Previous Story
12% of Kids’ Calorie Intake comes from fast food
Posted On Sep 21 2015
Comment: Off
Kids at the other end of the economic spectrum averaged 13% of their daily calories from fast food.
It looks like American kids may need to cut down on the Happy Meals. Children from families close to the poverty line had 11.5 percent of their daily calories from fast food, on average.
Fast-food chains have made substantial efforts to improve their offerings in recent years, adding grilled chicken and salads to their menus, switching from whole to fat-free milk, and offering fruit or yogurt with kids’ meals. It was also found that an additional 10.7 percent will have 25 to 40 percent of their daily food intake from fast food, and 11.6 percent will consume fewer than 25 percent of their calories from establishments serving such dishes.
The data was collected from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2011 and 2012.
More specifically, 12.1% of these young diners will get more than 40% of their daily calories in the form of fast food.
By comparison, an earlier CDC report, done in 2013, found that adults got about 11 percent of their calories from fast food.
“Childhood is not a place where you can say, ‘Let everyone eat what they want, and we can fix it later, ‘ ” she says. Obese kids are more likely to be at risk for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and developing diabetes. Fast-food consumption among children has remained consistent over the past 20 years, despite increased interest in organic and “slow” food and healthful eating. Asian American children, for example, were less likely to visit a fast food joint that their peers, which researchers speculated that they were not assimilated into the American lifestyle. Researchers also witnessed the same trend for the teenagers, those who came from the poorest families consumed the least amount of fast food. That compared with 11.2% of Latino kids, 13.1% of white kids and 13.9% of African American kids. That pattern was seen regardless of gender, race or ethnicity, weight status or family income, the researchers found.
