C’mon McD’s: You Can Do It!

According to a law passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, fast food restaurants in San Francisco have one year to improve the nutritional quality of their kids’ meals if they want to continue to lure the younger set in with cute and collectable toys. Although vetoed by the city’s mayor, the veto will probably be vetoed unless one of the eight supervisors who voted to pass the bill changes his mind, and the new law will take effect December 2011. (Update: The Board of Supervisors overrode the veto on November 24.)

We think that’s plenty of time for restaurants to come up with some new ideas for cutting some of the fat, salt and sugar from their family fare. In fact, in just one week, we created a few of our own healthier fast-food meals, and we offer our ideas up to McDonald’s and any other fast-food restaurant that wants to use them as a basis for meals that will allow San Francisco’s children to continue to pick up a coveted prize when they go out to eat, and all children to enjoy fast food that won’t compromise their health.

Lose the Fryers and Soda, Cut the Salt

For guidance, we turned to Susan McQuillan, a New York City food writer, dietitian and mom, who is the author of Sesame Street’s C is for Cooking and who currently writes the health pages for Parent & Child magazine. She says it’s just not that difficult to come up with healthier fast food that’s still fun for children to eat.

“Get rid of the fryers and soda machines,” Susan says. “And watch your portion sizes when it comes to higher calorie foods and ingredients.” Replacing high-sodium condiments such as ketchup, tartar sauce, salsa, dressings and dips, with lower-sodium varieties will greatly improve the salt situation, she adds, because that’s where a lot of the excess sodium in fast foods is coming from.

The biggest challenge is complying with the 200-calorie limit for individual items. It’s easy enough when you’re talking about fresh fruit and vegetables, or a handful of baked fries, but how do you make a 200-calorie cheeseburger? “That’s a tough assignment,” Susan says. “But it’s possible.” She created a turkey burger but says fast food restaurants could offer a choice of beef or turkey burgers if they grind only lean cuts of meat and keep their patties down to 2 cooked ounces.

Breading Alternatives

To keep her fast food fun, Susan coated chicken nuggets with crushed, salt-free pretzels crumbs and her fish fingers with crushed, lightly salted baked potato chips, which she “glued” to the meat with an egg white and yogurt mixture that adds no significant amount or calories or any fat at all. That way, the nuggets and fingers can be baked, and the coating is nice and crisp, without the benefit of frying.

Kids love dipping, but Susan says fruit can stand alone; save the dips for the veggies and make them with a yogurt base and low-salt or no-salt seasoning. And fries? Why not? Just stop frying them! A small order of lightly salted baked fries with low-sodium ketchup will satisfy a child and fill the nutritional bill.

Susan’s basic menus for healthier versions of fast-food meals won’t break any laws in San Francisco, or anywhere else for that matter, should other towns and cities follow suit. In fact the calorie counts, fat content and salt levels are so low, you could sneak in a little more of each and still escape the nutrition police! C’mon McD’s, you can do it!

The 3 Happy Meals: Cheeseburger, Fish ‘n Chips, Chicken Nugget

Cheeseburger Meal

• Turkey Burger in Pita Half with Lettuce, Tomato and Cheddar Cheese
• Steamed Broccoli with Yogurt Dip
• Baked “Fries”
• Sliced Apples
• Milk (1%), Apple Juice or Water
• 474 calories, 11 g fat, 454 mg sodium

Fish ‘n Chips Meal

• Turbot Fingers Coated in Crushed Potato Chips
• Steamed Green Beans with Salsa Dip
• Baked “Fries”
• Sliced Mango
• Apple Juice, Milk (1%) or Water
• 469 calories, 10 g fat, 432 mg sodium

Chicken Nugget Meal

• Pretzel-Coated Chicken Nuggets
• Carrot and Sweet Peppers with Yogurt Dip
• Baked “Fries”
• Pineapple Cubes
• Milk (1%), Juice or Water
• 473 calories, 15 g fat, 396 mg sodium

Beverages

Drink up, but stick to lowfat milk, 100% juice or water. Kids need to know that sugary soft drinks are not an option if they want to take home a prize.

We Made 3 Kid-Captivating Meals That Pass the San Francisco ‘Happy Meals Ban Law’ is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

I recently posted here in defense of a San Francisco law requiring fast-food and other restaurants that offer toys along with certain children’s meals to limit the calories, fats and sugar content of the toy meals. This produced a number of comments taking issue with my position. I would like to respond to a few of the points the commenters made.

Today, I’d like to reply to this observation made by Kevin D.:
“I believe you are… misrepresenting the nutritional value of the Happy Meal. For example, the Chicken Nugget Happy Meal with Apple Dippers and 1% milk represents less than 1/3 of the USDA recommended fat, sodium, and calories. If you choose fruit juice, you can lower the total even further, with 380 calories and 12 g of fat (only 2.5 of which is saturated).”

