Once again, it's a blame-everyone-else society...

McDonald's and other fast food places have been receiving a lot of flack for serving fatty unhealthy food. Okay, it's fast food alright? Anyway, McDonald's has now donated $2 million dollars to fund research on childhood obesity. Terrif. You may read the full article here.

While you may find the entire article of interest, I zeroed in on one particular quote, "It's good that they are funding useful medical research, but that doesn't absolve them of their responsibility to serve nutritious food to children," said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a Chicago-based charity watchdog group.

Personally, I've always believed that it was the PARENT'S responsibility to serve nutritious food to THEIR children. After all, no one is FORCING them to drive through any fast food chain and purchase greasy burgers, deep fried chicken or potatoes to their children. And of course, no one is twisting their arms to purchase soda or milk shakes for their children to wash that greasy, fattening, calorie ridden food down either. These places do offer salads with low-fat dressing, fruit cups, yogurt, milk, juice, grilled chicken and bottle water as well. It isn't the fault of the chains that too many parent's out there are too wishy washy to say "NO" to their child or just plain don't give a rat's ass about their child's health.

I'm not going to throw stones at anyone for taking their kids out for an occassional jaunt for a burger...stress on the word OCCASSIONAL. But it isn't McDonald's fault that there are kids out there being raised on grease and fat. That responsibility falls square on the parents who continually purchase this food for consumption by their children and call it dinner. NO ONE ELSE IS TO BLAME. That is just called poor parenting.

Of course, I'd like to know when these people are going to start going after the breakfast and lunch programs in our public schools. With such offereings as children Pop Tarts, sugar coated cereals, greasy sausage pizza, chocolate and strawberry milk for breakfast and corn dogs, fries, cookie, chocolate and strawberry milk for lunch, is it really wonder our children are obese???!!! These kids get this same type of food FIVE DAYS A WEEK at school. How often do they really get McDonald's? It seems to me that if people want to start casting blame they should start at the public school food programs because they are absolutely greasy, fattening, calorie ridden and UNHEALTHY! Even salads are made with iceburg lettuce, which has NO NUTRITIONAL VALUE at all, cheese made from grease (because it's cheap) and salad dressing that is loaded with saturated fat. All heaven forbid serving these kids fat free low calorie dressing, right?

In the end is still comes down to the parents though. Until the PARENTS take responsibility and start demanding truly healthy food for breakfast and lunch at school (or take the time to pack healthy nutritious food for their children like I do) and stop driving through McDonald's, all of the research isn't going to do a damned thing.

But that's just my opinion.