Regulations make Fast Food Meals Healthier for Kids, Study Reports

Regulations are effective in making fast food kids' meals healthier, a new study found.

For this study, the researchers set out to see if a new proposed policy aimed to make fast food kids' meals healthier would be effective. The policy, which was presented to the New York City Council, would require all meals that includes toys to also include one serving of fruit, vegetable or whole grain. The entire meal would also have nutritional restrictions, such as a limit of 500 calories.

The team recorded the purchases made by 358 adults at a fast food restaurant - Burger King, McDonald's and Wendy's - in New York City and New Jersey from 2013 to 2014. The meals were bought for 422 children with the average age of seven.

The researchers found that on average, parents bought their children a 600-calorie meal with roughly one-third of those calories sourced from fat. The meals also contained an averaged of 869 mg of salt. Based from these averages, the team concluded that if the children ate meals designed under the new policy, they would end up eating nine percent fewer calories, 10 percent fewer calories from fat and 10 percent fewer sodium.

"It's a rather small amount in comparison to how bad the country's obesity problem really is," senior author Marie Bragg, of NYU Langone Medical Center in New York acknowledged before adding that small amounts can add up. "There's a lot of value in the incremental changes that can sum up to a great impact with all the other changes occurring in the environment. We're at a point where we have to move the needle and we have to do it with policies like this."

The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.