America is a fast food nation. Just look at restaurant drive-throughs.

Once a commuter’s convenience, it’s now a morass of endless idling lines. Walking inside, by comparison, takes mere seconds.

The same is true for dozens of cookie-cutter fast-food joints. All are basically the same except for name, and all contribute to expanding waistlines.

Now some companies are offering to change their advertising toward children, and promote exercise and healthy living along with their food products. Think Mayor McCheese taking a step class.

The effort, though worthy of a rousing golf clap, is ineffective. The companies will neither stop selling health-questionable products to children, nor further illuminate the amount of fat, calories, cholesterol or carbohydrates their food contains. Children will merely be advised healthy living is a good thing.

This fails to recognize an obvious fact: it’s the parents, not their kids, idling in those drive-through lines. Any effort to improve children’s health must focus on the decision-makers – their parents.

Because not every kid is Drew Letourneau, a 13-year-old student at Central Maine Christian Academy who eliminated fast food from his diet two years ago. Most are like Tiffini Sample’s two-year-old; Sample, of New Jersey, told the Associated Press her toddler is conditioned to fast food.

“She passes the Golden Arches and she says, ‘French Fries,'” Sample said. So do millions of other children, forcing millions of parents to choose convenience or nutrition.

What’s the choice? Dr. Dora Anne Mills, the state’s health czar, has grimly forecast this generation of Maine children could be the first to live fewer years than its parents, a condition directly proportional to a swelling rate of obesity.

Fast food isn’t all to blame. Lack of exercise, nutritional intellect and effort by parents, business and government has created a culture in which “easy to get” supersedes “good for you.” We’re all guilty of creating the fast food nation, which, in turn, spreads responsibility for reversing its effects.

Parents must make better decisions for children’s nutrition. Just as television shouldn’t raise a child, greasy french fries and chicken nuggets shouldn’t feed them. And exercise must be near-mandatory, to instill habits of healthy living to follow a child through their lifetime.

The food industry must abandon marketing lip-service and improve the nutritional value of its food. KFC’s decision to eliminate trans-fats from its restaurants is an example of practical nutritional reform.

And government must force this to happen. Weak public service campaigns are equivalent to doing nothing. This week, the federal government introduced “Labelman” to inform consumers about nutrition labels, joining “Bac” and “Thermy” in the government stable of cartoon health advocates.

Critics said the new cartoon proves government is delusional in combating childhood obesity. We couldn’t say it better. Poor children’s health is an epidemic, and needs to be treated with action, not illustration.