Restaurant meals, with their large portions, liberal use of fat, and freebies like chips and bread push the calories in one meal well over the recommended limit for most adults for an entire day.
Kids’ menus are no different. Findings from a new study say that kid-friendly menu items go over-the-top calorie-wise for children, too.
A panel of fifteen child nutrition experts looked at the calories in menu items tailored to kids at the top 200 restaurant chains. Their job was to not only measure calories, but come up with guidelines to help children and their parents know how to stay within reasonable calorie limits.
A third of all children and over 40 percent of teens eat at fast food restaurants on any given day.
“It's important to examine the caloric value of what kids are served because the chances are they will eat all or most of what they are served,” lead author, Dr. Deborah Cohen, a senior medical scientist at the RAND Corporation, said in a statement.
Here are the recommendations that came out of the study:
To be in line with these guidelines, a kids’ hamburger or a serving of mac and cheese should contain no more than 300 calories, yet the researchers found that the average number of calories in a child-sized burger was 465 and 442 in mac and cheese, or roughly one and a half times the recommended calories.
Children eat out often. A third of all children and over 40 percent of teens eat at fast food restaurants on any given day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children under the age of 12 tend to eat what’s put before them, according to the researchers, and parents generally don’t have the information to make decisions about how much to allow their child to eat or save to take home.
Restaurants are in a position to promote children’s health and participate in the fight against childhood obesity by taking the recommendations of child nutrition experts and adjusting their kids’ menu offerings. Parents can support them by making their children aware of the excessive calories in many offerings and the weight gain and other health consequences that taking in more calories than you burn will bring.
Not only would this step be beneficial for parents and kids, but it could be good for business for restaurants.
The study is published in Nutrition Today.