The federal government is spending over $1 billion on nutrition education this year, and it’s probably a waste of money, according to the AP.
“Any person looking at the published literature about these programs would have to conclude that they are generally not working,” said Dr. Tom Baranowski, a pediatrics professor at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine who studies behavioral nutrition.The results have been disappointing, to say the least:
• Last year, a federal pilot program offering free fruits and vegetables to schoolchildren showed fifth-graders became less willing to eat them than they had been at the start. Apparently, they didn’t like the taste.
• In Pennsylvania, researchers gave prizes to schoolchildren who ate fruits and vegetables. That worked. But when the researchers came back seven months later, the kids had reverted to their original eating habits: soda and chips.
• In studies where children tell researchers they are eating better or exercising more, there is usually no change in blood pressure, body size or cholesterol measures. They want to eat better and might even think they are, but they’re not.
Childhood obesity has quadrupled among children 6-11 since the 1970′s. Why? There’s a lot of debate. The only thing everyone agrees on is that the parents are the most important part of the equation. Ultimately, its up to them what their children eat. Whatever happened to “eat your lima beans?” (Full Disclosure: We love lima beans.)
It’s too bad parents have so much to fight against. Unhealthy food is cheaper than fruits and veggies. Unhealthy food is marketed to children, healthy food is not. Heck, unhealthy food tastes better than a lot of healthy food, particularly if you don’t know how to cook.
Let’s hear from parents in the comments. How are you coping? What are you feeding your kids?
Big-money battle on child obesity shows little success [Freep via Freakonomics]
(Photo:Clearly Ambiguous)
More From Consumerist
-
USDA Workers Will Eat What The Department Preaches With New Fryer-Less Cafeteria
-
Healthy Choice Lasagna Disappoints Hungry Office Worker
-
Funeral Procession Takes Trip To The Burger King Drive-Thru For One Last Meal
-
U.S. Consumers Cut Back Spending On Everything Except Cellphones
-
Study: Taking On The “Cinnamon Challenge” Could Severely Mess Up Your Lungs
My grandfather often comments on how food-conscious people are these days, whereas when he was a child in the 1930s his father ate 2 eggs for breakfast every day, his family drank whole milk, and he ate a slice of cake everyday, and not one of the 12 kids was ever overweight. But, I guess when you’ve got 12 kids, there was no option for a second slice of cake!
Myself, I grew up as an extremely picky child in the 80s/90s. Through gradeschool I bascially lived on yogurt, carrot sticks, cheese sandwiches, fritos and fruit- but those are pretty balanced sounding for a picky kid! I wouldn’t touch school lunch unless it was French Bread Pizza day. My highschool lunch choices were especially
horrible and I pretty much only ate Snapple and Hostess Donettes for lunch for the last two years of highschool (those were spent in NH instead of MA- big difference in school lunch quality between those states). But desipte that unhealthy choice I have never been overweight… probably because my lunch was only around 500 calories.
I don’t like how people are making the 1960s out to be some wonderous time, when in fact that is when the cartoon-tie in, sugar coated processed cereals were first getting in swing. And that’s when soda companys started marketing their product s for daily at-home use, not a once a week soda fountain treat. And that’s when TV dinners came about. And that’s when fast food took off. The 1960s were terrible for American eating habits- and it’s the people who grew up then, eating that junk, that are making the decisions about what to feed their kids and what should be on the school lunch menus today.
I’m with the zoning-causes-obesity camp, though I don’t discount the whole spectrum of food issues. In truth they’re probably about equally to blame, but I don’t believe that fixing only one would change this, as efforts to fix the food issues have proven. What we haven’t done is insist that all neighborhoods have sidewalks, invest in community schools that are within reasonable walking/biking distance of the vast majority of the students they serve, plan for shopping areas ditto, invest in street police officers to keep those neighborhoods safe and patrolled, and see to it that kids embrace a lifestyle of active, daily community engagement.
Anyone who’s ever been on a diet knows that permanent weight loss is going to have to = permanent lifestyle changes. Bribing kids to eat right, like they did in one study, was obviously never going to work.
As a father of three – 16, 9 and 5, my observation is that the relationship between you, your kids and food is going to be a complex mess – especially when they start going to school – less because of the school lunch pressure (we pack their lunches every morning) and more because of peer pressure.
