How Ronald McDonald Killed My Happiness by Chris White

I am not overly health conscious.  I should be considering my age and family health history.  I do exercise regularly, practice deep breathing exercises for stress, and take a few supplements regularly, but I don’t spend a ton of energy on monitoring everything that goes in my mouth.  I once took a healthy cooking class from the Seventh Day Adventists.  The food was delicious.  The teachers were really, really old and had been eating this way for decades (of course I didn’t check their drivers licenses. They might have been in their 40’s and just looked really old).  But there was just too much emphasis on making things that aren’t meat and cheese, taste like meat and cheese.  It seems to me the healthier thing to do would be to lose your taste for meat and cheese or make your peace with it and just eat it with some moderation.  All this is prologue to the fact that when I turned 50 (3 years ago now), I made a decision that I really didn’t need to eat fast-food hamburgers anymore.  This was not a decision based on snobbery or nutritional self-righteousness, but rather the realistic assessment that I had probably eaten enough of them for a lifetime and they really aren’t very good for you so why keep going?  What was a mainstay for me years ago, has now become a very, very, occasional treat.

Enter the incident of two weeks ago.  It had been a couple of years since I had visited a McDonalds but I had my young grandsons with me for the day and wanted to give them a treat they enjoyed which clearly entailed a visit to the golden arches.  As they ran along to “McDonald’s Playland”, I went to the counter to order lunch for all of us.  And there it happened.  As I looked up at the beautiful backlit pictorial menu my eyes flashed with horror at a sight I had never encountered before: the calorie count for every item on the menu.  I knew this was coming someday and somewhere with Obamacare, but I figured it would only affect places like New York City where they love to regulate everything.  What I saw with the calorie count was that really almost nothing is a good or healthy choice at McDonalds.  Yes, I am aware they serve water and salads.  But the calorie count with the dressing isn’t a huge distance from a Big Mac sandwich.  But then again, as I would ask anyone, when you say “let’s go to McDonald’s” did you mean “Let’s go get a healthy salad?”  Only if you are a yoga instructor or anorexic.  C’mon.  McDonalds is about burgers, fries, and those oh-so-delicious fried apple pies.

As a Christian man, I do believe in the importance of truth, especially biblical truth, but all other truth as well.  I guess it is only right that we all know the real truth about the calories we eat so that when we step on the bathroom scale some morning we will no longer wonder how we added those last 10 pounds to the overall count.  But there is truth and such a thing as “d*mn truth” (an example of the latter is when your wife asks if their dress makes them look fat and you answer “yes” instead of “you know dear, that dress just doesn’t do your curves justice!”).  There are just times when you want to have some fun and be carefree and that includes what’s on the menu for lunch that day.  Having a calorie count inescapably emblazoned in front of your eyes as you order a milkshake (800 calories) seems inimical to fun and carefree.  Perhaps some day in the future we will discover that hamburgers and French fries are actually good for you and what was causing heart disease and obesity all along was worrying about it in the first place, not what you were eating when you were having fun with your grandkids.  For now, happy meals have grown a whole lot less happy as far as I’m concerned.

If you are curious about the reality of whence I speak visit: nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.pdf

A Lesson from American Idol

I used to be mildly embarrassed to admit it, but now that American Idol’s fastest growing viewing demographic is people my age, I guess it is safe to come out of the closet and say I like the show. Come to think of it, it was my generation that cut it’s teeth on Ed Sullivan and The Gong Show and so perhaps it is a more natural fit than I realized. I like American Idol for a lot of reasons, but more than anything else I love the show because of judge Simon Cowell. I know that Simon is the producer of the program and partly famous for being the caustic and smug brit that we expect him to be, but he is extremely nuanced in his understanding and feel for performance and the music business and usually tells the truth we overly nice Americans won’t say. Remember, we’re the people who tells little Johnny “he can be anything he wants to be if he works hard at it” or “everyone is a winner at our grade school”. Or you’ve got the public school teacher telling the parents “Johnny is showing real promise in this area” because they’ve already done 13 parent-teacher conferences today and they don’t have the energy to tell his parents he should probably join the Navy and learn a trade because he’s not university material. I find Simon’s unvarnished truth at times very refreshing. If a performance was bad, he will call it an unmitigated disaster or not worthy of a karaoke night at a low-end club in Reno. The three other judges in the competition will criticize but usually with too much tact and generosity and hence the performer is not moved to tears like they are when they get Simon’s approval which is obviously more meaningful because it means something. I think there is something from American Idol we all ought to learn and that is our young people need to be told the truth with regards to their talents and aptitudes. Life is way too precious to waste pursuing that for which we have no talent and it is an act of love to steer a young person in the way he/she should go. It’s okay to have a childhood dream but if every boy in my neighborhood had lived out his dreams there would have been hundreds of baseball players and no doctors, teachers, musicians, or even baseball watchers to fill the bleachers. It takes all of us to make the world go around. God makes all of us for a certain purpose and destiny. Your destiny will be confirmed by your abilities and affirmed by people other than yourself. Listen to them and be glad even if they sound a bit like Simon at the time.