Evaluating a Healthy Restaurant Kids Meals Policy

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.