Article from the BBC
Theme parks, museums and other leading holiday attractions are
serving up child meals loaded with sugar, salt and fat, a survey has
found.
Local government group LACORS ran the largest ever survey of meals at 220 British leisure facilities and found that not one of the 397 meals tested fully met guidelines from the School Food Trust.
The association representing leisure parks, BALPPA, have countered that healthy options were nearly always available.
The survey tested 397 meals aimed at seven to ten year olds from 220
attractions, including wildlife parks, leisure centres, heritage sites
and farm parks.
The meals sampled came not only from privately-run tourist sites, but also from council leisure centres and swimming pools.
Chips with everything
Most meals, they said, were served with fried potatoes of some kind or other, and often involved deep-fried meat. The worst meal they found contained more than 85 grams of fat - three times the maximum recommended by the School Food Trust.
Other meals had six times the advised amount of saturated fat, 500%
more protein, or more than three times the recommended level of salt.
On average, the meals had 10% too much fat, and 44% more salt than
recommended.
While the report acknowledged that menus at tourist attractions tended
to offer what children preferred to eat, and what adults wanted to buy,
it called for the option of healthier food, the ready availability of
drinking water instead of sugary fizzy drinks, and the removal of extra
salt provided at the table.
It is not all doom and gloom, with a few examples of attractions, including the Natural History Museum in
London, and Cornwall's Eden Project, which did offer healthier food to
young and old visitors.
A spokesman for Merlin Entertainments, which runs many of the UK's
biggest attractions, including Thorpe Park, Chessington World of
Adventures and Alton Towers theme parks, said healthy options were
always available.
She said: "We include a free fruit salad with 100% of our children's meals - although often the parents leave it behind."
Link to full article from the BBC
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