In a new study, researchers from the University of North Carolina led by nutrition professor Barry Popkin have found that even when they are not eating at fast-food restaurants, children who frequent them tend to eat food that would probably make many of them overweight or obese anyway. The study, which was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, said poor dietary habits that obese children learn at home are the main cause of their weight problems. After doing so, they went back to the children's detailed food consumption records and categorized them as nonconsumers of fast food (those whose food tracking records indicated no calories consumed from a restaurant or eating establishment without servers), low consumers (whose food tracking records indicated that no more than 30% of their calories came from such an establishment), and high consumers (for whom more than 30% of calories consumed came from a fast-food restaurant).
– Fast food isn't making your kids fat—not really. What's truly behind the trend of childhood obesity are the sodas, frozen pizzas, and cookies consumed at home, school, and whenever kids aren't in a McDonald's or Burger King booth—a "Western diet" high in saturated fats and added sugars, according to a new study. Researchers looked at the eating habits of 4,466 American kids, aged 2 to 18, and grouped them based on what they ate when they weren't eating fast food. What they found: Those with the highest rates of being overweight or obese ate a Western diet—even if they ate no fast food; on the flip side, those who were high fast-food consumers but otherwise ate a "prudent" diet were much less likely to be overweight or obese, the Los Angeles Times reports. The more often a child ate at fast food spots, however, the more likely he or she was to follow a similar diet at home. But "just because children who eat more fast food are the most likely to become obese does not prove that calories from fast foods bear the brunt of the blame," one author says, per Red Orbit. In fact, health campaigns targeting fast-food restaurants may be "overestimated" in that they are "not sufficient to reduce child obesity if the remainder of the diet is not addressed."