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Litigation not a good weight-loss plan
Focus
on living healthy, not easy way out
COMMENTARY
Lauren Cates
McDonald’s
recently dodged an obesity suit filed by two women who claimed the
company was responsible for their obesity when a judge ruled that
the general public should know better than to consider McDonald’s
food healthy.
Surprising? Not in the least.
The only thing surprising about this ruling is that two people would
be so moronic as to blame a fast food company for their poor health
habits. When it comes to eating in America, the most obese nation
in the world, people will do anything to avoid the things that are
healthiest in exchange for the things that are worse for them yet
easier to obtain in the short run.
Want to lose a couple of pounds? Suing fast food giants, popping
weight loss pills and trying fad diets is no substitute for eating
healthily and exercising regularly. But it seems that Americans
will do just about anything to shed those pounds, including endangering
their own lives, rather than do what is most sensible. Blaming fast
food entities for effective advertising is no excuse for poor decisions
and not a good way to escape from reality.
The new eating epidemic has even more widespread consequences that
we don’t even notice. Restaurants give 3 to 4 servings of recommended
meals in one entrée, knowing many people will finish it all.
Every fast food chain has a version of the super-size, where already
ungodly amounts of fat and calories are nearly doubled.
In an effort to be fair, fast food restaurants have made nutrition
information readily available for everything served. But what they
have not made readily available is what exactly goes into making
your Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets (which, by the way, have double
the fat of a hamburger and dozens of ingredients other than chicken).
Eight million Americans suffer from eating disorders. We spend more
than $40 billion on dieting and diet-related supplements a year.
Think about how many starving children in Somalia we could feed.
And it could all be saved if we stopped looking for the easy way
out.
Let’s face it. We’re a nation obsessed with get-what-I-want-fast
no matter the cost and to hell with the consequences. Instead of
choosing the proper course of action to get what we want, we buy
the Cliff Notes version and hope nothing bad comes of it.
So if you want to lose weight, don’t sue corporations. Instead
think of exercising a little. Just to get started here’s a
tip: Lay off the Big Macs.
Lauren
Cates is a junior advertising/public relations major from Houston.
She can be reached at (l.e.cates@tcu.edu).
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