New York, U.S.A. — Starting December 14, the monstrously popular kids hit, Moshi Monsters will invade McDonald’s restaurants throughout North America for a Moshi Monsters Happy Meals promotion. The special program will give fans from coast-to-coast a chance to get their hands on exclusive Moshi Monsters toys for four weeks during the holiday season.

One of eight different colorful characters from the Moshi Monsters universe will be featured in every McDonald’s Happy Meal, including an all-new, top-secret mystery Moshling to be unveiled as part of the month-long promotion. The collectible figures (exclusive to McDonald’s) will include fan favorites Katsuma, Poppet and IGGY along with Furi, Jeepers, Shishi and Luvli, while supplies last. Each Happy Meal also comes with a free 3-day membership to MoshiMonsters.com.

With over 70 million registered users worldwide, Moshi Monsters is an online world of adoptable pet monsters for boys and girls ages 6-12. Children choose from one of six virtual pet monsters that they can create, name and nurture. Once their pet has been customized, young players can navigate their way around Monstro City, taking the daily puzzle challenge to earn ‘Rox’ (virtual currency), playing games, solving Super Moshi Missions, personalizing their room, showing off their artwork, reading stories and communicating with friends in a safe environment.

Following its huge online success, Moshi Monsters has expanded into the physical world with a range of products, including best-selling toys, the number one-selling kids magazine in the UK, a top-five music album, books, membership cards, trading cards, video games and much more.

The article Moshi Monsters Invade McDonald’s Restaurants appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

The phrase “fast food” invokes thoughts of cheap, delicious and convenient meals. However, the truth is that these words can be deceiving.

Compared to home-cooked food, junk food is much richer in calories, fats, and carbohydrates, all of which promote weight gain when consumed in large quantities. For example, McDonald’s “Angus Bacon & Cheese,” which can satisfy the hunger of a normal teenage boy, contains one-third of the normal daily calorie content of every individual. On the other hand, the same quantity of food in baked potatoes is no more than 220 calories, which is equal to one-tenth of a person’s calorie ration per day.  Also, half of the calories in convenience foods come from fat, which is becoming a serious threat to the modern man. Spending lunch breaks in a amongst junk food increases an individual’s chances of falling ill with lethal diseases, such as heart attacks and Type 2 diabetes.

When asked about their opinion on junk food, most people answer that it is not a problem for them to eat it once or twice a week. Few are those who say that they are waiting on the queues of McDonald’s, KFC, or Burger King every day. Unfortunately, the number of people who consider themselves strongly against the consumption of junk food is even smaller.

The problem is not that people are unaware of the harmful effects of fast food on their health. However, it is a common misconception in most parts of the world that it is less expensive than self-prepared food. In his article “Is junk food really cheaper?” New York Times columnist Mark Bittman reveals: “hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home.” According to Bittman, feeding a menage of four with convenience food may cost from $23 to $28. On the other hand, buying the same amount of raw chicken and potatoes and preparing them at home, according to the Times, is around $14- half the price of a similar menu at McDonald’s.

Although most people claim that they buy junk food because it is cheaper, specialists in this sphere agree that money does not motivate people to eat unhealthy food. Nowadays, consumers buy junk food mainly because it is much more convenient for them to not have to spend time shopping and then cooking at home. The average American adult works about eight hours a day, which doesn’t always allow for him or her to meet all of the household duties.  Of course, passing through some convenience-food place on your way home after work can seem like the perfect alternative to preparing home meals.

Others point out that those who live far away from food markets are forced to consume the nearest available, and often unhealthy, food they can find. In the 21st century it is laughable for people to claim that isolation is the main reason for them to consume junk food. Although a recent study showed the discouraging a truth, that “there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States.” This doesn’t mean that people are not given the chance to choose whether to live healthily, or to continue spending time in the dining halls of junk-food restaurants.

Recent studies have shown that humans have become much more aware of the fact that they should consume more nutritious food, if they want to be healthy. However, according to the Director of Nutritional Policy with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Margo Wootan, it is still impossible to convince some people that fruits and vegetables are more beneficial and less expensive than products rich in fat, salt, or sugar. “If they buy a bag of chips for $2, they think it is a good deal, but if they buy a bag of apples for $2, they think it’s a lot,” Ms. Wootan commented.

The inclination to consume fast food is accepted as one of the major problems people face today.  Whether we will solve it or not depends entirely on us. However, one thing is clear: serious measures have to be taken soon, in order for us to prevent the ceaseless progress of the “junk-food epidemic” that is affecting the modern world.

