Kudos and good luck. I’ll bet you will see enough chicken strips and hot dogs to last a lifetime or two.

Seriously, though, when it comes to obesity it really is pretty much calories in/calories out. If you are consuming more calories than normal for you, you will gain weight; fewer calories, you will lose weight. You alluded to this in your comments on the Spurlock adventure.

But the problem with ‘obesity’ isn’t being fat really. Being fat can cause some joint problems, especially for overweight kids, and there are some connections between actual fat cells and damage to arteries etc. But otherwise, those ‘fit but fat’ people really might be ok. The real problem with obesity is that the same things that make people fat – eating too many empty calories (i.e., crappy carbs, like you will be conuming this month) and getting no physical activity – is very bad for you in the long run. It gives you heart disease, diabetes, and contributes to many types of cancer. They also cause you to be fat most of the time, because (I think) your body ultimately keeps you eating more and more to supply nutrients it isn’t getting from those empty calories. But those long term effects won’t show up after a month, whether you gain or lose weight.

But again, I think it is great that you are doing this. You are brave. My guess is that whether you gain or lose weight, eating that stuff 3 times a day for a month will prompt you to march to DC and plead with Congress to ban the stuff now and forever. Yech!

You go on to compare this fight to the fight against smoking. The big difference is no one has to smoke to survive but you do have to eat. If you sell cigarettes to kids, you are breaking the law; if you sell them a kid’s meal you are not. No matter how good the advertising is, children cannot legally buy cigarettes.

Lastly, you make the point about the nagging being about the toy. If all the children want is the toy and don’t care about the food, then it really doesn’t matter what restaurants are serving since kids aren’t eating it. Ask my father about his experience with me growing up. I’d nag him for a happy meal and then, if he acquiesced, I’d spend all lunch playing with my toy and he’d either eat my food or throw it out, since that was not a priority to me. Children demanding meals with toys demonstrates children are addicted to wasting money, not necessarily fast food. I haven’t seen any studies that show that demand for this food is the same without the toy, which it would be if it were as addicting as you assert. And, of course, I’ve yet to see any young children that can both drive AND have enough money to purchase this food without parental assistance.

Of course, all these arguments are tertiary to the reason I am running this experiment in the first place, which is to see if eating foods marketed to children (and I mean the worst of those foods healthwise, since I could go just as easily go to McDonald’s and get a kid’s meal with the same toy that has both apples and milk) in a normal quantity is an over-riding driver of obesity and obesity related diseases in this case. Since much of these regulations are being pushed for that reason alone (even if the tangental effects to children being healthier are beneficial as well, there is little talk of a Childhood Hypertension Crisis or a Childhood Heart Disease Crisis, as those issues are not at the crux of the purported reason for regulation), I am curiouous to see if my own experiences support or refute them.

Thanks again for your reading and your comments and I invite you to come hear the results and share your concerns in person at our conference this March.