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Healthy Fast Foods for Kids
April 15, 2014
All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.
-Sydney Lumet

Fast food establishments are working hard to advertise their healthy eating choices.  Mother Jones took a look at how they are doing and here is what they found:

"Meals for 'moderately active' preschoolers — kids between two and five — should contain about 410 calories (slightly less for kids on the younger end of that range and slightly more for the older ones), according to USDA recommendations.

"Yet when we looked at kids' meals from 10 different fast-food chains, we found that all of them contained more than the recommended amount of calories — and some contained much more.  The most caloric, from Carl's Jr., had a whopping 990 calories, more than twice what a preschooler should be eating (and about 33 percent more than what's recommended for a 10-year-old).  The least caloric was KFC's Li'l Bucket, with 570 calories."

Seems like the term "healthy fast foods" is an oxymoron.





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Comments (1)

Displaying 1 Comment
Amy · April 15, 2014
San Tan Valley, AZ, United States


I have concerns about this article, not because I think children should be eating a lot of fast food, but because I think accuracy when talking about these things is important. I looked at the calories for a Happy Meal at McDonald's and what I found was the meal with the kid-sized fries, milk, apples and a hamburger was 470 calories. The same meal with a cheeseburger was 520 calories and with 4 nuggets was 410 calories. These all are obviously less than the KFC meal and the nuggets are right on target with the recommendation.

I think that people who want to defend fast food will be quick to point out inaccuracies in articles and think this justifies them in feeding kids these meals. What seems to make more sense is to use accurate facts and also talk about the other things in these meals that are not good for children on a regular basis, like fat and sodium.



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