The article Why do we Consume Fast Food? appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Edinburgh, Scotland – For the second time in three years, Macdonald Hotels has won the award for Best Breakfast at The Menu Innovation and Development Awards (MIDAS). The MIDAS awards aim to recognize the outstanding talents of menu development managers and group executive chefs in the multi-unit and chain restaurants sectors of the food service industry.

Alan Swinson, Catering Director of Macdonald Hotels was presented the award by Eamon Flavin, Managing Director of Delice de France sponsor of Best Breakfast.

Alan said: “It’s an honour to once again win the MIDAS Award for Best Breakfast. At Macdonald Hotels & Resorts, we are immensely proud of the quality we offer to our guests and are happy that MIDAS has recognised our high standards.”

Anna Longthorp from Anna’s Happy Trotters, supplier of sausages to the group, commented: “We are delighted that Macdonald Hotels has won this award. We’re fortunate to work with a hotel collection that cares so much about sourcing top quality, high welfare produce. Many hotels and restaurants are purely fixated on price and our pigs, being free range cost rather a lot more to produce than your average pig but this shows in the quality. Macdonald Hotels could source pork a lot cheaper, such as imported pork, so this just demonstrates their commitment to welfare, provenance and quality.”

The privately-owned hotel group works with a small selection of UK-based suppliers, meaning its restaurant chefs can employ the best raw ingredients to construct menus based on seasonality, sustainability, flavour and provenance, ensuring all food is bursting with nutrients and flavour.

Having invested GBP120k last year to improve its breakfast menu, Macdonald Hotels takes the most important meal of the day very seriously. Unlike many other hotel groups, Macdonald Hotels’ restaurants celebrate the best ingredients on offer across all areas of catering; breakfast, lunch, room service, conference and banqueting, using only the most fresh of ingredients. Breakfast choice at Macdonald Hotels includes:

• A range of healthy organic mueslis, fresh fruit, yogurt and granola
• Sausages from pigs raised by Anna’s Happy Trotters in Free Range conditions, using only back and belly meat from breeds such as ‘Duroc’ and ‘Maximus’
• Freshly baked all butter croissants, breads and pastries
• Freedom foods approved John Ross Jnr smoked salmon which is smoked in a 150 year old traditional kiln
• 100% Free Range eggs
• Milk from Graham’s The Family Dairy

The group has been awarded over 40 AA Rosettes for its restaurants and its food promise is reflected in the recruitment of the very best in fine dining talent. John Paul Maclachlan, Executive Chef at Macdonald Marine Hotel in North Berwick, learnt his trade with Gordon Ramsay and Raymond Blanc, and Aidan Byrne, who established the British Grill at the group’s Macdonald Craxton Wood Hotel near Chester, remains the youngest UK chef to have won a Michelin Star at the age of 22.

The article MacDonald Hotels Wins Best Breakfast Award For Second Time appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Over the last year, a network of more than 1,900 health professionals, including some of the nation’s top pediatricians, cardiologists, and child psychologists, has called on McDonald’s to stop marketing junk food to kids.

As part of the initiative, leading doctors are joining Corporate Accountability International in calling on the administrators of the nation’s leading health institutions to remove McDonald’s franchises from their premises. Twenty-two hospitals currently have contracts with the fast food industry leader, including the Cleveland Clinic and Children’s Memorial Hospital of Chicago.

“Kids are being treated for diet-related conditions like diabetes on one floor in the hospital and given the wrong message by being offered the world’s most recognized junk food brand on another floor in the hospital,” said Dr. Francine Kaufman, former president of the American Diabetes Association and professor emeritus of pediatrics and communications at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, one of the hospitals with a McDonald’s. “The practice earns McDonald’s an undeserved association with healthfulness among parents and children alike…and it should be curtailed.”

A 2006 study in the academic journal Pediatrics demonstrated that allowing a McDonald’s store to operate inside a hospital affects hospital guests’ consumption on the day of their visit, and boosts the perception of the “healthfulness” of McDonald’s food.

To address this concern and call for action, the initiative sent a letter to 22 hospital administrators last week. The letter further notes: “It’s no surprise that McDonald’s sites stores in hospitals. After all, for decades, McDonald’s has attempted to co-opt the health community, to deflect blame for the epidemic of disease that it has helped drive, and to pose itself as part of the solution.”

It also discusses the powerful message administrators could send in taking action, just as others have before them. For example, in 2009, Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas, Texas succeeded in replacing a McDonald’s with a smaller chain offering healthier food. McDonald’s had been the only chain restaurant at the hospital for 20 years. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Vanderbilt Medical Center have also ended their contracts with McDonald’s in recent years.

