American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown issued the following comments on the New York City (NYC) Healthy Kids Meals Bill and calls on beverage industry to support broader health policy strategies:

“The American Heart Association is pleased to see the announcement from NYC Speaker Corey Johnson demonstrating leadership to advance the NYC Healthy Kids Meals Bill, making water, milk, and 100% fruit juice the standard drink with kids’ meals. We recommend that children consume no more than one small 8-ounce sugary drink per week. Kids today are consuming up to 10 times that amount.

Ensuring healthy beverages are offered with kids’ meals is one way to improve the health of children. A few major restaurant chains have already agreed to serve healthier beverages with their kids’ meals voluntarily, but most chain and independent restaurants continue to push soda on our children. Beverages are responsible for nearly half of added sugars in their diets. We should be making it easier, not harder, for parents to raise healthy and strong kids.

Since the beverage industry made a welcomed about-face in support of this kids’ meal legislation, we hope they will now continue to support these and other policy changes being considered by communities across the country so that we can meaningfully reduce the real health consequences associated with the overconsumption of sugary drinks.

We encourage the beverage industry to more fully embrace this new path forward by supporting policy initiatives similar to the NYC Healthy Kids Meals proposal being considered across the country and abandon efforts to deny other local elected officials the right to address sugary drink consumption and the unique health needs of their communities."