Santa Clara County’s next stab at obesity: No toys for fatty fast foods

• Obesity • Mar 23, 10

As 5-year-old Jena Rosetta chomped down a “yummy” lunch of Burger King chicken nuggets on Monday and slurped down a soda, her mother dug into the Club BK kids meal box and presented Jena with her reward: a Pinkalicious plastic doll that perfectly matched her pink blouse.

“We like the toys,” said Jena’s mother, Susan Barragan.

But if Santa Clara County Supervisor Ken Yeager gets his way, there may be no more dolls, race cars or toys of any sort to entice kids like Jena — and their parents — to feast on fried, fatty fast-food.

The supervisor wants to stop — or at least limit — restaurants from offering toys that encourage children to eat fatty, sugary, high-calorie and generally unhealthful meals that can lead to childhood obesity.

“They want the toy and have no idea what’s in the food,” Yeager said Monday. “You can’t expect a 3-year-old to say there are too many calories in that hamburger.”

Yeager hopes his colleagues will agree at today’s board of supervisors meeting. If they do, they’ll ask county officials to look into regulating kid meals with toys. The result could range from an outright ban on toys to restricting them to healthful meals. Yeager said the regulation would be the first of its kind in the nation.

Meanwhile, the California Restaurant Association was not pleased to hear about Yeager’s proposal.

“I have to question how taking the toys hostage can help consumers make smarter choices,” spokesman Dan Conway said from Sacramento.

He said fast-food chains over the past decade have introduced salads, apple slices, juices and other options to their menus for children. Conway said giving customers wider choices works better than “piecemeal legislation.”

Any new regulation would affect only restaurants on county land, but the supervisors have a track record of proposing food laws that spread.

The county’s 2008 menu-labeling law, which required chain restaurants to include calorie counts on their menus, was eventually adopted by the state.

According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, offering toys with children’s meals is a marketing practice that goes back three decades, not long after the birth of the fast-food industry.

Yeager cited a recent study by the organization that said 10 out of 12 unhealthy, high-calorie meals meant for children came with toys. Citing a county study, he said 1 in 3 low-income, young children are overweight or obese. The problems could lead to diabetes and other diseases in adulthood.

Barragan, a stay-at-home mom who’s running a long shot campaign for mayor of San Jose, said the family eats out often at fast-food restaurants, including McDonald’s, which offers Star Wars and the iCarly line of Happy Meal toys, and Jack in the Box, which offers the Yo Gabba Gabba toy figurines.

“A toy’s important,” she said while she and Jena left a Burger King in an unincorporated pocket of Santa Clara County just south of downtown San Jose, “because I can use it as a treat for when she does her homework.”

She’s not opposed to requiring more healthful meals, but she doesn’t want the prices to go up, either.

“With the economy this low, I don’t think it’s a good time to raise prices,” Barragan said. “A lot of families would be hurt.”

Yeager said the “avalanche” of advertising money spent on using toys to sell unhealthy food to children is simply too enticing to continue unregulated.

“We can’t just do nothing and hope that families just find another way to avoid obesity in their kids,” said Yeager, who hopes a new regulation could come up for a vote in late April. “We have to hold the fast-food chains responsible.”

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By Joe Rodriguez

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