He’s quite right in this regard. You can order the Happy Meal with apple slices instead of fries and juice instead of a soft drink. Moreover, most of the fast-food chains offer some form of “healthy” version of their standard kid’s meal. But there are two problems with this.

(CC) DESIGNFACTS/FLICKR

First, the actual number of those healthy options is almost vanishingly small. Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity analyzed the nutritional information for kids’ meals provided at eight major chains: McDonald’s, Wendy’s Taco Bell, KFC, Burger King, Dairy Queen and Subway. Out of a grand total of over 3,000 childrens’ meal combinations, they found exactly 15 that met the accepted nutrition standards for elementary school kids. There were 20 more that met the kids’ calorie limit, but exceeded other limits such as on fats and sodium. And while some offered as few as 300 calories, there were plenty that topped out at 1,000 or so. In short, a minuscule 0.7 percent of all possible kids’ meals studied qualify as “healthy.”

The second problem is that you, the parent, have to know which chains offer the healthy options, and what those options are, and make a point of asking for them. At every chain but Subway, if you fail to specify otherwise, you’ll be given their default combo, which is in most cases is the entree (usually a burger or breaded chicken) plus fries and a sugary soda.

Since 84 percent of parents surveyed say they take their kids to a fast-food place at least once a week, the numbers mount up impressively. One Yale researcher estimated that if the healthier kid’s meal options were made the default choices, America’s youth would consume literally billions of fewer calories per year.

Source: “Choosing meals is not child’s play,” Nanci Hellmich, USA Today, 11/8/10, p. 6D.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

Fast-Food Children’s Meals: Odds of Getting a Healthy One are Roughly 150 – 1 is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

Using Lures to Tempt Kids into Making Bad Choices? Isn’t that what Pederasts do?

As you’ve probably heard, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has just passed a new ordinance, effective December 1, which restricts the ability of fast-food and other restaurants to offer free toys with children’s meals. Under the new rule, toys can only be given away with kids’ meals that (1) contain less than 600 calories or 35 percent of their calories from fat, (2) include fruits and vegetables, and (3) come with drinks that are low or moderate in fat and sugar content.

San Francisco isn’t the first locality to do something like this — Santa Clara County, just south of the city, passed a similar law earlier this year — but it is the first major American city to do so, and it is San Francisco, after all, and inevitably this is being ridiculed in some quarters as nanny statism and/or liberal interference with the free market run amok.

Unsurprisingly, it has been strongly criticized by the National Restaurant Association and McDonald’s, which introduced the free toy ploy with its Happy Meals in 1979.

As it happens, I live just a half hour across the Bay from San Francisco, and as it also happens, I wholeheartedly support the new restrictions, and below are a few of the reasons why I rise to defend it.

• Nobody’s “consumer rights” or “freedom of choice” have been impinged. Parents can still buy fat- and sugar-heavy meals, there simply won’t be a toy included. And they can still get the toys, simply by buying one of the healthy meals, which can then be eaten or thrown away, as they wish.
• What we have with the free-toy reward is an enticement, pure and simple, and moreover an enticement to do something that is not in one’s own best interest. The basic psychology is the same as the abuser who uses candy to get the child into the car. I know, this sounds like a wildly hyperbolic comparison, it’s just a damn hamburger, right? Wrong. In the case of the Happy Meal, it’s a hamburger or chicken McNuggets, fries, and a soda or low-fat chocolate milk or juice, totaling 580 calories and fully 26 grams of fat; roughly half the entire recommended daily calorie load for 4-5-year-olds and 40 percent of that for 9-year-olds. And it’s not just one meal, but millions upon millions of such meals, at a time when some 37 percent of Americans ages 2 to 19 are overweight or obese. They virtually guarantee soaring increases in our national diabetes and heart disease rates down the road.
• The problem with the free toy concept is that it works: it effectively lures the kids and their parents to choose the accompanying meals over other options. How effective? Well, fast-food chains spent over one-half-billion dollars on toys and ads to promote kids’ meals in 2006 alone, the latest year we have data for. You don’t spend that kind of money on something unless it’s moving the product like hotcakes.
• In essence, all the S.F. ordinance is doing is saying that if you have a gimmick that has been shown to effectively channel kids toward certain menu items, you can only use that gimmick to promote items that are beneficial, not detrimental, to the kids’ health.
• And don’t dismiss this as just another “only in lefty-loony San Fransicso” news item. A lot of localities have enacted or are considering similar restraints on the sale or marketing of trans-fatty foods, sugar-laden beverages and other nutrition-challenged restaurant offerings.

(CC) pyxopotamus/FLICKR

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has threatened McDonald’s with legal action over the Happy Meal toys used as a lure for minor children, and don’t be surprised if they file a suit before the month is out.