“Simply put, the less kids are exposed to fast food and its marketing, the less likely they are to suffer from diet-related conditions like type 2 diabetes,” said Sara Deon, International’s Value campaign director and the letter’s principle signatory. “McDonald’s has a long history of putting a healthy label on an inherently unhealthy brand.

It has used healthcare providers and institutions to help promote this image for decades. Today, administrators have the opportunity to provide a healthier food environment for the children and families they care for.”

The article Children’s Hospitals Urge to End Contracts with McDonald’s appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

The French supermarket chain Carrefour and the American fast-food chain McDonald’s topped the list of offenders made by of the Chinese central television (CCTV) on the anniversary of World Consumer Rights Day on March 15.

A team from the CCTV went to a McDonald’s restaurant in Sanlitun, a neighborhood of Beijing, and took photos with a hidden camera; they documented the use of stiffen cheese in burgers, hours after removing the sanitary plastic cover from it. The TV journalists also noted that the restaurant staff had been manipulating the expiration dates of the deserts sold by this restaurant.

When they asked a staff member about these practices, without the person knowing that they were being recorded, they were told that the practices would increase profits and bonuses for the staff.

McDonald’s of China came with an immediate response on its blog, saying it attaches great importance to these violations. The company added that they will strengthen the management and focus on running the business according to the necessary criteria in order to maintain good consumer reputation and clean food and promised to prevent the recurrence of such incidents.

China has experienced several food scandals in recent months, ranging from using recycled cooking oils to fruits being painted to look fresher, mushrooms found to be radiated and tainted wine. The number of McDonald’s restaurants in China has reached more than 1400 with 200 of these opening just last year, according to the official website of the company. China is the third largest market for the fast food chain, which provides employment for more than 70.000 people.

The French hypermarket chain Carrefour has 200 stores in China, which were targeted last year. After it misled customers through a number of deceptive offers, the Chinese TV station were careful to include them in their report. 

In the Zhengzhou branch, regular chicken was sold as a free-range chicken at double the price, according to the TV channel. Carrefour has opened an investigation immediately, and promised severe punishment to those responsible in order to protect the rights of the consumers, according to their official Sina Weibo micro-blog, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter.

After three days, the authorities in Zhengzhou temporally shut down the store as per a report by China’s national English-language newspaper for North American readers, China Daily USA. In 2011, Carrefour was accused by the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) for misleading pricing tags.

The discovery of the misguided pricing was made after an undercover investigation carried out by NDRC personnel in five branches of the French hypermarket chain in a handful of cities.

Image Courtesy of  http://www.flickr.com/photos/asmythie/

The article Carrefour and McDonald’s Mislead Chinese Consumers appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Undercover video footage exposing animal abuse and suffering inside Hawkeye Sow Centers (HSC), a pig breeding factory farm in Leland, Iowa, is being released on February 15 by animal protection organization Compassion Over Killing (COK). The video was filmed by a COK investigator who worked at the facility in December 2011 and wore a hidden camera to document the day-to-day miseries forced upon thousands of female pigs and their piglets.

Iowa is the largest pork-producing state in the U.S., and agribusiness interests are currently trying to pass an “ag-gag” law (HR-589/SF-431) in the state to effectively make whistleblowing exposes on factory farms, like this investigation, illegal.  COK’s video exposes standard industry practices that the industry is desperately trying to hide, including:

• Pregnant and nursing pigs nearly immobilized in tiny crates, unable to even turn around
• Piglets screaming while workers slice off their tails and cut out the males’ genitals without any pain relief
• Poorly performed castrations that resulted in herniated intestines
• Workers pushing the herniated intestines back inside the piglets, then wrapping the area with tape
• Countless sick or injured piglets left to suffer without veterinary care, many of whom later died
• Forced cannibalism: intestines from dead piglets are turned into “gruel” to feed back to pigs
• Layers of feces caked on the floor of crates and  filthy, fly-infested conditions

As our investigator was told, many of the piglets born at this facility will end up on store shelves under the brand name, Hormel. While Hormel recently issued a statement that its company-owned facilities will be phasing out gestation crates, it did not commit to extending this welfare policy to the hundreds of independently-run facilities that ultimately supply Hormel, like HSC, which comprise the majority of Hormel’s pork.

With the news this week that McDonald’s—one of the biggest buyers of pork in the U.S.—is moving to end gestation crate confinement of pigs in its U.S. supply chain, the writing for this inhumane practice is on the wall. It’s time for Hormel for end the use of cruel gestation crates in its entire supply chain.

