette can instantly become addicted and want more and more. Of course this doesn’t happen every time but, the more you feed them McDonalds the higher the chance the brain will crave more of the same. Fast food is like a drug that our brains can’t resist easily.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48605/title/Junk_food_turns_rats_into_addicts

Pretty much anything is alright in moderation.

I say the parents are in for some difficult times getting their kids use to home cooked healthy meals.
However to each their own. I won’t police people on how to raise their kids.
My niece was raised on that stuff. If my sister in law couldn’t go out and buy her food than she would’ve starve to death because mom hated cooking. It was either mc,donalds or if she was lucky a peanut butter jelly sandwich or can raviolis.
Just so you know, my niece has always been underwieght and still is at age 20.
Not the healthiest kid but I think peanut butter and jelly and ravioli would’ve had the same effect anyway.

I don’t think it’s good for children to eat that stuff. I wouldn’t feed it to my child if I could help it. But I wouldn’t feed my child any of those frozen dinners, pasta in a can, chicken nuggets or fruit roll-ups, either.

@TheJoker Look I hate McDonald’s, I really do, I avoid it like the plague, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with eating it once in a while, even for a small child. And children under five are not toddlers, BTW.

So the chicken nuggets have half the days allowance of salt. Fine, if the kid only gets that much salt through the rest of the day, then there’s no harm. But even at that, it’s a misunderstanding of nutrition, daily allowances, and childhood nutrition in general. It doesn’t matter what a child eats in any given day (within reason), it matters what they eat over the course of a week or so. This is true of anyone. If I eat too much salt or fat today, I’m not going to have a heart attack tomorrow, and if I eat a nice salad with a vinaigrette dressing, some whole wheat bread, and a lot of fruit tomorrow I’ll more than make up for it. So will a child. And that assumes the child will eat all the chicken nuggets. There’s a good chance that a child under five, let alone an actual toddler will only eat two of them.

@ragingloli That’s rats that were given an unlimited supply of only junk food, and it wasn’t McDonald’s either, it was Ho-Hos, bacon, and pound cake. Yeah, that would be bad for any one. But McDonald’s once a month or once a week isn’t going to hurt anyone, not even a toddler.

I am guilty of buying my son a Happy Meal just to get him to eat something.

When the kid’s trying to subsist entirely on diluted apple juice and blueberries, I’ll take the sodium content to make the kid gain some weight.

@Pandora If a parent cooks home cooked meals most nights, like I do, there is nothing wrong with an occasional treat.

I don’t think fast food is appropriate for small children. When my friends sister was younger, we never took her out to fast food places. I always cooked. I would make homemade chicken tenders and sweet potato fries. Plus I only used olive oil. Now we go out like once every month, and her sister asks for healthy options like juice and apples with the chicken. She is a ten year old health nut.

@ragingloli Great link! That is what I’m trying to point out with my answer. Of course fast food once a week or month isn’t going to harm you from a nutritional point of view, but what it does to the brain is something to be worried about.

It’s no wonder you see kids throwing tantrums when they don’t get their chocolates and chips. The brain is addicted to sugar, salt and fat because it experiences a high (by releasing certain chemicals) similar to that of drugs. That’s why you don’t see kids making a scene over mum not buying that carrot or mushroom.

@HTDC Once a week or once a month isn’t likely to affect the brain either. Those rats ate nothing else and ate as much as they wanted. It’s a study of the effects of an unrestricted all junk food diet, not of eating a hamburger and fries once in a while.

@Snarp… alright calm down. You’re not a McDonalds share holder are you? As it happens I don’t hate McDonalds, it does a job, & at the end of the day it’s down to personal choice. A choice, incidentally, that small children don’t have. & BTW I don’t really care what age a toddler stops being a toddler, it was just an arbitrary age I chose for this question. The point is that parents are feeding their children too much salt & fat, which is causing more toddlers & children of school starting age to be fat & obese. In a toddlers normal diet, without trips to fast food restaurants, or snacks such as crisps, chocolate, ice cream, biscuits etc they are already getting all the salt & fat they require. I picked on fast food restaurants as they illustrate the point that most modern parents simply don’t know how to correctly feed their children. A treat should be a treat, not a daily, or weekly occurence.

@Snarp Once a week, once a month, it still has an effect. It’s easy to say taking ecstasy once a week won’t have an effect but once the brain has had it, it will want more the majority of the time. That is how an addiction starts.