It’s really just this simple: McDonald’s and other fast-food chains are bribing children to choose food items that are at best insufficiently nutritious and at worst downright unhealthy for them. That may not qualify as child abuse, but it’s definitely child manipulation and exploitation. I applaud almost any measure taken to rein it in.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

In Defense of San Francisco’s “Happy Meals” Law is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

Some Handy Tricks for Handling the Treats

Nanci Hellmich, USA Today‘s health and medicine reporter extraordinaire, has a Halloween candy article in that paper today that is rich with interesting little factoids, favorite candy calorie-counts, and a few suggestions on how the weight-concerned can glide through this annual candython with the least damage to themselves, diet-wise. It is recommended reading. To whet your appetite, here are some samples.

• Parents wind up eating half the candy bars their kids bring home, especially the chocolate kind.
• The most popular forms of candy are chocolate, chewy, and hard, in that order.
• During the week beginning Halloween night, we will eat about five percent of the candy we will eat all year.

Some Halloween Candy Favorites, with Contents

• Fun-size Butterfinger: 85 calories, 3.5 grams fat.
• Fun-size Snickers: 80 calories, 4 grams fat.
• Fun-size M&Ms: 73 calories, 3 grams fat.
• Snack-size Hershey’s Milk Chocolate: 67 calories, 4 grams fat.
• 10 candy corns: 75 calories, no fat.
• Fun-size Skittles: 60 calories, 0.7 grams fat.
• Tootsie Roll pop: 60 calories, no fat.
• Starburst Fruit Chews (2): 40 calories, 0.8 grams fat.


(CC) Imcomkorea/Flickr

Some Survival Tips for Grown-ups

To lessen the overall sugar and fat load consumed by your kids and/or yourself, begin by handing out some kind of candy you and they don’t like very much. When your kids return with their bounty, have them divide it into items they really like and items they’re not so wild about. Buy the latter items from them for, say, a nickel a treat. Pile up all the less-desired candies and give them away to a charity or food program. Then put a limit on how many of the remaining treats can be consumed per day, and freeze or lock up the stash to help enforce it. And finally, set a good example: observe the candy limit yourself, and no stealing from the kids’ stash!

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

More Halloween Candy Nutrition, Stats, and Timely Tips is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

The problem with handing out truly healthy treats on Halloween — apples, raisins, trail mix, home made baked goods, etc. — is that such ploys can get your house toilet papered or worse by kids with fairly narrow and uncompromising notions of what constitutes a legitimate treat. About all you can do is try to avoid the worst, most nutrient-devoid and insanely caloric choices. Since we’re talking about the candy industry, that’s rather like choosing between migraine and stomach flu, but here are some assorted and highly subjective opinions on how to do the least damage to trick-or-treaters next Sunday night.

The Best and Worst Halloween Candies

Mens Fitness asked nutritionist and Wall Street Diet author Heather Bauer for her best and worst candy suggestions. For Best, she picked lollipops, because they last longer, are fat-free and contain as few as 20 calories. But they’re almost pure sugar and particularly conducive to cavities. Presumably, jawbreakers would also fill the bill in this category. She also gave the nod to Smarties, those little sugar pills that come in cellophane rolls about the size of a crayon and pack just 25 calories per roll.

(CC) Juushika/FLICKR
Beyond that, she likes dark chocolate (not milk or white) for its heart-friendly attributes, but even the best probable option here, Hershey’s dark chocolate Kisses, delivers 20 calories and about a gram of saturated fat per Kiss.

Her Worst picks are those mini-Mounds bars, which even in their diminutive form pack 63 calories and 3 grams of saturated fat each, and candy corn, almost pure high fructose corn syrup and calorie-intensive.

So what do the kids really want?

Some good news in this regard arrives via a recent survey showing that kids for the most part hate being given candy corn on Halloween, probably for the same reason that your dog doesn’t really consider a handful of kibble to qualify as a treat. What the kids say they really go for are M&M’s and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, candies that at least moderate the sugar load with the nutritional presence of peanuts, either whole (M&M’s) or ground (Cups). On the downside, just two bite-size Reese’s Cups contain 72 calories and 3 grams of saturated fat.

(CC) Scurzuzu/FLICKR

Finally, from Men’s Health magazine comes a warning to avoid the little “fun size” Butterfinger Bars, which are loaded with 100 calories, almost 40 more than a similarly-sized Three Musketeers, and to shun Twix Miniatures, which hammer home 50 calories and 2 grams of saturated fat per bite-size piece, far more than the preferred Tootsie Roll alternative. And don’t get them started on Brach’s Caramels, a mere four of which amount to 160 calories and 3.5 grams of saturated fat.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

Halloween Candies: How to Choose the Merely Unhealthy Over the Absolutely Ruinous is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

It’s Time for Some Tough Love in the Cafeteria

The Department of Agriculture, whose policies determine to a great extent the food items that are provided to America’s schools for their lunch programs, is concerned that the kids tend to select foods of the fatty/salty/sugary variety such as french fries and cookies instead of fresh fruit and vegetable side dishes. The agency has now hired behavioral psychologists to suggest ways to influence the students’ choices in the direction of the more nutritional fare.

