America’s children get a startling amount of their daily calories from fast food

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The average American kid under age 19 gets 12% of his or her calories from fast food.

That’s the equivalent of one McDonald’s hamburger, a large fries at Wendy’s, or a medium chocolate-dipped cone at Dairy Queen — every single day.

That percentage is only slightly less than the last time this number was measured in 2006, when kids got an all time high of 13% of their calories from fast food, according to a new report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

These numbers come from the 2011-12 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Adolescents especially consumed more calories from on-the-go foods than children: of those ages 12-19, about 17% of their daily calories came from fast food. In comparison, children ages 2-11 got 8.7% of their daily calories from the same kinds of food.

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