@TheJoker Most modern parents don’t know how to correctly feed their children

May I ask where you are getting these numbers from?

@HTDC Food is not ecstasy. Sugar is not cocaine. Salt is not heroin. Fat is not nicotine. Eating unhealthy food once in a while has never been shown to cause anything like an addiction, certainly not by the study @ragingloli mentioned.

@Snarp I hate to be so blunt but you clearly didn’t understand what the article or myself were talking about. Obviously they aren’t the same but the effects are.

@jonsblond… I just lifted them streight from McDonalds UK website. It has all the nutritional values listed. & from the programme in the link above.

@TheJoker My problem is that you suggested a label saying that fast food should not be given to children under five. There is no evidence that such a label is appropriate. There is a difference between saying that eating too much fast food is bad for you or for children and saying that it can never be eaten by them. I fully agree that some parents give their children too much fast food, but I can’t say whether or not it is the majority, and it certainly isn’t all.

@HTDC I understood the article. It didn’t prove anything about the occasional consumption of high fat, high salt, or high sugar foods.

@Snarp…. thats a very fair comment. Although my personal opinion is still that I can see no place for fast food in a young childs diet… but it’s just an opinion.

I am astay at home mom who cooks healthy meals every day for my family. I maintain a garden year round with fresh veggies, fruit and herbs. My daughter is sixteen. I allowed her fast food occasionally as a treat, or when travelling. She is very healthy, and she doesn’t feel I have deprived her of anything. She prefers to eat healthy. She says she doesn’t like the way “bad food” makes her body feel. She is old enough to make her own choices of what she likes. I think she will stick with a healthy diet as an adult. If she doesn’t have the time to make healthy food , she can always stop by mom and dads for a healthy meal.

I don’t think anything of it.

I take my son occasionally. Key word: occasionally. It’s not a fixed part of his diet. We just went the other day, and sat down inside so we could get out of the house, have some food, and me not worry that I’d be disrupting other customers (seriously, if you think children ruin your “dining experience” then don’t dine at McDonalds…”) He knows what it is, and sometimes asks for chicken, but I can go home and make the chicken. Sometimes we go for a quick meal though.

You can’t restrict what parents feed their child, as long as the food is legal then parents can and will feed it to their children.

I think a rats brain is a bit simpler than ours for one. And I would occasionally take my kids out to eat. None of them are addicted nor am I (although I was raised on home cooked food) and both my kids (now young adults) love my food instead. Only exception is my son loves curry and I hate making it. And he isn’t overweight. Now my daughter is but she didn’t get that way till she moved away and was working 60 to 70 hours a week and only had time for fast food. Now shes back home. And back to eating home meals.

@TheJoker I try not to base important decisions about my child’s nutrition on the number of hits on google.

@Snarp… Hahaha, thats probably a good idea…. but it was just to illustrate a point.

It’s a scientific fact that eating these types of foods releases the feel good chemicals. We all know that, no need to try and dispute it. That’s why we all (well most) of us feel good when we eat chocolate right? So, the more you feed them these foods the more your brain says mmm… I like the feeling I get when I eat this, I want more.

So, over time you can get addicted. Obviously we can consciously try and resist these foods, but as a child it’s not so easy. So it’s up to the parents to say no and avoid feeding them these foods as much as they possibly can.

@TheJoker I looked at it, there aren’t all that many hits that are actually about feeding salt to a baby, but the stories appear to be about taking processed crap food, grinding it into mush, and feeding it to an infant. That’s a horrible idea, but it’s also a far cry from giving McDonald’s to a toddler once in a while. If you want to put a label on processed foods that says: don’t grind this in the blender and use it as baby food, then I’m all for that.

@HTDC You are correct, it is up to the parents to say no and avoid feeding children these foods as much as they possibly can. That doesn’t mean never.

And while fat, sugar, and salt in food release feel good chemicals, they are also essential nutrients and they taste good. I for one am physically addicted to all three. I will die if I don’t eat enough fat, sugar, and salt.

I think a lot of issues can stem from parents that think “Well, my toddler asked for it. I just wanted to make him happy!”

My son is 18 months old. He had a cookie once, and from that moment on, whenever he’s hungry, he says “Mmmmm… Cookie!”

