Weight Watchers Teams Up with McDonald's in Australia and NZ
Ask a random patron at your local McDonald's why they're eating there, and it is unlikely that anyone will say that it's because they're trying to lose weight.
If McDonald's has anything to do about that, this is about to change. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that McDonald's has just signed a deal with Weight Watchers to promote some of its meals as ideal for dieters.
The deal began on March 3, 2010, in New Zealand McDonald's, with plans to expand later this year to franchises in Australia. Under the new agreement, three McDonald's meals have begun to feature a Weight Watcher's logo. The meals are Chicken McNuggets, Filet-O-Fish, and a Sweet Chili Chicken Wrap, all served with a salad and the Weight Watchers seal of approval.
In the new deal, McDonald's will use the Weight Watchers logo on its menus and tray liners. Weight Watchers will promote McDonald's to dieters.
The article quoted the CEO of McDonald's New Zealand, Mark Hawthorne, as saying, ''This is a noble cause. We serve 1.5 million meals a week in New Zealand to 4 million people and we're making every best effort to generate a change in behaviour, to create an awareness in consumers about making healthy choices.''
Even if these particular menu items could be considered "healthy diet choices," which I question, once inside, dieting customers will have to face the temptations of much more fattening foods.
This is astonishingly bad news. Australia has just caught up to the United States in its obesity rates, and worse, Australian women have the fastest rising obesity rates in the world. With obesity rates already soaring in Australia, this deal between McDonald's and Weight Watchers amounts to an act of corporate collusion.
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Kim Gamble
kmbearden
Spectrum Voice
Susie Lindau
Lauren B. Davis
racheld
Salon.com
Comments
Great reporting, Linda!
That's all I have to say.
They offer low fat alternatives, that is a good thing. The blame is on the parents who give their kids unhealthy food. McDonalds would sell tofu if that is what the public wanted.
Enough of this nanny state BS. McDonalds is listening to the market and that is good business.
It's "strange bedfellows" along the same lines of revenue from a tobacco tax being used to fund anti-smoking programs!
Linda Shiue writes: "...this deal between McDonald's and Weight Watchers amounts to an act of corporate collusion. "
I agree! It is "corporate collusion."
M Todd writes:
"The blame is on the parents who give their kids unhealthy food. McDonalds would sell tofu if that is what the public wanted.
"Enough of this nanny state BS. McDonalds is listening to the market and that is good business."
Yes. It's "corporate collusion," but McDonald's (which test-marketed a veggie burger in California several years ago) is merely giving the public what it thinks it wants.
Several years ago, a series of e-mail exchanges between animal activist Lauren Ornelas and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, prompted Mackey to go vegan. He later commented that companies like Whole Foods can put vegan products on the market, but there needs to be an actual consumer demand for these products, if they are to succeed. That's capitalism.
(Mackey, a Libertarian-leaning entrpreneur, later incurred the wrath of the Left by expressing opposition to health care reform in the Wall Street Journal.)
To change things at the corporate level, we have to change things at the grassroots level: i.e., consumer demand. We have to educate the public.
In an opinion piece in the Animals' Agenda from the late '90s, Ingrid Newkirk, Executive Director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), pointed out that meat and dairy alternatives, veggie burgers, soy "ice creams," etc. didn't magically appear on the marketplace, but were there as the result of consumer demand.
The following quotes, facts, figures, and statistics are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
---Albert Einstein
"Each year, the meat industrial complex abuses and butchers nearly 9 billion cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and other innocent, feeling animals just for the enjoyment of consumers. Each year, nearly 1.5 million of these consumers are crippled and killed prematurely by heart failure, cancer, stroke, and other chronic diseases that have been linked conclusively with the consumption of these animals. Each year, millions of other animals are abused and sacrificed in a vain search for a 'magic pill' that would vanquish these largely self-inflicted diseases."
---Alex Hershaft, PhD, president, Farm Animal Reform Movement
When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.
Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study, where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat-eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.
One study analyzed eighty scientific studies in leading medical journals. The analysis found that vegetarians had lower blood pressure, and were less likely to suffer from stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure.
A large German study of nearly 2,000 vegetarians found that deaths from heart disease were reduced by over one-third, and that heart disease itself was far less than that of the general population.
Another large study examined the coronary artery disease risk of young adults ages 18 to 30 and vegetarians were found to have much higher levels of cardiovascular fitness and a greatly reduced risk of heart disease.
"The process of gradual blocking of the coronary arteries begins not in adulthood but in childhood...and the main cause of this arteriosclerosis is the steadily increasing amount of fat in the American diet, particularly saturated animal fats such as those found in meat, chicken, milk and cheeses. If there was another disease that caused half a million deaths a year, you can be sure that the public would be acutely aware of the danger, and that the cure or prevention would be universally practiced."
---Dr. Benjamin Spock, author, child expert
"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
---Dr. Dean Ornish, author, Reversing Heart Disease
Stroke is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. Vegetarians have a 20 to 30 percent reduced risk of having a stroke. Stroke, like heart disease, is associated with diets high in saturated fats, and the vegetarian diet is naturally low in these fats.
The Oxford Vegetarian Study found cancer mortality to be 39 percent lower among vegetarians when compared with meat-eaters. The European Prospective Investigation of Cancer found vegetarians suffer 40 percent fewer cancers than the general population.
