GOOD NEWS: Burger King Pulls Soda from Kid’s Menu

GOOD NEWS: Burger King Pulls Soda from Kid’s Menu

Groups Applaud Burger King for Joining Other Fast-Food Giants in Pulling Soda From Kids Menus

After years of pressuring fast food giants to stop marketing sugary sodas to children - Burger King has announced that it will be removing all soda pop products as a default option from their kids menus, effective immediately. MomsRising.org, joined by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, have been urging the chain to improve the nutritional quality of its kids' meals by removing soda from the kids menu.

With Burger King agreeing to remove soda pop products from its children’s menu, three of the biggest fast food burger chains - Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Burger King - now join Subway, Chipotle, Arby's, and Panera in providing healthier options as the default beverage in their kids meals.

Monifa Bandale, Senior Campaign Director of MomsRising.org’s Food Power project, issued the following statement on Burger King’s decision:

"Parents and families across the country are applauding as one by one, restaurants are listening to parents and public health experts and starting to do their part to help keep America’s kids healthy.”

"Ensuring that our children can make healthy choices is an important part of raising them. When restaurants offer up sugary drinks as a default choice, it undermines those efforts. While Burger King is now offering better default beverages, we need more restaurants to do the same because sugar-sweetened beverages uniquely promote heart disease and type 2 diabetes. MomsRising and its members aren’t done yet!

“Hundreds of thousands of MomsRIsing.org members and volunteers have spoken up asking Burger King to join other industry leaders in taking this step. While this is a great first step - we urge all fast-food restaurants to further improve upon their healthy options for children and adults by serving whole grain rolls, offering more fruit and vegetable options, reducing sodium across the menu, and adopting a comprehensive policy to limit the marketing of unhealthy food to children and join the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, a self-regulatory program administered by the Council of Better Business Bureaus.”

CSPI Nutrition Policy Director Margo G. Wootan issued the following statement:

“Soda and other sugary drinks promote diabetes, tooth decay, obesity, and even heart disease—and have no place on menus meant for little kids. We applaud Burger King for taking this responsible step forward, and call upon their franchisees—who operate independently of the company—to immediately follow suit.

Restaurant chains that market soda as part of their children’s meals are making life harder for parents, most of whom want to reserve soda as a special, occasional treat if they allow it at all. It will help children eat better now, as soda is the leading source of calories in children's diets. It also helps to set kids on a path toward healthier eating in the future, with fewer kids becoming conditioned to think that soda should be a part of every eating out occasion.

Now all of the big three burger chains have stopped this discredited practice and we hope other fast-food and table-service chains follow suit.”

SEE BURGER KING’S MENU HERE: http://www.bk.com/menu/kids_meals

For more information, or for interviews with MomsRising.org, please contact Brett Abrams at 516-841-1105 or by email at brett@fitzgibbonmedia.com.

For interviews with CSPI, please contact Jeff Cronin at 202-777-8370 or jcronin@cspinet.org or Ariana Stone at 202-777-8355 or astone@cspinet.org.

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MomsRising.org is an online and on-the-ground grassroots organization of more than a million people who are working to achieve economic security for all families in the United States. MomsRising is working for paid family leave, flexible work options, affordable childcare, and for an end to the wage and hiring discrimination which penalizes so many others. MomsRising also advocates for better childhood nutrition, health care for all, toxic-free environments, and breastfeeding rights so that all children can have a healthy start. Established in 2006, MomsRising and its members are organizing and speaking out to improve public policy and to change the national dialogue on issues that are critically important to America’s families. In 2013, Forbes.com named MomsRising’s web site as one of the Top 100 Websites For Women for the fourth year in a row and Working Mother magazine included MomsRising on its “Best of the Net”list. MomsRising also maintains a Spanish language website: MamásConPoder.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is a nonprofit health-advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on nutrition and food safety. CSPI is supported largely by the 900,000 U.S. and Canadian subscribers to its Nutrition Action Healthletter and by foundation grants.