Nutritional quality of food items on fast-food ‘kids’ menus’: comparisons across countries and companies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To compare energy (calories), total and saturated fats, and Na levels for 'kids' menu' food items offered by four leading multinational fast-food chains across five countries. DESIGN: A content analysis was used to create a profile of the nutritional content of food items on kids' menus available for lunch and dinner in four leading fast-food chains in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. SETTING: Food items from kids' menus were included from four fast-food companies: Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), McDonald's and Subway. These fast-food chains were selected because they are among the top ten largest multinational fast-food chains for sales in 2010, operate in high-income English-speaking countries, and have a specific section of their restaurant menus labelled 'kids' menus'. RESULTS: The results by country indicate that kids' menu foods contain less energy (fewer calories) in restaurants in the USA and lower Na in restaurants in the UK. The results across companies suggest that kids' menu foods offered at Subway restaurants are lower in total fat than food items offered at Burger King and KFC, and food items offered at KFC are lower in saturated fat than items offered at Burger King. CONCLUSIONS: Although the reasons for the variation in the nutritional quality of foods on kids' menus are not clear, it is likely that fast-food companies could substantially improve the nutritional quality of their kids' menu food products, translating to large gains for population health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".