There’s also no disputing that without anesthesia, male piglets endure immense pain when their testicles are ripped from their bodies. Welfare concerns have prompted Switzerland and Norway to ban this barbaric process, and many other countries have implemented alternatives—alternatives which are also available in the U.S. and should immediately implemented by the pork industry here as well.

“When it comes to the meat industry, animal cruelty is standard practice,” says COK’s executive director Erica Meier. “And rather than try to prevent the worst abuses, Big Agribusiness is trying to prevent Americans from finding out about them with ag-gag bills designed to ban these exposes.

The most effective way consumers can stand up for animals and help stop the cruelty is to simply leave pigs, and all animals, off our plates.

For more information, including investigative footage and photos, visit http://www.cok.net/camp/inv/iowapigs.

The article Cruelty in Iowa Pig Breeding Factory Farm Revealed by COK appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Despite the new look for McDonald’s Happy Meals starting in Sept in the U.S. critics say McDonald’s can still do more.

The golden arches will be offering a healthier option for their Happy Meals. But the University of Minnesota’s Simone French believes McDonald is missing a bigger chance to help children’s health. French believe McDonald should get rid of the soda.

The kids’ meals will be adding 1/4 cup of apples to their meals in addition to serving a smaller portion of french fries.

This change with cut 130 calories from the current Happy Meal. -The new Happy Meal with four pieces of McNuggets, apple slices, smaller French Fries and 1% milk will have 410 calories, 19 grams of fat and 560 milligrams of sodium.

French is an expert on marketing and societal influences that affect eating behaviors and is studying how to improve the diets and habits of low-income Minnesota families. These families are particularly affected by fast food practices, she said, because those restaurants offer food they can afford.

“What you could do is not even offer a sugar-sweetened beverage in a kids’ meal,” she said to Star Tribune. “If parents want it, they should have to order it separately off the menu.

Childhood obesity has become a growing problem in the U.S. and health advocates have pointed fingers at McDonalds for contributing to the problem. But McDonald’s is taking steps to change that, “by adding fruit in every Happy Meal, McDonald’s hopes to address a challenge children face in meeting the recommended daily consumption of produce,” according to the corporation’s statement.

The changes follow first lady Michelle Obama’s public health campaign to prevent childhood obesity. The first lady says she commends the progress McDonalds is making by providing more fruit and reducing the calories in its Happy Meals, “I’ve always said that everyone has a role to play in making America healthier, and these are positive steps toward the goal of solving the problem of childhood obesity,” Michelle Obama in a statement.

“McDonald’s is taking steps in the right direction, but we should be careful in heaping praise on corporations for simply reducing the scope of the problem they continue to create,” said Kelle Louaillier, executive director of Corporate Accountability International to CNN Health. “Ultimately corporate responsibility is not about securing public relations for cleaning up your own mess, but for not creating the problem in the first place. In this case, that means stopping the marketing of junk food to kids.”

The suggested retail price of the Happy Meal will not change, remaining between $2.99 and $3.49.

“McDonald’s has been engaging suppliers, government and non-government organizations to determine ways it could play a role in helping society address today’s obesity concerns,” the company’s press release said. “McDonald’s will develop additional fruit and vegetable choices and expects them to roll out over the next few years.”

The article McDonalds Can Still Do More appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

The McDonald’s Corp. has bowed to pressure from health and children’s advocacy groups and will introduce changes to its trademark Happy Meals. The new meal will include a serving of fruit or vegetable and lower the portion of french fries from 2.4 ounces of potatoes to 1.1 ounces.

The new menu was announced Tuesday and will take effect from September in selected markets. By April, the fast food chain expects all restaurants in the U.S. to have implemented the change.

The president of McDonald’s, Jan Fields, said on Good Morning America: “What we’re doing is offering fruit to every child that comes into McDonald’s, to it is an automatic.” The company, which has long been criticized for peddling unhealthy food to children, according to CBS News, has stated “We recognize the importance of fruit in a child’s diet.”

Alongside the reduced French fry serving, a side dish of apple, carrots, raising, pineapple slices or mandarin oranges will be included, depending on the season and the region, reports the LA Times. On average the new meal will represent a 20% decrease in calories.

Critics of the world’s largest restaurant chain have challenged the practice of selling kids meals with toys with have little nutritional value, connecting it with the United States obesity crisis. Legislation have already been put in force that bans meals with toys if they do not live up to certain nutritional criteria. According to the LA Times, McDonald’s spokeswoman Danya Proud has said “We know we’re a leader and we know we need to be part of the solution.”

But she adds, “we can’t be looked at as providing the only solution.”

The article McDonald’s Kids’ Meal About to Boost Nutritional Value, Decrease Calories appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.