Shortly after a healthy default beverage (HDB) law took effect in Hawai‘i, requiring restaurants that serve children’s meals to offer healthy beverages with the meals, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Efforts to contain the virus resulted in changes to restaurants’ operations and disrupted HDB implementation efforts. Economic repercussions from containment efforts have exacerbated food insecurity, limited access to healthy foods, and created obstacles to chronic disease management. Promoting healthy default options is critical at a time when engaging in healthy behaviors is difficult, but important, to both prevent and manage chronic disease and decrease COVID-19 risk. This commentary discusses COVID-19’s impact on restaurant operations and healthy eating, and the resulting challenges and opportunities for this promising health promotion intervention.
In January 2020, Hawai‘i became the second state with a healthy default beverage (HDB) law, requiring restaurants to offer HDBs with their children’s meals. This observational study presents baseline characteristics of restaurants with a children’s menu and meal, and describes pre-law beverage options to inform future HDB policy language, implementation, and evaluation. Between November and December 2019, data were collected from a statewide sample of unique restaurants (n=383) with health inspection permits. Restaurants were assessed separately for a children’s menu and meal using website reviews, telephone calls, and in-person visits. Meals were evaluated in February 2020 for pre-law beverage type and compliance. Logistic regression was used to estimate the likelihood of having a children’s menu and meal. Most of the restaurants were full-service (70.2%) and non-chains (67.9%). While 49.3% of restaurants had a children’s menu, only 16.7% had a meal. Significant predictors of having a children’s menu were being full-service (OR=2.09; p=0.004), national/international (OR=5.32; p<0.001) or local chains (OR=1.99; p=0.03), neighbor island (non-Honolulu) locations (OR=2.49; p<0.001), and hotel locations (OR=3.77; p<0.001). Only being a national/international chain significantly predicted having a children’s meal (OR=7.57; p<0.001). Although 35.9% of children’s meals offered a non-sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) option, only 3.1% offered law-compliant beverages. Inclusion of an SSB default option (60.9%) and not specifying the type of default beverage were the predominant factors for pre-law non-compliance. Results support the need for HDB regulations, especially for national/international chains, which were most likely to have children’s meals, and provide data to inform policies in other jurisdictions.
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