“Cookie”, to him, is anything that tastes good. Cookies are “cookie”. Chicken nuggets are “cookie”. Mashed potatoes with peas are “cookie”.

I’m certain there are some parents out there that don’t understand the way children learn language, and that the first word they attach to something isn’t always the right one.

@Snarp Yes, but it is the wrong type of sugar and fat, it’s refined and saturated. You’re better of getting natural fats and sugars from other sources that you are less likely to get addicted to.

@HTDC Look, all I’m saying is that eating somewhat unhealthy foods in moderation is not bad for a healthy person, even a small child. Yes, parents are responsible for what that moderation is. Are you seriously trying to argue that giving a child any candy, cookies, cakes, saturated fat (which would include bacon, eggs, and pretty much any meat at all), or salt is going to turn them into addicts who can’t control their food consumption?

I think if it is just once in a while it is fine. I would define once in a while as once a month or less.

@Snarp Not natural foods like meat and eggs. Only highly processed foods like McDonalds and KFC. The companies make these foods with the intention to make customers addicted, it’s how they make so much money. The severity to which these foods affect a child differs between us and that’s okay.

I think even eating these foods on occasion has a negative impact on the way the brain operates and responds to positive stimulus in general. (This brings in other aspects which I won’t go into like genetic predisposition to addiction, etc.) I know you probably don’t agree, but it’s something I believe in and think about quite often.

@HTDC I don’t agree. I think you are being too strict about the whole thing. When I was little we rarely ate fast food. When I did I barely could finish half a hamburger and a few fries. I think the biggest problem is kids eating huge portions of bad food, hell any food. Most children have a piece of candy now and then, or eat something bad for them. McD’s is just another bad thing, I don’t think it is extra special bad. I do agree that while they are very young best to feed them whole foods as much as possible, while you have real control over what they eat. But, it isn’t any good to worry that you have just poisoned your child and ruined him for life just because you were rushed one day and picked up some fast food.

@HDTC Yes, I disagree. I don’t think that occasional consumption of these foods is going to cause addiction or overeating. I believe in moderation in all things, and I believe that as a parent if you try to create absolute and unvarying rules on these kinds of things you are setting yourself up for trouble. There is no more desirable fruit than the one that is forbidden. Not to mention the simple need for flexibility just to get through the day with a three year old.

I’m not talking about all children in general. Just like drinkers, some can consume one glass of wine and become an alcoholic while others can drink a bottle and won’t. It can set off something in the brain that creates an addiction which is why not all people who eat fast food are 200 pounds and feel they want to eat it everyday. But for the few who are, it was probably because this type of food was introduced to them as a young child. Anyway, I’m not saying I am 100% absolutely correct but it’s a theory that isn’t disproven yet.

I wish McDonalds and KFC would either disappear or foot the bill for obesity-related illness.

You can challenge my opinions as much as you want. Many of my views are not of the mainstream. Even if you don’t understand them or agree with them, it’s fine, but at least I’m exploring alternative theories and not relying on what is considered the “normal”, “acceptable” views on all issues in society.

It’s disgusting. I don’t think kids under 5yrs old should have fast foods or sodas yet. They can get all the starches and fats from home cooked food and at least form some sort of pattern recognition to regular healthy meals. Fast foods should be “treat” foods, something out of the ordinary you know will probably upset your guts but you’ll eat it anyway because it’s satisfying a craving for the out of the ordinary. My earliest memories of foods (I never saw a fast food restaurant until after 5yrs old) are of home table foods, some remain my biggest cravings and the stuff of nostalgia. I feel it’s much healthier this way than me pining for McDonald’s of some sort. People’s cravings have a lot to do with memories, association and of course, comfort.

All can be prevented by social studies in childhood development. Kids can be taught not to eat such thing if they’ve been told from their early age by their parent.

What do I think? I just have to look at all the fat high school kids.
It has gotten so bad Gym (PE) is not mandatory any more.

It is just another example of a society living on excess.

I think that unless it is an emergency, my children wouldn’t be exposed to the kinds of foods McDs claims to be food. It is unhealthy in multiple ways and as a parent I, given the facts, wouldn’t take my children there. My toddler likes french fries because he’s had the once at Red Lobster (from grandpa’s plate) and so I make him french fries at home out of sweet potatoes which is a better idea.

Eh, once in a while is fine. And if you’re going on long road trips, there’s really not much other choice.

