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Springboarding off the just-released Fast Food Nation's dramatization of how burger chains and Hollywood conspire to bloat America's children by inducing them to gorge on diabetes-inducing meat slabs en route to the plastic Shrek toy contained in their movie tie-in meals, the LAT's Patrick Goldstein calls out studio chiefs for happily endorsing a variety of social causes (AIDS, the environment, any other issue involving a charity dinner with an open bar) while ignoring the damage that McRibs are inflicting on advertising-prone kids:

When the surgeon general puts a disclaimer on a Burger King burger saying, 'Consuming this food is dangerous for your health,' then we'll get out of the fast-food business," he told me. "I don't see cigarettes and hamburgers being in the same category. Smoking is dangerous and addictive. It's a lot harder to smoke in moderation than eat fast food that way. I just don't think people who eat fast food become fast-food junkies."

Horn contends that "you can find a healthy meal at Burger King if you choose to." I'm not so sure. I went to my neighborhood Burger King, which is giving away cuddly Waddle Raul and Glide Lombardo penguins to everyone who buys a Kids Meal. If you order a garden salad, you get 21 grams of fat, including 3.5 grams of trans fats — but no penguin. If you're looking for a healthful meal, you've come to wrong place.

Universal Chairman Marc Schmuger says his studio is simply allying itself with the promotional partners that best fit his movies. "We're not forcing anyone to eat fast food," he says. "We're encouraging people to have freedom of choice. It's up to the individual or the family to decide where they want to eat."

The studio heads make fair points; to date, only Carl's Jr. Six Dollar Heart-Stopper Burger carries any kind of warning label (and even that one touts a "guaranteed cardiac arrest from eight layers of meaty goodness") and it is, of course, a parent's duty to force-feed the occasional vegetable in between penguin-collecting, artery-clogging trips to Burger King. Warner Bros., DreamWorks, Universal, and their peers aren't forcing anyone to eat the crap they're covering in advertising for their films, but if their promotions just happen to result in creating a new generation of moviegoers so obese that any physical activity more demanding than raising the armrest and squeezing into two adjoining seats at their local multiplex becomes impossible, so be it. It's not like the burger fumes rising off their bodies are causing second-hand lung cancer or depleting the ozone layer.