Studies have shown that decreasing a woman's animal fat intake can reduce the chances that she will die from breast cancer. A large-scale, long-term study in the Netherlands found a powerful connection between the amount of animal fat consumed and the rate of prostate cancer. A review of a dozen studies found dietary fat strongly correlated with prostate cancer.
Ovarian, uterine, and endometrial cancers have all been shown to be strongly correlated to the amount of animal fat in one's diet, and vegetarian women have significantly lower rates of these cancers.
"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all the natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined."
---Dr. Neal Barnard, Executive Director, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rate of coronary disease of any group in the country. They have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate."
---William Castelli, MD, Director, Framingham Heart Study
"Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores."
---Dr. William Roberts, editor-in-chief, American Journal of Cardiology
Linnaeus, who introduced binomial nomenclature (naming plants and animals according to their physical structure) wrote: "Man's structure, external and internal, compared with that of other animals shows that fruit and succulent vegetables constitute his natural food."
Predators exist in the wild, but that does not imply man must automatically imitate them. Cannibalism and rape also occur in nature. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his book In the South Seas, noted there was no difference between the "civilized" Europeans and the "savages" of the Cannibal Islands:
"We consume the carcasses of creatures with like appetites, passions, and organs as our own. We feed on babes, though not our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."
Studies indicate flesh-eaters have less endurance than do vegetarians, while vegetarians have two to three times greater stamina and recover five times more quickly from exhaustion. Most kinds of cancer, as well as heart disease, osteoporosis, kidney disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, hemorrhoids, diverticulosis, arthritis, gallstones and gallbladder disease are all preventable and treatable on a vegetarian diet.
In a letter to a friend on the subject of vegetarianism, Albert Einstein wrote, "besides agreeing with your aims for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind."
Additional data from Please Don't Eat the Animals:
Meat production causes deforestation, which then contributes to global warming. Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and the destruction of forests around the globe to make room for grazing cattle furthers the greenhouse effect. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reports that the annual rate of tropical deforestation has increased from 9 million hectares in 1980 to 16.8 million hectares in 1990, and unfortunately, this destruction has accelerated since then. By 1994, a staggering 200 million hectares of rainforest had been destroyed in South America just for cattle.
Livestock production affects a startling 70 to 85 percent of the land area of the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union. That includes the public and private rangeland used for grazing, as well as the land used to produce the crops that feed the animals. By comparison, urbanization only affects 3 percent of the United States land area, slightly larger for the European Union and the United Kingdom. Meat production consumes the world's land resources.
Half of all fresh water worldwide is used for thirsty livestock. Producing eight ounces of beef requires an unimaginable 25,000 liters of water, or the water necessary for one pound of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.
The Worldwatch Institute estimates one pound of steak from a steer raised in a feedlot costs: five pounds of grain, a whopping 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 34 pounds of topsoil.
33 percent of our nation's raw materials and fossil fuels go into livestock destined for slaughter. In a vegan economy, only 2 percent of our resources will go to the production of food.
"It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the overpopulation of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."
---Jeremy Rifkin, pro-life and pro-animal author, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, and president of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
Les Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 10 percent per year, it would free at least 12 million tons of grain for human consumption--or enough to feed 60 million people.
For those of us who are veg for *ethical* reasons, the nutritional debates over soy, etc. aren't even an issue. The health advantages of going veg are just a pleasant side effect of a nonviolent philosophy. And meat and dairy analogs provide us with familiar tastes---without the cruelty.
Would it hurt to refrain from taking the lives of our fellow creatures? I had the opportunity to hear John Robbins, author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America, speak at a Unitarian church here in Oakland, CA in 2001. The church was PACKED.
John writes in The Food Revolution (2001):
"The revolution sweeping our relationship to our food and our world, I believe, is part of an historical imperative. This is what happens when the human spirit is activated. One hundred and fifty years ago, slavery was legal in the United States. One hundred years ago, women could not vote in most states. Eighty years ago, there were no laws in the United States against any form of child abuse. Fifty years ago, we had no Civil Rights Act, no Clean Air or Clean Water legislation, no Endangered Species Act. Today, millions of people are refusing to buy clothes and shoes made in sweatshops and are seeking to live healthier and more Earth-friendly lifestyles. In the last fifteen years alone, as people in the United States have realized how cruelly veal calves are treated, veal consumption has dropped 62 percent."
Peter Singer concludes in Animal Liberation that "by ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation, too."
Great way for Weight Watchers to make more money, and perhaps also double ensure they have customers for life.
Not sure who else will gain :)
Rated!
But it has to be consumer demand not just demands from one group that opposes another person's beliefs. McDonald's and Whole Food is only interested in Vegans, if Vegans are going to be customers. If there is a handful of people who do not eat at McDonald's in the first place why should they change for them?
McDonald's will change for their customers and the potential of future customers. That is how the free market system works. And I agree with this system. There is not some master plan to make people eat something they do not like. Since the dawn of time fat, sugar, salt have been prized for food. No one had to convince people to eat it, the problem is we just eat to much of it.
It starts with parents teaching their children balance. Children do not drive themselves to McDonald's and they do not whip out their credit cards and buy happy meals. The blame falls on the parents and adults making poor food decisions, not McDonald's.
People have to take responsibility for their own actions and stop blaming some corporate boogeyman that does not exist.
Interesting post, Linda. R