Healthy fast foods?

MCDONALD’S ANNOUNCED early this week that they were changing their well-known “Happy Meals” to offer healthier fare. The change is significant because the Happy Meals mainly target children. No less than US First Lady Michelle Obama, who has been campaigning for healthier children’s diets, has congratulated McDonald’s for the move.

The move comes shortly after the National Restaurant Association in the United States announced their Kids Live Well program, with 19 restaurant chains that include well known names like Burger King and Denny’s committing themselves to offering healthier meals for children. McDonald’s opted to do its own program separate from Live Well.

All these changes have come about after growing pressure from consumer associations, children’s advocacy groups and government regulatory agencies alarmed by rising obesity among children and adolescents.

The obesity epidemic has been blamed on junk snack foods and soft drinks, many of which are purchased from groceries and supermarkets and consumed at home.  But fast-food restaurants are also being blamed because the meals they offer, like the junk snack foods, contain too much fat, sugar and sodium (usually through salt).

The fast-food industry is huge, with the top 20 fast-food chains ringing up $118 billion in sales in 2009.  McDonald’s alone accounted for $32 billion, with about 10 percent of the revenues coming from Happy Meals.

The stakes are high in the obesity epidemic, with children facing higher risks for diseases like diabetes, heart ailments and metabolic syndrome, the latter being a catch-all term for problems affecting different organs and body systems, especially the kidneys. These risks increase as the children grow to adulthood, still carrying bad eating habits acquired in childhood, aggravated by other lifestyle problems like lack of exercise and smoking.

Menu changes

Those in the food industry, including the fast-food restaurants sector, know that if they don’t reform, the government will impose more regulatory measures.  They know, too, that by changing their menus early in the game, they can even capture the still small but growing number of consumers who want healthier foods, especially for their children.

Those participating in the National Restaurant Association’s Kids Live Well campaign are committed to offering at least one kids’ meal that has less than 600 calories, no soft drinks and at least two items from the following food categories: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins and low-fat dairy products.

The change in McDonald’s Happy Meals is more specific.  In the past, the Happy Meal consisted of a burger, a large serving of French fries and a soft drink. Now, the fries will be reduced by half, the “missing” fries substituted by a quarter-cup of apple slices. Instead of soft drinks, the Happy Meal will have fat-free milk. In addition to all this, clients can opt not to get any fries at all and instead get a double serving of the apple slices.

What we are seeing here is not just a change in menus but in food culture, reversing trends that began in the 1970s, when fast-food restaurants first emerged. At that time, they were seen as a welcome solution to the rigors of urban life in industrial societies. Fast foods meant foods that were available quickly, at fairly low cost, to be gobbled down quickly.

Fast foods were not new for Filipinos, given that we already had sidewalk food vendors and noodle shops.  But when McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in the Philippines in the early 1980s, it was hailed as another symbol of American cosmopolitanism, convenience and efficiency.  Soon local clones appeared, from Jollibee to Mang Donald’s, offering cheaper and more “Filipino” (read: saltier) versions of the burgers while diversifying into products like Filipino (read: sweeter) spaghetti.

With time, American health activists began to worry about the problems coming out of fast foods and to call for reforms.  The changes in American fast-food menus was preceded by many other changes in policies, sometimes imposed through new laws, for example, restaurant chains having to include the calorie content of their dishes in the menu.

The reforms are strongest when it comes to protecting children. Schools are now offering early nutrition education, school meals are becoming healthier, and many canteens ban junk foods and soft drinks. The food industry is also responding by promising to be more responsible in their advertising, especially for children. They are also coming up with new products, although sometimes the changes are cosmetic, or even deceptive such as stamping a label “natural” without any significant changes in the contents. (Sugar and salt are, after all, “natural.”)

Food revolution

The Philippines has a long way to go yet, given that we don’t have strong consumer groups and government regulatory agencies. Many Filipino parents are still hooked on junk foods and fast-food restaurants, some even believing these places offer good and healthy foods. There’s even prestige attached to these restaurants, so parents hold birthday parties in these places. The fast-food places are just so ubiquitous and some have even been able to get into schools and hospitals.

Until we start our own cultural food revolution, parents will have to find ways to create healthier options at home and when eating out, for example, asking that soft drinks be substituted by fruit drinks (but be careful since the fruit drinks are often as bad, mostly sugar with some fruit flavor).

Some local private schools are also now more conscious about the problems associated with junk foods and have started nutrition education and began offering healthier school meals and banning soft drinks and junk foods from canteens.

Education at home includes involving kids when buying foods and helping them to differentiate healthy from unhealthy foods. Bring them to markets as well so that they will see fresh real food.

Organic foods are also on the rise.  See the Sunday Inquirer magazine of July 18, where I listed some places where you can buy them. (Which reminds me, the opening of Mara’s organic foods outlet on Shaw Boulevard, which I announced in the magazine to be scheduled in July, has been postponed to September.)

Let me explain that question mark in the title of today’s column. I don’t think fast foods can ever be entirely healthy, mainly because they are so rushed. Healthy is not just what we eat, but how we eat. Even in our rushed world, we need to keep food and eating on the slow lane, giving time for marketing and cooking, turning down invitations from friends to take dinner out so we can get home and eat with the children, and arranging for more family meals to span the generations, children with grandparents.

For more information on developments around child nutrition in the US, visit yaleruddcenter.org.

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