Nutrition is a controversial topic in our nation. We seem to have a pretty good concept of what's healthy and what's not, but deciding what to do about it has proven much more difficult.

Eating too much leads to obesity. Obesity leads to low self-esteem and, depending on the crowd, a push for "fat studies" in our nation's universities.

Eating too little leads to anorexia, bulimia or some other –ia and, once again, low self-esteem.

The obvious solution, as in the Goldilocks paradigm, is to find the "just right" niche and settle in, ideally avoiding the bear attacks at the end of the story.

Whatever defines "just right" in nutritional health, such as the FDA food pyramid, it's clear by now that good nutrition doesn't leave much room for fast food.

Unfortunately, it's also clear by now that our nation loves McDonald's.

Attempts have been made both socially and politically to stymie fast food giants like McDonald's and even smaller restaurants with lipid-laden menus.

Recently, New York City imposed a trans fat ban on city restaurants. Even more recently, and likely in response to increasing criticism, KFC changed its Colonel's Chicken recipe.

Perhaps most memorably, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock frequented McDonald's, eating nothing else for a month as documented in his multimillion-dollar success Super Size Me.

Following the release of the film, McDonald's, under fire, did away with its Super Size menu items. In fact, it launched a "healthy" menu with salads, wraps, yogurt and bottled water. Could the menu makeover compensate for the damage caused by Spurlock's film?

It turns out that compensation was probably never even necessary.

I remember that period well; I worked at McDonald's then. The flow of Big Mac meals — with Diet Coke, naturally — never stopped, Oreo McFlurries continued to fly across the counter and the Little League baseball teams kept coming all season long.

In fact, a few years later, McDonald's is enjoying some of the best sales in the company's history and preparing for the release of its biggest burger yet — the Angus Third Pounder. The burger will pack 720 to 860 calories, depending on cheese, bacon or mushroom options.

McDonald's opponents may be vexed. How, in the face of a national obesity epidemic, can one of the nation's primary purveyors of unhealthy food continue to prosper so much?

That's probably the wrong question to ask.

In fact, I am much more interested in an entirely separate question: when did the focus of "diet and exercise" shift almost entirely to "diet," such that the blame for our nation's health problems has been increasingly pushed onto restaurants and food manufacturers?

Physical education programs are being cut out of public school curricula, and the advent of technology isn't exactly encouraging exercise. The day of the Apple iHouse probably isn't far off.

It's true that McDonald's sells a lot of high-fat food. But it's also true that McDonald's provides a lot of jobs for workers that might have trouble finding employment elsewhere.

Health education is surely important, but personal health cannot be legislated. Prohibition failed and tobacco continues to sell despite overwhelming legal evidence of its devastating health impacts. Attempting to bring down fast food is at least as unrealistic and certainly unfair.

Reach columnist Andrew D. Brown at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.