Restaurant Kids' Menus Still Not Healthy

About five years ago, the American National Restaurant Association teamed up with Healthy Dining to cre­ate the Kids LiveWell pro­gram. To imple­ment the objec­tives of the Kids LiveWell ini­tia­tive, 42,000 restau­rant loca­tions nation­wide com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing fam­i­lies with a grow­ing selec­tion of health­ful children’s menu choices when din­ing out, with the menus requir­ing that at least one meal and one other item on the menu fall under proper nutri­tional guide­lines.

A study con­ducted by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, how­ever, found no sub­stan­tial health improve­ments in the menu offer­ings. What is more, the amount of sugar in bev­er­age options for chil­dren appeared to be alarm­ingly high.

The new study was pub­lished in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and was the first of its kind to exam­ine trends in the nutri­tional con­tent of children’s meals among US restau­rant chains, at a time when many were tran­si­tion­ing towards health­ier menu choices.

The researchers employed data acquired from the nutri­tion cen­sus MenuStat, and looked into trends in the nutri­ent con­tent of 4,016 bev­er­ages, main courses, side dishes, and desserts offered on children’s menus in 45 of the nation’s top 100 fast food, fast casual, and full-ser­vice restau­rant chains between 2012 and 2015. Out of the total num­ber of restau­rant chains, fif­teen were Kids LiveWell par­tak­ers.

It was found that nei­ther group showed sub­stan­tial improve­ment in the num­ber of calo­ries, sat­u­rated fat, or sodium in menu offer­ings for chil­dren over the first three years after the launch of the Kids LiveWell project in 2011. Children’s desserts had almost as many calo­ries and roughly twice the amount of sat­u­rated fat as the main course, while the aver­age children’s entree far exceeded rec­om­men­da­tions for sodium and sat­u­rated fat.

In addi­tion, eighty per­cent of children’s bev­er­age options were sug­ary drinks, and this even though indi­vid­ual restau­rants had vowed to grad­u­ally cut them out. The study also showed that when­ever restau­rant own­ers excluded soda from the menus, they tended to replace it with fla­vored milk and sweet­ened teas.

“This study high­lights the impor­tance of mon­i­tor­ing restau­rant com­mit­ments over time, both to hold the indus­try account­able to their pledges, and to assess whether fur­ther improve­ments are made down the road,” said to Olive Oil Times lead author Alyssa Moran, a doc­toral stu­dent in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan School.

Asked why no actual progress has been made regard­ing the qual­ity of kids’ menus, Moran answered that this is mainly an account­abil­ity issue. To par­tic­i­pate in Kids LiveWell, restau­rants are only required to offer one meal and one other item that meet cer­tain nutri­tional require­ments. Although this is a step in the right direc­tion, restau­rants can get credit for par­tic­i­pat­ing by mak­ing only very min­i­mal changes.

“Modifying the pro­gram to require that all kids’ menu items meet nutri­tional stan­dards, and offer­ing guide­lines for healthy bev­er­ages would likely have a big­ger impact. With that said, many of the restau­rants chains in our study have thou­sands of loca­tions nation­wide and may just be slow to adopt vol­un­tary pledges, rather than resis­tant to change. Kids deserve foods that taste good and pro­vide the nutri­ents they need to grow and develop into healthy adults, and restau­rants are in a great posi­tion to make those types of foods avail­able,” con­tin­ued Moran.

The sci­en­tist also stressed that there needs to be more col­lab­o­ra­tion between chefs, food­ser­vice exec­u­tives, and nutri­tion sci­en­tists to come up with inno­v­a­tive, finan­cially viable solu­tions, cit­ing a pro­gram called Menus of Change, which was cre­ated by The Culinary Institute of America and Harvard School of Public Health, and which seeks to do just that.

“Local gov­ern­ments can also play a role in con­nect­ing restau­rants with pub­lic health experts. In Philadelphia, the Department of Public Health worked with Chinese take-out restau­rant own­ers to reduce salt in their foods by pro­vid­ing train­ing from pro­fes­sional chefs and by work­ing with dis­trib­u­tors to offer lower sodium ingre­di­ents,” the lead author of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study reported.

“These types of pro­grams can work, espe­cially if restau­rants feel there is a demand for health­ier options from their cus­tomers. So, there’s also a role for par­ents to play, in telling restau­rants they want health­ier options for their kids!”

• Trends in Nutrient Content of Children’s Menu Items in U.S. Chain Restaurants


• National Restaurant Association