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Happy Meals go the ‘healthy’ route, but kids may not benefit

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A Happy Meal with apple slices (sans caramel) or carrots. Hmmm. McDonald’s has trotted out some crazy concepts before. Remember the special packaging for the McDLT that kept the hot side hot and the cool side cool? Or the low-fat McLean Deluxe? But at a time when nearly one in five kids is obese, slimming down the Happy Meal is an idea that might actually stick.

I know from personal experience that Happy Meals are a quick way to get a food-type product into a child. And kids, dietitians that they aren’t, seem to like everything about them: the fries, the squishy bun on the thin patty, the soda, the toy that ties into some movie that their parents are desperately hoping to avoid.

But Happy Meals also come with a side of parental guilt. The standard hamburger meal with fries and a soda has nearly 600 calories and 20 grams of fat (including 5 grams of saturated fat). The nutritional info on the McDonald’s site helpfully lists levels of iron, vitamin A and vitamin C. But, really, the good nutrients don’t add up to much. And parents know that.

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By cutting the portion size of fries by more than half and adding fruits or vegetables, McDonald’s is undoubtedly making its meals more healthful. The chain says that the new meals will have about 20% fewer calories. (Of course, kids can decide to cut the calories even further by skipping the apple slices or carrot sticks.) Although the company doesn’t seem eager to point this out, the smaller portion of fries will also have about 5 fewer grams of fat.

Yet it seems unlikely that more healthful Happy Meals are the way to raise healthier children. To reshape their kids’ diets, parents need to make more meals at home, where they can write the menus and control the ingredients and portion sizes. If more healthful Happy Meals translate into more trips to the golden arches — as McDonald’s obviously hopes — the end result may be something other than happiness.

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