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Kids’ menu choices improve calorie counts, remain high in sodium, fat
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While fast food and full-service restaurants improved the availability of lower calorie children’s meals, many still failed to meet recommendations for fat, saturated fat and sodium content, according to research in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
“Improving the availability of healthier kids’ meals is a critical step toward increasing children’s exposure to healthier foods, but that alone is not enough,” Sarah Sliwa, PhD, of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said in a news release. “We encourage restaurants to look holistically at the nutritional value of their children’s meals, and to market healthier options in ways that emphasize taste and appeal to parents and children alike.”
Sliwa and colleagues studied publicly available data from the sales-based top 10 quick-service restaurants and full-service restaurants, based on the 2014 Nation’s Restaurant News Top 100 Report. Restaurants were included if they offered a specific children’s menu and had nutritional information publicly available. The researchers gathered nutritional data from restaurant websites. In cases where information was unavailable on the Internet, the researchers obtained it from corporate customer service centers and local franchises via telephone.
Study results showed that on average 72.4% of quick-service and 63% of full-service restaurants offered children’s menu meals of 600 kilocalories or less. Only 31.9% of quick-service and 21.7% of full-service restaurants, however, offered meals that met nutrition recommendations for calories, fat, saturated fat and sodium.
“The current findings offer a point of comparison for monitoring further shifts in the nutrition profile of children’s meal combinations, which is timely because the national implementation of menu labeling may lead to additional lower-calorie offerings,” Sliwa and colleagues wrote. “It is unclear whether requiring calorie information alone will spur needed improvements in the overall nutrition content of offerings.” – by David Costill
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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