On Thursday, Dec. 1, the city’s de facto ban of the Happy Meal commences. San Francisco has accomplished what the Hamburglar could not. Or has it?

In order to include a toy with a meal, restaurants must now comply with city-generated nutritional standards. Those are standards that even the “healthier” Happy Meals McDonald’s introduced earlier this year don’t come close to meeting. (As SF Weekly noted in January, the school lunches our children eat aren’t healthy enough to qualify, either).

And yet it seems McDonald’s has turned lemons into lemonade — and is selling the sugary drink to San Francisco’s children. Local McDonald’s employees tell SF Weekly the company has devised a solution that appears to comply with San Francisco’s “Healthy Meal Incentive Ordinance” that could actually make the company more money — and necessitate toy-happy youngsters to buy more Happy Meals.

It turns out San Francisco has not entirely vanquished the Happy Meal as we know it. Come Dec. 1, you can still buy the Happy Meal. But it doesn’t come with a toy. For that, you’ll have to pay an extra 10 cents.

Huh. That hardly seems to have solved the problem (though adults and children purchasing unhealthy food can at least take solace that the 10 cents is going to Ronald McDonald House charities). But it actually gets worse from here. Thanks to Supervisor Eric Mar’s much-ballyhooed new law, parents browbeaten into supplementing their preteens’ Happy Meal toy collections are now mandated to buy the Happy Meals.

Happy Meal Ban: McDonald’s Outsmarts San Francisco – San Francisco News – The Snitch

County officials in Ohio saw a big problem with an 8-year-old child living in Cleveland Heights — the third grader, name withheld, was tipping the scales at over 200 pounds.

Case workers in Cuyahoga County feared for their child’s life and have placed him into foster care after the working with their mother for more than a year to help remedy the boy’s obesity problem. Social workers tell the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the boy has been under protective supervision from the county since 2010 when he was diagnose with sleep apnea, a condition which is commonly weight-related. The child began to lose weight shortly after but has ballooned up to more than 200 pounds in recent months.

“A 218-pound 8-year-old is a time bomb,” University of Pennsylvania professor Arthur Caplan tells the Plain Dealer.

Even if that is the case, the child’s mother and others think that the government’s intervention wasn’t exactly necessary.

“They are trying to make it seem like I am unfit, like I don’t love my child,” the boy’s mother says. Her name is also being withheld.

“Of course I love him,” she adds. “Of course I want him to lose weight. It’s a lifestyle change, and they are trying to make it seem like I am not embracing that. It is very hard, but I am trying.”

200-lb third-grader placed in foster care for being too fat — RT

A British man who at one time was the fattest in the world is pleading with the NHS to remove unsightly flaps of flesh after he managed to lose more than half of his body weight.

Paul Mason, 50, who weighed 60 stone two years ago, underwent a gastric bypass after he was told he otherwise faced certain death.

But he has been left with rolls of unsightly excess skin after the extreme weight loss and now needs an operation to remove the flaps hanging from his stomach, arms and legs.

However, NHS bosses have refused to perform cosmetic surgery, insisting that he needs to maintain a stable weight before it can be considered.

Former world’s fattest man begs for NHS operation to remove folds of skin after losing 40 STONE | Mail Online

The passenger who had to stand during a seven-hour flight because of a morbidly obese man sitting next to him has today spoken about his ordeal.

Arthur Berkowitz, 57, said his 400lb neighbour on US Airways Flight 901 from Anchorage to Philadelphia made it impossible to get into his seat.

The obese man spilled over into Mr Berkowitz’s personal space and he could not move because the plane was full so he was forced to stand up.

Dangerous: Passenger Arthur Berkowitz had to stand for a seven-hour flight after a morbidly obese man next to him made it impossible for him to sit down

He said the obese man was very sorry. ‘The first thing he said to me was: “I want to apologise – I’m your worst nightmare”,’ he told MailOnline.

Passenger forced to stand on flight for seven hours because of 400-POUND man | Mail Online

Access Economics estimated the cost of obesity to Australia at $58.2 billion. And sure enough, this enormous headline number promptly headlined in the press.

On Dunsford’s analysis, however, the figures are flawed, skewed by the ”non-financial” estimates to make obesity seem a lot more costly to the taxpayer, in particular, the $49.9 billion in ”non-financial costs”.

