Can restaurants help stem America's childhood obesity epidemic? A new program aims to try -- but so far, results are hard to measure.
Nine months ago, the National Restaurant Association partnered with nutrition website HealthyDiningFinder.com to create the Kids LiveWell program, which set standards for healthier kids' menu items. More than 100 restaurant chains from Applebee's to zpizza have gotten on board, and LiveWell dishes now grace menus at 25,000 fast-food and sit-down eateries.
The main dishes in the program must have fewer than 600 calories and less than 35 percent of those calories can be fats. There's an emphasis on fresh fruits and vegetables, and the dishes definitely sport more of them than you see in a typical fried chicken-fingers-and-fries type kids' meal.
As a mom, I know it's one thing to put a healthy meal on a menu and another to get a kid to eat it. So I started calling around to get a look at what's on the healthy menu, and to find out how popular these meals are with customers. Unfortunately, few chains -- particularly publicly traded ones -- give out information on the sales of individual items.
With the lack of disclosure by the chains, only time will tell if healthier kids meals are catching on, says NRA spokeswoman Sue Hensley. As high-minded as they'd like to be, there's a basic rule in the restaurant business: Menu real estate is valuable, and you don't keep offering items customers don't want.
"They can't serve items that won't sell," Hensley says.
The good news is some of these meals are pretty appetizing -- see the slideshow for a look. If they were offered as the only kids' items, I could see my kids eating them. Whether they will choose the healthier option when they could be ordering fried chicken and French fries is a murkier question.
Also, the seemingly healthy entrees don't tell the whole story, I discovered. Some of the more fattening parts of the meal, such as salad dressing, appetizers, and dessert, aren't included in the calorie count. So your kid might get a gold star for having a low-fat turkey sandwich, but then top it off with a 400-calorie ice cream sundae that's included in a meal deal. So much for fighting obesity.
Many of the menu items in Kids LiveWell, it turns out, existed before the program was created. That means there were already many healthy kids' entrees available in restaurant chains. Which points to the bigger problem: We've had access to healthy kids meals all along -- our kids just aren't eating them.
Some chains have added new menu items as part of Kids LiveWell, though. Friendly's introduced an entirely new kids' menu, and East-Coast regional chain Silver Diner added a Chicken Pizza Quesadilla after surveying its diners, for instance. More chains are set to join the program, too.
The NRA and HealthyDining are trying to make it easier for parents to find the healthy meals, introducing a smartphone app that allows you to find the nearest participating restaurant while on the go. Now all we need is the collective will to convince our kids to eat them.
