Do Studies Support Legislation To Reduce Childhood Obesity?

I recently ran across a couple interesting articles examining the relationship between junk food and childhood obesity, with implications on legislation. Somewhat surprising findings:

1) A study by the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found that fast food restaurants did not have the intended response to a ban on kid’s meal toys. The study was based in Santa Clarita, CA, the first city to pass this type of ordinance, and found that restaurants responded by eliminating the toys and promoting existing menu options rather than retooling meals to allow toys to remain on the menu. While there are a number of reasons to choose this strategy (e.g., long lead time to revamp menus, extra costs associated with toys), it demonstrates that the legislation failed to deliver more healthy meals. What will be interesting to see is the impact to sales and how much demand they toys accounted for.

2) Another recent study from Penn State took the blame for poor nutrition away from school and placed it on the home. The study showed that while access to junk food at schools rose between fifth and eighth grade, obesity rates among the students in the survey declined. This led the team to conclude that obesity was influenced less by school choices than by other factors. While this finding isn’t groundbreaking, it does bring into question investments being made to reduce junk food at schools and improve nutrition. If access at school has limited impact on obesity rates, would energy and resources be better spent on parent education and access to healthier foods at home?

You could argue these measures were successful because they eliminated a marketing gimmick targeted towards kids and reduced exposure to unhealthy foods. Some restaurants, potentially spurred by this type of legislation, are proactively taking new measures to improve kid’s meals (e.g., McDonalds will be automatically adding apples to Happy Meals starting in March). But these are great case studies on how legislation may not be an effective tool if businesses can work around the rules or the real issues are outside the scope of the law.