Kids’ meals from Canadian chain restaurants are exceedingly high in calories, fats, and sodium: a cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to the increased prevalence of eating outside-the-home, alongside high rates of childhood obesity, the objective of this study was to analyze the nutritional quality of kids’ meals (including main entrées with accompanying side dishes, desserts and beverages) from Canadian fast-food (FFR) and sit-down restaurant (SDR) chains. Data (serving size, calories, fat, saturated fat, trans fat, sodium and fibre) for 3,235 meals were obtained in 2010 from the websites of 7 SDRs and 10 FFRs of the 35 chains with more than 20 outlets in Canada and offering kids’ meals. T-tests were used to compare nutrient levels from SDR and FFR. On average, SDR meals had larger serving sizes compared to FFR meals (628 g vs. 562 g). As a result, SDR meals contained significantly higher amounts of calories (846 kcal vs. 737 kcal) and saturated fat (12 g vs. 8 g) ( p < 0.0001). More than 50 % of kids’ meals from SDR and 35 % of meals from FFR exceeded 1,200 mg of sodium – the daily Adequate Intake for children aged 4-8 years. SDR meals had 41 % and 13 % of total calories coming from fat and saturated fat, while FFR had 37 % and 10 %, respectively. However, standardized comparisons of meals calculated per 100 g showed that FFR had significantly higher ( p < 0.001) amounts of calories (244 vs 185 kcal/100 g) and sodium (538 vs 381 mg/100 g) compared to SDR. These results illustrate that addressing the poor nutritional quality of restaurant kids’ meals should be a major public health priority.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".