What I have noticed is that the people who are really obese, or have very heavy children eat horribly in their own homes also. They wish they could blame it all on McDonald’s, but it is so much more than that.

I think you’re on to something, Joker. (!)

In Ontario, Canada, high school cafeterias will soon (in the next school year, I believe) no longer be permitted to serve french fries or soft drinks (pop, soda). I think this is another step in the right direction. Recently, vending machines in Ontario high schools (possibly also elementary schools) were banned from selling junk food and soft drinks.

“They wish they could blame it all on McDonald’s, but it is so much more than that.”
That is just a cop-out.

In the end it all adds up.

@ChazMaz Do you mean blaming McD’s is a cop-out; or, that we should blame McD’s at least partially for the problem?

@Trissinger Now there I agree with you 100%. Junk food and sugary soft drinks have no place in schools. The fast food and soft drink companies should also not have marketing tie ins to provide financing to schools, but we have to be willing to make an extensive investment in public schools before we can change that.

Avoiding the blaming of McD’s is a cop-out.

Sure I understand. WE have to drive there.

@ChazMaz Thanks for clarifying.

Another thing I would support is a tax on sugary drinks (and perhaps fast food as well, but soft drinks are easier logistically) with the proceeds going to health care (preferably a single payer system, but it could go to boost medicaid, or other programs for healthy children like WIC).

It’s irresponsible. No one should eat that crap, let alone a child.

@Snarp I just think if we do things like that it can get crazy. It seems like a slippery slope. Almost every person I know who was a runner winds up needing knee surgery. I have high cholesterol, it’s genetic in my family, so do I have to pay extra for health care. Someone else has the breast cancer gene, will we charge them extra? We all have health risks, and I don’t like the idea of letting government or big business decide which risk is going to be the one we pick on today. What do you think? I am in favor of single payer also by the way. I don’t see how it will ever happen in America, at least not in the next 50 years.

It seemed innocent enough when McDonalds, KFC and BK showed up.
We had no idea we would become junkies.

Has this thread jumped the shark yet?

@JLeslie Well, the slippery slope is considered a logical fallacy for a reason. There’s no reason to assume that we can’t set reasonable boundaries. Running of course improves cardio-vascular fitness in all cases and prevents heart disease, obesity, etc, while only some runners will need knee surgery and there’s no way to know for sure if they would have needed it anyway. Sugary drinks on the other hand have no health benefit, and while they cannot be shown to have caused any particular problem, it can be shown in general to contribute to a lot of problems.

And forcing you to pay for being born with a certain genetic predisposition is clearly discriminatory.

And finally, it’s a tax for known risky behavior, just like cigarette and alcohol taxes, it doesn’t prevent anyone from doing it, but it does force you to pay some of the cost of your risky behavior.

My mum never gave me junk food when I was little, so I don’t need it now. I eat KFC if I do, and that is about once a year. Too many parents these days, let kids have it to shut them up for a while. Think it’s kids having kids, yet again.

@ChazMaz We weren’t junkies back in the day and we still had access to fast food.

@all My neice and nephew aren’t heavy or food junkies. My friend who has the hardest time controlling her weight is the one who grew up in a home that her mother rarely cooked from scratch. Not sure if that is the reason she has trouble, but I always thought it might have something to do with it. Her food choices are really pretty bad. Even when I eat whatever I want, I generally eat better than she does.

All restaurant food is a nightmare. Fish has butter dumped on it. Portions are huge. I ordered steamed green beans at Outback, and they were soaking in butter. When I pointed it out to the waiter he said, “They are steamed with butter, it comes in the package that way.” Pretty much if you are eating out you are eating badly, unless you are lucky enough to live in a city that has a lot of health food restaurants.

Maybe part of the obesity problem is parents have less time to cook at home. I know I will get slammed for that.

@Snarp I do think alcohol and cigerrettes are in a class by themselves, so I am ok with that tax actually. As I have pointed out before orange juice has the same amount of sugar as Coca-Cola. I’m not sure we can pick on Soft Drinks, although sure Coke has other things about the drink that are not good, but when you talk about sugar, weight and diabetes, both drinks are very similar.

“We weren’t junkies back in the day and we still had access to fast food.”
I come from a time that we did not have fast food. And, at least for me. WHen “fast food” showed up, it was a treat. Something my dad would bring home (now and then) on a Saturday afternoon for lunch.

