Restaurant chains are quietly pushing sugar on your kids

Of the top 50 U.S. restaurant chains, more than half (56%) provided menus specifically for children that included sugary beverages — soda, lemonade, sugar sweetened juice drinks and others — according to a new report released this week by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “Restaurant foods are the largest category of food marketed to children and play a critical role in children’s diets,” the report said. “Children get an average of 25% of their calories from restaurant foods and beverages.”


Still, the availability of sugary drinks on children’s menus fell to 74% last year from 83% in 2012. “Children’s meals are a form of food marketing to children and restaurant foods are the top food category marketed to children,” the authors wrote. “Healthier children’s meals — with beverage offerings such as water, seltzer, and low-fat milk — support families’ efforts to feed their children well and help children form healthy eating habits.” (The American Beverage Foundation and the National Restaurant Association did not respond to request for comment.)

These figures follow national trends. Some two-thirds of children in the U.S. drink at least one sugary beverage per day and 30% drink two or more a day, according to a study released in January by the National Center for Health Statistics at the government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the American Heart Association says children aged 2 to 18 should eat or drink no more than six teaspoons of added sugars daily. A regular can of soda has 39 grams of sugar or more than nine teaspoons of added sugar.

Some 31% of American 15-year-olds self-reported as overweight, a report released in May by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded. The OECD said the number of 15-year-olds who self-report as overweight has steadily risen since 2000, despite public health campaigns in most countries to combat it. U.S. dietary guidelines recommend no more than 10% of calories per day from sugar. The rate of obesity among adults in the U.S. is also the highest among more than 40 countries surveyed by the OECD, just ahead of Mexico and New Zealand.

Thomas John Dunker, author of “Pushing Sugar: Straight Talk About Sugar and How the Corporate Food Giants Are Tricking You,” says food corporations market cereals and other products as “sugar bombs” for kids. Being overweight is associated with a higher risk of dying prematurely than being a healthier weight — and the risk increases with additional pounds, according to a 2016 study led by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

You have more control over what you eat when you cook it yourself at home and, similar to the peer-support philosophy of Weight Watchers WTW, +25.12% eat with people who have the most intimate knowledge of your goals. A 2014 study published in “Public Health Nutrition” found that cooking dinner frequently at home is associated with a healthier diet. But there’s an important caveat: People are more likely to snack as a meal when they are alone.

Diet soda may not be the answer either. Even the consumption of artificial sweeteners such as sucralose and aspartame could lead to an increase in body mass index, a recent review of trials and studies involving more than 400,000 participants and published in the peer-reviewed Canadian Medical Association Journal found. “Evidence from randomized controlled trials does not clearly support the intended benefits of non-nutritive sweeteners for weight management,” it said.