Ploys they’ve come up with so far include: locating the salad bar by the checkout register, as a potential impulse purchase by kids waiting in line; hiding the chocolate milk behind the regular milk; moving the fruit from stainless steel trays to attractive baskets; and my personal favorite, requiring the kids to pay cash for desserts.

Nobody at the USDA has asked me, probably because I’m totally unqualified, but based on the changes just mentioned, here are some other suggestions for getting the kids on the right nutritional track:

I am available for professional consultation.

And They’re Not Even Old Enough to be Set Off by the Political Ads

A study conducted at the University of Bristol in England has found that 10- and 11-year-olds who spend more than two hours per day watching TV or on a computer (not counting homework) are 60 percent more likely to have “psychological difficulties” than kids who spend less time doing so, and that number only drops to 50 percent in the case of two-hour kids who also spend a lot of time engaging in physical activity.

Two caveats to this finding:

The researchers’ definition of “psychological difficulties” includes hyperactivity, inattention, poor conduct, antisocial behaviors, and problems with peers and friends, all of which are subjective and often arbitrary.

The researchers don’t know whether the excess screen time results in the problems, or kids with problems prefer the company of electronic diversions, or some third factor leads to both.

The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Poorer. Guess What Happens to the Fat?

A recent Lab Notes item cited a report in the journal Health Affairs that Americans kids now get over 27 percent of their calories from snacks, and were chowing down 113 more calories per day as of 2006 than they were in 1977. Not noted was another study in that issue of Health Affairs reporting that while the rate of overweight U.S. children had seemingly stabilized at around 15 percent from 2003 to 2007, the rate of obese kids had bumped up from 14.8 percent to 16.4, the grim aspect of this being that obesity is where the serious and long-term health problems originate and flourish.

It is evidently numbers like these that moved the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to publicly call not just for the taxation of junk foods and beverages, but zoning restrictions on fast-food outlets near schools and a ban on ads for unhealthy foods directed at children. Don’t expect the next Congress to embrace his ideas.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

Kid Stuff: School Food Psychology; TV Drives Kids Nuts; Even More Childhood Obesity is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News

It’s Low-Carb by a Nose. Or Maybe a Lipoprotein

Still one more study pitting low-carbohydrate diets against low-fat diets has been brought to fruition, and once again the evidence indicates that both work equally well when it comes to losing weight, but that the low-carb diet has the advantage of raising the dieter’s good cholesterol almost twice as much as the low-fat diet, thus being potentially more beneficial to the dieter’s heart.

Among the particulars:

Although low-carb diets have been more effective in six-month weight loss programs, this study, which ran for two years, found that over that length of time either diet resulted in a weight loss averaging around 15 pounds, or 7 percent of the starting weight.

Low-carb dieters experienced a 23 percent increase in HDL, the good cholesterol, compared to just a 12 percent boost in low-fat dieters. The 23 percent increase compares favorably to results achieved through medications. The reason for the difference in HDL results is not yet known.

The study involved a population of obese individuals who did not have diabetes or cholesterol problems, with half following an Atkins-style low-carb diet and half a low-calorie, low-fat diet. Each group participated in support sessions which, the researchers noted, were probably more instrumental in the subjects’ weight-loss success than which specific diet was followed.

Basically, the More They Like It, the Less of It They Should Eat

Parents hoping to reverse the weight gain in their children may want to heed a report by the National Cancer Institute in the latest Journal of the American Dietetic Association. Here’s the gist: according to an analysis of the diets of American kids ages 2-18, cutting back in just a few food areas can have a significant effect in reducing their overall calorie intake. Simply putting a limit on grain desserts (cakes, cupcakes, cookies, brownies, etc.), sugary sodas (the #1 source of young Americans’ calories) and pizza can make a serious dent.

Sugar-sweetened sodas and fruit drinks all by themselves provide nearly one-tenth of the total calories consumed by that age group. Include foods with solid fats on your watch list, and you’ve targeted almost 40 percent of their calorie sources. In all, the researchers identify six primary villains in the war of the waistline among young people: sodas, fruit drinks, dairy desserts, grain desserts, pizza and whole milk.

And their advice is to cut back on these food groups completely rather than switch to “healthier” versions; other than with milk, simply shifting to “low-fat” or “low-cal” options won’t really come to grips with what is ultimately a matter of fundamental food-group choices and priorities.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

Low-Fat Versus Low-Carb Diets, and the Foods that Make Kids Fat is a post from: CalorieLab Diet News