We try our best – expose them to as many foods as possible (edamame, brie, hummus and tofu are favorites for the little kids,) allow consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables any time, cook at home nearly every night, avoid processed stuff as much as possible, limit junk food, and nearly eliminate soda. We have no obesity problems – in fact the 9 year old is skinny as a rail, but we still fight food battles all the time. For example:
The 16 year old is finally coming out of a phase where if it didn’t come from a restaurant, highly processed or individually wrapped, then it wasn’t worth eating. She sure as heck didn’t get that from us. It lasted about four years and basically took the combination of maturity, becoming an athlete, cooking once in a while, and being forced to live within a budget to come out of it.
The little kids get pretty dessert focused every so often – to the point where it seems like their whole purpose for eating is to get at some sweets. Again, they didn’t get that from us. We try to keep the stuff out of the house as much as possible and much of what we have is home made. However, when it’s around we try to strike a balance between keeping the portions small and finishing it off so we won’t have to hear them whining about it any more.
Interesting that articles like this can blame the parents while ignoring the number of parents that are themselves obese.
The healthy eating program doesn’t work, if you were going to bribe kids into healthy eating you would have to do it all the time, aka constantly bribing them, which might work but it would be costly. It worked with me because my parents constantly bribed me with money for good grades, and yes I kept my grades up to get the money. But what are you bribing them with, you must also bribe them with something that is healthy for them, don’t bribe them with a gameboy and 10 games, or bribe them for good grades with a gift certificate to mcdonalds. Maybe bribe them with a new bike or something, although that may not be as effective as bribing them with video games, but there has to be something other than video games that kids want that would be healthy for them and that you could bribe them with. This is no joke either, at my cousins school they are “rewarded” for good grades and other acheivements with a gift cert to McDonalds.
If you run a healthy eating program the most important thing is to be consistant, spending hours teaching the kids about healthy eating in class then having them go to the lunchroom to be fed nothing but mac & cheese and hot dogs isn’t going to work. Rewarding a kid for being student of the month with a gift cert to McDonalds isn’t sending a good message either. Bribing isn’t going to work unless you do it consistantly either, it might work if you constantly bribed kids, but probably not the best way to go about it.
They have installed some new playground equipment here but my problem with it is that first of all its geared for kids who are ages 4 and under and also sized for them, and also there is significantly less playground equipment so if 1-3 kids are occupying it thats about all it can take. We used to have stuff that could accomodate all kids and even adults such as swings and teeter totters, but it doesn’t work if you can only accomodate the smallest of kids and only up to 3 kids at a time. There used to be about 6-8 teeter totters, 2 baby swingsets, 3-4 adult swing sets, 3-4 slides, monkey bars, jungle gym, ride-on spring animals (oh these were great fun!), now there is a single plastic plaything that can hold about 3 kids at a time and like 1 set of baby swings.
Oh and also the fast food places have reduced their playgrounds to nothing, there used to be one burger king here that had a HUGE playground. I mean seriously as a kid you did not want to leave that place and you were begging your parents to take you there on weekends to play not to mention you didn’t even want to eat the food while there you just wanted to play. There was a Mcdonalds that was the same and had an even bigger playplace with rides, slides, the whole works, and it was all free, again I was begging to go there and I didn’t want the food either, I just wanted to play, as a kid you could stay for hours at these places and it didn’t even seem like you were excercising because it was so much fun. Now the playplaces have been reduced to one plastic slide.
@nardo218: Well that’s a matter of opinion.
I’m with the zoning/sidewalk crowd. There was a thing on CNN a while back about urban food deserts. In a lot of places things are just spaced too far apart to walk.
Which is not to say I don’t agree with the other problems stated. I just wish the people who claimed they were trying to fight obesity would realize that 1) these all problems contribute to it and 2) come up with solutions that aren’t new problems. Such as:
* Feeding them crappy fruits and veggies so they’re actually less willing to eat them.
* Bribing them to eat healthier instead of teaching them that it’s something they’re supposed to do.
* Accusing them of lying or being wrong when they do change their habits.
@Orchid64: Why aren’t all kids taken for a half hour walk every day during school hours? How hard would it be to schedule this instead of a class everyone but the most athletic end up hating?
Yes, ITA. There was a very small alternative gym class called “Fitness” I took junior and senior year, but only ~50 out of some thousands of students took it. We did The Grind workout (this was the 90s), ran track, did weightroom, kickboxing, physical defense. The girls who took it loved it, but the school needed to encourage it more; teenagers won’t do anything that everyone else isn’t doing.
In a classic case of “too little, too late”, research says that the $1 billion that the federal government is spending each year on “healthy eating” campaigns isn’t doing jack for today’s overweight kids, according to The Consumerist. Childhood obesity rates in kids ages 6-11 have quadrupled…