[A] bill regulating kids’ meals moved forward Wednesday after nutrition advocates and business interests came to a compromise and scrapped rules relating to food.
The Senate Health and Welfare Committee voted unanimously to approve S.70, which in its revised form mandates that Vermont restaurants offer healthier drinks like water or unsweetened juice as “default beverages” for children’s meals.
Some say the slimmed-down bill doesn’t go far enough. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, a member of Gov. Phil Scott’s administration argued that regulating kids’ drinks could hurt the tourism industry.
The American Heart Association called the measure “a good place to start” as the state tries to confront a growing child obesity problem.
“Just about anything we can do to curb sugary drink consumption in kids is great,” said Tina Zuk, government relations director for the association in Vermont.
Obesity ranks as one of America’s top health concerns, according to the 2017 “State of Obesity” report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Vermont doesn’t rank among the worst states for obesity rates, according to the report, but there’s still plenty of bad news.
For instance, the state’s adult obesity rate was 27.1 percent as of 2016 – up from 17 percent in 2000 and 10.7 percent in 1990, according to the report. And the problem extends to juveniles, it said. Vermont high school students had a 12.4 percent obesity rate as of 2015.
Also, in a finding that the heart association calls “alarming,” the obesity rate is 14.1 percent for Vermont children aged 2 to 4 enrolled in the federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
S.70, which was introduced a little over a year ago, sought to address the issues in some of the places where it was, such as children’s meals at restaurants. Children consume “almost twice as many calories when they eat a meal at a restaurant as they do when they eat at home,” the document noted.
As initially drafted, the bill limited kids’ meals at restaurants to 600 calories and 770 milligrams of sodium. Other provisions included caps on calories from sugars, fat and saturated fat, as well as a requirement that all such meals must contain at least half a cup of fruit or vegetables that aren’t fried.
The bill also excluded sugary drinks as a beverage option.
Supporters filing testimony before Senate Health and Welfare included doctors, parents and the heart association.
But there were also skeptics. The Vermont Chamber of Commerce said many restaurants already offer healthy options for kids, but the chamber “does not support a mandate that will incur additional costs to doing business and that will limit the ability of restaurateurs to develop menus based on their individual customer’s preferences.”
The National Restaurant Association worried that S.70 “will impose additional burdens on restaurateurs, limit menu options and negatively impact a guest’s experience.”
The debate led to a compromise version of the bill that ditches all food-related provisions. Instead, it says water; nonfat or low fat milk, low-calorie non-dairy alternatives, or certain juices must be the default menu choice for children’s meals.
Those aren’t the only beverage choices, though. The bill says a restaurant can sell other drinks with kids’ meals at a customer’s request.
The new draft of the bill earned support from Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce. Cathy Davis, the chamber’s government affairs director, said a survey had shown mixed feelings about the original bill among the organization’s members.
“We heard from a couple of members who already met these standards in the previous version,” Davis told the committee. “We heard from several more that said that they would eliminate their children’s menus. So that was concerning to us.”
Zuk of the heart association offered her enthusiastic support. In testimony submitted to lawmakers, she said the default beverage language “clearly makes the healthy choice the easy choice, as the nutritious drinks would be listed first for parents and kids to choose from.”
Sugary drinks are the largest source of calories in kids’ diets, Zuk added, and the primary consumers of children’s meals are between the ages of 2 to 5. So she’s hoping that giving healthier beverages more prominence will begin to change habits – and possibly health trends – at a young age.
Not everyone is on board, though.
Wendy Knight, the state’s tourism and marketing commissioner, discussed the economic importance of the state’s $2.6 billion tourism industry and urged the committee to “consider voluntary approaches” to regulating restaurants.
“From our perspective, if childhood obesity is the issue, then we should address the issue of childhood obesity head-on and not try and impose additional mandates on the business community,” Knight said.
Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, scoffed that that notion. She said the new version of S.70 is an “infinitesimal step in the right direction.”
“It doesn’t say you can’t get a Coke for your kid. It says the first thing we offer them is milk, water or juice,” Cummings said. “I’m not sure why that’s going to impact tourism.”
Sen. Dick McCormack, D-Windsor, said the question of voluntary vs. mandatory regulation is really a question of who has “freedom to do what to whom?”
“As a parent, I can tell you that I felt my efforts to raise my kids healthfully were almost deliberately undermined constantly,” he said.
McCormack said the revised bill is a “pathetic shadow” of the original. But he and the other four committee members voted to send it to the full Senate for consideration.