Evaluating a Healthy Restaurant Kids Meals Policy

Diet Habit Clinical Trial

Official title: Evaluating a Healthy Restaurant Kids Meals Policy

Status Completed

Clinical Trial Summary

More than a dozen municipalities have passed healthy default kids' beverage policies. These policies seek to reduce child consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) by requiring that restaurants serve only healthy beverages (e.g., water, milk, or 100% juice) instead of SSBs as the default choice with children's meals in restaurants. These policies have potential to meaningfully reduce child SSB consumption. However, there are significant gaps in our knowledge of the effects of healthy default beverage policies on children's health. This study uses a natural experiment to evaluate the effects of a healthy default beverage policy in two U.S. cities, New York City and Philadelphia, on children's fast-food restaurant meal orders and dietary intake. The primary hypothesis is that the policy will reduce children's SSB purchases and consumption, reduce children's total caloric intake, and improve diet quality at the fast-food restaurant meal and on the day of the restaurant meal.

Clinical Trial Description

This study uses a quasi-experimental approach to evaluate the effects of a healthy default kids' beverage policy on children's fast-food restaurant meal purchases and dietary intake. Annotated receipt and survey data will be collected from parents purchasing a food or beverage for a child 2-10 years of age at fast-food restaurants. Eligible participants will be asked to participate in a telephone dietary recall the following day. Data will be collected from a repeated cross-section of children in two intervention cities implementing a healthy default kids' beverage policy (New York City and Philadelphia) and a control area not implementing the policy (northern New Jersey) before the policy is implemented and after the policy goes into effect. A difference-in-differences analytic approach will be used to compare the change in children's fast-food restaurant meal orders and dietary intake pre- to post-implementation in the intervention versus control groups. A Holm-Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons will be applied to p-values for secondary outcomes. ;

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Diet Habit

• NCT number: NCT04330235
• Study type: Observational
• Source: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Status: Completed
• Start date: October 13, 2019
• Completion date: July 18, 2022