The First Lady told the restaurant industry to hold the calories. Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson.

RODALE NEWS, WASHINGTON, DC—Mixing praise and criticism, with more of the latter, Michelle Obama told members of the National Restaurant Association this week that they haven’t done nearly enough to fight childhood obesity.

The meals kids eat in restaurants, she said, have twice as many calories as the ones they eat at home. And when kids eat out, they consume more saturated fat, and less fiber and calcium, than when they eat at home.

Those are just two of the more depressing pieces of information the first lady dropped on her audience, in a speech one member of her staff described as "her toughest since she began her Let’s Move campaign."

Like children being told to clean their plates, some members of the audience clearly did not enjoy being told what to do. And some didn’t seem to be listening carefully when she said that their industry makes it hard for people to make healthy choices. And that what they serve in their restaurants reinforce people's desires for sweeter, richer, and saltier food. Their response to date has been: We give our customers what they want, and if they won’t eat healthy food there’s no point in offering it.

Mrs. Obama was having none of that. “The choices you make determine what’s listed on the menus, what’s advertised on billboards, and what’s served on our plates,” she said. “And your decisions about how a dish is prepared, what goes into it, and where it is placed on the menu—that can have a real impact on the way people eat.”

THE DETAILS: Because restaurants are responsible for a third of the calories kids get every day, the first lady asked the association attendees to increase their efforts to make healthy food appealing and easy to find. Children's menus show no imagination at all, according to a survey Mrs. Obama cited: 90 percent of them include mac and cheese, 80 percent include chicken fingers; 60 percent, burgers and cheeseburgers. And lack of creativity is only part of the problem. Some children's menu options contain more than 1,000 calories, close to the maximum for a child for the whole day. She challenged the industry to provide healthy options and "provide them up front so that parents don’t have to hunt around and read the small print to find an appropriately sized portion that doesn’t contain high levels of fat, salt, and sugar."

Giving lip service to the concept is not what the first lady has in mind. “It doesn’t mean providing just one token healthy option on the menu, or taking out one problematic ingredient and replacing it with another," she told the audience. "And it is not about finding creative ways to make unhealthy food products be perceived as healthy.” If anything, she'd like to see the restaurant industry channel its wildly successful marketing skills into helping children make healthy food choices. “Our kids don’t learn about the latest fast-food creations on their own,” she pointed out. “They hear about them on TV, advertisements, on the Internet, video games. And as any parent knows, this marketing is highly effective.” It’s the parents responsibility to raise their children, she said, but “what does it mean when so many parents are finding their best efforts undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at our kids?"

WHAT IT MEANS: Like the other parties Mrs. Obama has talked to—parents, schools, food manufacturers—the restaurant industry has some work to do. If some in the audience thought Mrs. Obama was asking for the moon, Geoff Tracy, who owns four restaurants in Washington DC—Lia’s, and three Chef Geoff’s—and manages a fifth, was not one of them. He’s a convert, and his three children are responsible. “Once you become a father, your perspective changes,” he says. He has made incremental changes to the children’s menus at his restaurants, and so far, hotdogs have been banished, chicken fingers are available only in a pinch, and french fries are no longer a default side dish. As a result, there’s been a 50 percent drop in sales of chicken fingers and of french fries.

Instead, children can have fish tacos with crispy plantains and guacamole, grilled salmon with green beans and couscous with apples, or raisins and arugula and a small Caesar’s salad.