Unless you call the automatt in NYC fast food.

@JLeslie Well, as far as rationale goes, soft drinks have no nutritional benefit outside of calories, orange juice does. As for logistics, you tax added sugar, not naturally occurring sugar.

@JLeslie But I admit it’s controversial.

@ChazMaz OMG! The macaroni and cheese at the Automat. We would take the train into the city and that was our treat.

THAT was more like an amusement park then a “fast food” place. :-) lol

Well McDonalds has gotten better over the years so I suppose it depends what from McDonalds you are giving your toddler. But I believe it should be reserved as a reward treat and not as meal supplementation. Regular fast food is defiantly not the way you kick start proper development in children. I don’t think there is much of anything at KFC that is good for toddlers. =\

As long as it’s an occasional thing. And I mean pretty damn occasional, not some once a week thing.

I don’t remember ever going to fast food places that young, but I have been going to them for a while.

I think it’s none of anyone else’s business what a parent feeds their child. Why are we all of a sudden butting our noses into how people raise their kids? Don’t do it if you don’t like it and leave everyone else alone.

@DominicX And you still got that figure ;)

I think it is just terrible when I take my daughter to McDonald’s and she asks for the apple walnut snack-size salad to go with her chicken nuggets. OMG – the 2 nuggets she actually eats will be… 1/8 of her sodium intake for the day? Yikes.

You don’t become stupid by walking through the doors of McDonald’s. Meals that bad can and are frequently cooked in homes or ordered in other restaurants. There is a “healthy” restaurant here – and their food is healthy – but then they have two entire glass cases of cakes and pastries. Surely that wouldn’t tempt a child.

Common sense. When did we stop trusting people to use it? Where do the warnings stop?

@Supacase GA

People don’t want to be responsible for their own actions, simple as that. They want everything to be handed to them, they don’t want to put in the effort, and when things go wrong, they want someone else to blame. Laziness.

@Mike_Hunt Why thank you, dear. :)

@HTDC All I can say is that I’m glad I wasn’t your kid.

All three of my adult grandsons were practically raised on the stuff by their single mother, and I don’t see any ill effects at this point. I don’t really believe that it is as bad as some people make out, except for a portion of the population who are susceptible to that sort of thing.

@TheJoker both your premise and solution were wrong. A hamburger and cooked chicken have nutritional value whether cooked in a restaurant or at home. Let’s start with McD’s. If you decide that is the choice for the meal, you aren’t going to give a 4 yo a dble bacon cheeseburger, shake and large fries. Any normal parent is going to order a plain burger, milk and some of Mom’s fries at a healthy 325 calories. Also that parent is not going to go for burgers more than a couple of times a month because habituating your child to a limited diet is a sure way to create a life long picky eater.

As for KFC the young child isn’t likely to go for the spicy stuff unless they have it on a regular basis. Again the roasted leg and and some of the side off Mom’s 2 piece meal is perfectly healthy for both,

Any parent who doesn’t make the right choices for their child-fast food or homemade-isn’t going to be swayed by a govt mandated poster

@TheJoker I like your “health warning” idea, especially if its put directly onto the packaging of fries and hamburgers that automatically come with “the fixings” —- nothing wrong with reminding, warning and/or educating parents and kids alike of the unhealthy food choices at fast food restaurants. (And yes, they have been proven to be unhealthy, for the most part.)

@galileogirl…. I understand the argument you’re making. & I’m not actually blaming the fast food giants, I enjoy them as much as anyone else does. If everyone were as intelligent, or dilligent, as you seem to asume then it wouldn’t even be an issue. However, & it’s just my opinion, the facts seem to suggest that many parents nowadays do not have good judgent as to how to feed their children. If they did then so many young children/toddlers wouldn’t be fat/obese by the time they started school. I know this is 1 example but it does illustrate my argument. A few nights ago in KFC, the family sat at the nxt table were feeding their son, maybe 2–3yrs old, popcorn chicked, & fries, which they’d added salt to, & a Pepsi. If parents aren’t being responsible, shouldn’t the state intervene?

@Trissinger… hiya. Yeh, I think a cigarette style health warning wouldn’t go amiss, & as you say, directly on the food packaging. Hope all well :)

What I don’t understand is why parents insist that they feed their kids, healthy, organic baby food, and then when they are old enough to chew give them junk food! It doesn’t make sense.

