In an era when the family trip to the golden arches is as British as queuing for the bus, one prominent fitness guru has declared a cultural and culinary rebellion. Joe Wicks, the 40-year-old phenomenon known to millions as the nation's PE teacher, has revealed that his four children have never once set foot in a McDonald's.
In a candid interview promoting his new cookbook, Healthy Start, Mr Wicks confessed to Times Radio's Cathy Newman that his offspring, Indigo, eight, Marley, seven, Leni, three, and Dusty, two, have been raised entirely without the dubious pleasure of a Happy Meal. It is a stance that will strike many a British parent as either admirable discipline or a rather joyless deprivation of a childhood rite of passage.
Why has Joe Wicks banned McDonald's for his family?
Mr Wicks, who has built a lucrative empire on exhorting the public to embrace exercise and wholesome eating, explained that his own conversion came not from a sudden health scare, but from a rather more romantic encounter. The last time he tasted a sausage and egg McMuffin, a treat he once devoured religiously at 7am before his boot camps, was on the very night he met his wife, Rosie, in 2015.
'The night I met her, actually, we're driving back from a rave, and we stopped at the 24-hour McDonald's in Wandsworth, and that was because she really wanted to have McDonald's. So that was the last time we had McDonald's.'
It is a tale of love, late-night cravings, and a decisive break with the past. Since that fateful stop in Wandsworth, a decade has passed without a single visit to the chain, a fact that Mr Wicks wears as a badge of honour.
Is ultra-processed food the real enemy?
His aversion is rooted in a childhood he has previously described as dominated by 'ultra-processed food'. Unlike the cosy image of a mother's home-cooked roast, Mr Wicks's upbringing was shaped by frozen dinners and a lack of culinary knowledge in the family home.
'I had a very unhealthy diet as a child. Any money that came through the door was not going on healthy protein sources and vegetables - it just wasn't. So I lived off ultra-processed food and frozen dinners. My mum was 15 when she was kicked out of school and left home; she didn't have the skills and knowledge to cook - it was not in her vocabulary.'
This personal history has clearly informed his mission. His new book is dedicated to providing 'nourishing, easy and enjoyable' recipes for families, a practical attempt to break a cycle that he believes is damaging the health of the nation's youth.
What does Joe Wicks say about children snacking?
Beyond the ban on burgers, Mr Wicks also offered his firm views on the modern parenting habit of constant snacking. He argues that children, with their 'quite small tummies', are being overfed between meals in an environment that encourages 'constant grazing'.
'I think we live in an environment where we're taught to sort of give snacks and this sort of in between meals all the time... So try and avoid snacking, try to just wait.'
It is a message of restraint that runs against the grain of modern convenience, but one that Mr Wicks delivers with the certainty of a man who has made a fortune from telling the British public to do what is good for them, whether they like it or not.