Chicago – Having fast-food restaurants in children’s hospitals influences patients’ families to eat fast food and to think that it’s relatively healthy, new research suggests.
At least 59 of the nation’s 250 children’s hospitals have fast- food restaurants, the study found. That is a troubling phenomenon, particularly given rising obesity rates, said the study’s lead author, Dr. Hannah Sahud, a pediatrician at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.
“We’re giving two different messages by being in the health- care profession and promoting health and saying obesity is a huge medical problem … and then implicitly encouraging it,” she said.
About 17 percent of U.S. children are considered obese, and many doctors think heavy consumption of calorie-laden fatty fast food is partly to blame.
Sahud conducted the research while at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital, which has one McDonald’s inside and another across the street.
Parents of children who got outpatient treatment at Children’s Memorial were much more likely to buy McDonald’s food on the day their youngsters were treated than parents of kids treated at Chicago-area hospitals without McDonald’s, the study found.
Parents of kids treated at Children’s also were twice as likely to rate McDonald’s food as relatively healthy than those whose kids were treated elsewhere.
“I was shocked … that they actually perceive it to be healthier,” Sahud said.
Her study appears in December’s Pediatrics, scheduled for release today.
“Hospitals should be walking the walk, not just talking the talk,” said Dr. Sarah Barlow, an obesity specialist at Saint Louis University and Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center.