@reacting_acid Oh, don’t get me started on ‘healthy’ baby food. The Gerber people have contributed their share to the sugar/salt cravings of children.

@YARNLADY Sorry to get you started, but really? I didn’t know that. I thought it was supposed to be the healthiest stuff around?

The ugly truth about commercial babyfood

@TheJoker One of the things my husband and I had in common was that we both had coca cola in our bottles as toddlers for a treat once in a while. Not saying it is a good thing, although I think the caffeine is a bad idea. But, we, my husband and I, grew up eating home cooked meals the majority of our youth, so overall I think we did ok, although I would say his mom cooked with a little too much fat. In fact his family never went to fast food, it did not exist in his country when he was young.

That family you talk about with the salted fries and Pepsi, you don’t know the childs whole diet. If the child and entire family are obese, then I would say you have a point, because probably they eat like crap all of the time, but many times a quick meal at McD’s is just that, and not a regular occurance.

Of course, there are other causes of childhood obesity than bad diets. It might have something to do with kids sitting in the house playing video games and watching TV all the time instead of going outside and playing. Even those who do play outside have a much more restricted roaming territory then they’re parents had thanks to urbanization and all the threats to kids. There’s not much we can do about parents making those choices, unless we put warning labels on video games, tvs, and computers. But I imagine the public service announcements and billboards telling parents that their kids need to spend 60 minutes a day exercising are at least as effective as a warning label would be.

What do we think about toddlers being exposed to smokers?
What do we think about toddlers watching tv for hours?
What do we think about toddlers being exposed to parents yelling at each other every day?

The list of sins is long.

@mattbrowne Very good point.

Man, I really want a spell checker with an algorithm to detect improper use of “their”, “there”, and “they’re”. How hard can that really be?

@mattbrowne…. touche!

@YARNLADY Gerber is nasty. I always made my sons babyfood. It’s not even time consuming, and you can add spices if you’d like. It’s good to see others agree!

Not all commercial baby food is bad, even Gerber. Read the ingredients on the label, you can still get those that are nothing buy vegetables (or meat) and water. Why they also sell the ones with all sorts of other things in them is beyond me.

@Snarp It’s for the parents. Babies are OK without the added salt, sugar and food colorings but moms tend to taste baby food and buy brands that taste good to the jaded adult palate.

@Snarp – You’d need a context-sensitive spell checker capable of doing some simple syntactic analysis.

Thread derailed.

I believe that a treat every so often is far better than banning a child from something like fast food or sweets completely. I can’t stand the parents that feed their kids crap day in day out but I have absolutely no problem with the parent who treats their kids to a Happy Meal once every few months. That won’t kill the kid (I have seen children eat FAR worse than the odd MacDonalds and survive!!!). I think if you make something taboo then the child is more likely to rebel as they get older. Alcohol is often a prime example. Introducing certain things early on and treating them as “no big deal” while educating the child at the same time is probably far beneficial.

Although, KFC is just wrong on sooooo many levels!

@Snarp Not to get too off topic, but people finding shreds of metal, and me personally finding a pubic hair in a gerber container…I would never recommend it, and would never feed it to my child. (oh, and the only reason I had any was because my mother got it for my son and I was going to try it out. Big mistake.)

@Snarp

It’s what they do to the vegetables that makes it unhealthy.

Blanching, microwaving, and overboiling them to the point that they don’t even resemble the natural colour of the real food. A jar of Gerber strained beef is purple. PURPLE.

Purple? Ewww!

There is a proper time and quantity for all things. Sometimes the proper time is ‘never,’ sometimes the proper amount is ‘none.’ But I do not think that fast food is to be avoided at all costs.

I make sure everything my daughter eats is organic when we are home. Kids love Mcdonalds there is no way around it. I dont want to deprive her of that little joy that I had as a child so once a month I take her to Mcdonalds and she always looks forward to it. The problem is it’s not really a treat for most kids it what they eat most of the time. I think thats very sad whether it be because that’s all the parents can afford or they don’t have the timeto actually make dinner. It should be a treat not a routine. That goes for adults too.

@Twinkletoes22 There is a way around it. I never took mine to one. They don’t even know what it is.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Never even seen a commercial… Never heard there friends talk about it? That’s great!

@Twinkletoes22 They don’t watch tv much, they don’t pay attention to commercials ..and I don’t know if their friends talk about it or not, they never brought it up.