These comprised ”burden of disease” numbers, calculated by working out ”years of life lost through disability and premature death” and Access came up with $6.35 million for the value of a statistical life (VSL) and $266,843 for the value of a statistical life year (VSLY).

Tipping scales of credibility

Chubby kids might be cute, but childhood obesity is known to raise the risk for diabetes and heart disease. And an alarming new study shows that even by kindergarten age, large numbers of American kids have a body mass index BMI that suggests theyre on the path to obesity.

The proportion of kids who are heavy rises markedly during elementary school, with the biggest gains coming between first and third grades – and excess weight gain is particularly common among Hispanic children and black girls.

“It not just kids who are already overweight getting more and more so,” study author Ashlesha Datar, a senior economist at California-based RAND Corp., told HealthDay. “There is an entire shift. Even those who are normal weight are gaining weight.”

Obesity now begins in kindergarten? What new study says – HealthPop – CBS News

Normal weight adults, including those who had lost a lot of weight and kept it off, ate more often than overweight people in a new study looking at factors that may help in preventing weight gain.

Researchers following about 250 people for a year found that overweight individuals ate fewer snacks in addition to meals than people in the normal body weight range, but the overweight still took in more calories and they were less active over the course of the day.

“Most of the research has shown that people who eat more frequently have a lower weight,” said lead researcher Jessica Bachman, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “But no one knows why.”

Overweight people eat fewer meals than others – Yahoo! News

Washington — Congress agreed this week to continue counting the tomato sauce on a slice of pizza as a serving of vegetables for federally-sponsored school lunches.

In doing so, it sided with one of biggest makers of frozen pizza for school lunches the Schwan Food Co. of Marshall, Minn., a frozen pizza giant with more than $3 billion a year in annual sales. The privately held company was at the heart of the lobbying battle in Washington over pizza and convinced several members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation to follow its lead.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison and Republican U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen were the only Minnesota members of Congress to vote against the bills.

Schwan Food pizza brands include Red Baron, Freschetta and Tony’s Pizza. Besides the products it sells to consumers, Schwan’s does a big business selling frozen pizza to the federally-subsidized school lunch program.

A recent press release from the company boasts that it has a 70 percent market share in the pizza category of the $9.5 billion school food service industry.

So when the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed new, stricter nutritional standards for school lunches earlier this year, it set off a massive lobbying campaign by Schwan and companies such as food giant ConAgra.

Washington pizza sauce fight has deep Minnesota ties | Minnesota Public Radio News

Who needs leafy greens and carrots when pizza and french fries will do?

Congress wants pizza and french fries to stay on school lunch lines and is fighting the Obama administrations efforts to take unhealthy foods out of schools.

The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year. These include limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line, putting new restrictions on sodium and boosting the use of whole grains. The legislation would block or delay all of those efforts.

The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now.

SDA had wanted to only count a half-cup of tomato paste or more as a vegetable, and a serving of pizza has less than that.

Nutritionists say the whole effort is reminiscent of the Reagan administrations much-ridiculed attempt 30 years ago to classify ketchup as a vegetable to cut costs. This time around, food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes and lobbied Congress.

Pizza As A Vegetable? Congress Proposes New School Lunch Bill | Fox News

Researchers say there’s a new way to tell if infants are likely to become obese later on: Check to see if they’ve passed two key milestones on doctors’ growth charts by age 2.

Babies who grew that quickly face double the risk of being obese at age 5, compared with peers who grew more slowly, their study found. Rapid growers were also more likely to be obese at age 10, and infants whose chart numbers climbed that much during their first 6 months faced the greatest risks.

That kind of rapid growth should be a red flag to doctors, and a sign to parents that babies might be overfed or spending too much time in strollers and not enough crawling around, said pediatrician Dr. Elsie Taveras, the study’s lead author and an obesity researcher at Harvard Medical School.

Contrary to the idea that chubby babies are the picture of health, the study bolsters evidence that “bigger is not better” in infants, she said.

But skeptics say not so fast. Babies often grow in spurts and flagging the speediest growers could lead to putting infants on diets — a bad idea that could backfire in the long run, said Dr. Michelle Lampl, director of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health.

Babies on obesity path? New sign may offer answer – BusinessWeek