After years of public pressure on fast food giants to stop marketing sugary sodas to children, Dairy Queen announced it will remove all soda pop products from kids menus by Sept. 1, 2015.
With Dairy Queen agreeing to remove fountain drinks from its children’s menu, it now joins Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonald's, Subway, Chipotle, Arby's and Panera in providing more heathful beverage options in their kids meals.
MomsRising.org members, joined by advocates at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, have hounded chains for years to improve the nutritional quality of kids' meals. Soda has been the targeted focus.
Monifa Bandele, the senior campaign director of MomsRising.org's Food Justice campaign, stated: "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."
"But we aren’t done yet!" she added, emphasizing the continued to effort against sugar-sweetened beverages that promote heart disease and type 2 diabetes. "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."
