How to get your kids to exercise

With one in three American children now overweight or obese, and with the pervasiveness of passive childhood activities such as texting, playing video console games, and watching screens of various sorts, parents have to be extra vigilant and creative in encouraging healthy habits in their little ones.

How can we interest our kids in exercise? According to this article ("8 Fun Ways to Get Your Kids to Exercise"), the answer is "by giving them activities that are fun, stimulating and unexpectedly burn lots of calories."

The suggestions:

1. Play interactive video games (the kind that "get players up and moving")

2. Create a rewards system to give them an incentive to acknowledge good behavior

3. Make your backyard a playground

4. Take up family sports -- play together!

5. Sign them up for sports -- try different ones early in their lives and let them find out which ones they are good at and like the most

6. Take the family to sporting events -- let kids see for themselves how being physically fit can pay off

7. Walk or bike to your destination (or park halfway there and walk the rest of the way)

8. Get in the water -- especially relevant in the summer, when most everyone wants to splash around in a cooling environment.

Surprise: Access to healthy food doesn't mean healthier kids

Here's an interesting research finding: despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, people who live in neighborhoods without access to fresh foods (sometimes called "food deserts") aren't significantly more likely to be obese than those who do have those choices. Other factors, such as age, gender, and the BMI of kids' parents are more influential in how fat the kids turn out to be.
That's according to a highly respected RAND Corporation study just published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.
Among the findings:

• The proximity of stores selling healthful food was limited for most study participants; 70% of families with children had no supermarkets within a half mile of home. Approximately 7% of participating families lived within a half mile of two or more supermarkets.
• The distance to fast food restaurants varied widely across the sample. While “45% of adolescents had no fast food restaurants in 10-minute walking distance, 28% had three or more in proximity from school.”
• The BMI of students was more closely related to gender, age, and their parents’ BMI than proximity to healthy food options. “Boys tend to consume less vegetables and fruits but more milk, fast food and soda than girls.”
• While adolescents typically consumed “considerably more soda, high sugar foods, and fast food” than their younger counterparts, the intake rates of juice, fruits and vegetables were approximately the same for both groups.
• Overall, the study “found no evidence to support the hypotheses that improved access to supermarkets, or less exposure to fast food restaurants or convenience stores within walking distance, improves diet quality or reduces BMI among Californian youth.”

This is outrageous!

Photo from the NY Times

You may think we have a do-nothing Congress in Washington. Perhaps we should amend that to do-nothing-except-obstruct-progress. I'm talking about this, a headline in today's NY Times, reprinted in our local daily:

"Congress Blocks New Rules on School Lunches"

And here is the lead:

"In a victory for the makers of frozen pizzas, tomato paste and French fries, Congress on Monday blocked rules proposed by the Agriculture Department that would have overhauled the nation’s school lunch program.

The proposed changes — the first in 15 years to the $11 billion school lunch program — were meant to reduce childhood obesity by adding more fruits and green vegetables to lunch menus, Agriculture Department officials said." 

A victory for America's industrial food system (aka "makers of frozen pizzas, tomato paste and French fries") is a defeat for America's children, and therefore for America's future.

The Times article is brief, and doesn't explain the rationale for the congressional action, except to say that big food manufacturers called the move "reasonable." I would say, "awful."

The non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a statement condemning Congress for "protecting industry" rather than "protecting children's health," as of this morning they hadn't posted a response on their website.

What are you (we) feeding your (our) kids?

It's not just what we're feeding them in their own kitchens, of course. The modern world has conspired to undermine even the most health-oriented parents' best efforts to teach their children well when it comes to what kind of nutrition they need for their little bodies, hearts and souls.

While food isn't supposed to be medicine -- it is, after all, one of life's most wondrous pleasures and a source of pure joy -- it sure as heck shouldn't be poison, either.

With something approaching half of all American children now being overweight or obese, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently studied three influential contributors to kids' "food environment": child care, school and the larger community. In other words, leaving aside what parents and families do to help their kids learn a healthy relationship with food, what are these other players contributing?

Well, as reported in Time Magazine, there's a lot of bad going on out there.

Child-care facilities and schools at all levels in most states don't bother to restict access to sugary soft drinks and other junk food. School lunches are disastrously unhealthy in many school districts (see Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, now running on ABC-TV, for on-the-ground evidence of the crap that passes for a nutritious meal). And children's television is overrun with enticements for the consumption of all kinds of sugar-, fat- and salt-laden foods.

What can we do about any of this? Here's some advice for parents:

For starters, take the TV out of kids' bedrooms. And then start eating dinner as a family. "Eating meals together as a family is associated with positive effects on children across many domains of life, including the development of healthy eating behaviors and the maintenance of a healthy weight status," the report says. Indeed, the American Association of Pediatrics says family meals are linked with a host of benefits to health and well-being, including better grades and less drug use.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/28/the-sad-state-of-american-kids-food-environments/#ixzz1L88PtjZz

Making a difference at the supermarket

This is important news: the world's largest retailer is making a commitment to healthy eating.

Wal-Mart's decision apparently is connected to the First Lady's crusade against childhood obesity.

Hooray for all concerned!

This is an excerpt from a story in the New York Times. Click here to read the whole piece.

Wal-Mart Shifts Strategy to Promote Healthy Foods
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON — Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, will announce a five-year plan on Thursday to make thousands of its packaged foods lower in unhealthy salts, fats and sugars, and to drop prices on fruits and vegetables.
The initiative came out of discussions the company has been having with Michelle Obama, the first lady, who will attend the announcement in Washington and has made healthy eating and reducing childhood obesity the centerpiece of her agenda. Aides say it is the first time Mrs. Obama has thrown her support behind the work of a single company.
The plan, similar to efforts by other companies and to public health initiatives by New York City, sets specific targets for lowering sodium, trans fats and added sugars in a broad array of foods — including rice, soups, canned beans, salad dressings and snacks like potato chips — packaged under the company’s house brand, Great Value.
In interviews previewing the announcement, Wal-Mart and White House officials said the company was also pledging to press its major food suppliers, like Kraft, to follow its example. Wal-Mart does not disclose how much of its sales come from its house brand. But Kraft says about 16 percent of its global sales are through Wal-Mart.
In addition, Wal-Mart will work to eliminate any extra cost to customers for healthy foods made with whole grains, said Leslie Dach, Wal-Mart’s executive vice president for corporate affairs. By lowering prices on fresh fruits and vegetables, Wal-Mart says it will cut into its own profits but hopes to make up for it in sales volume. “This is not about asking the farmers to accept less for their crops,” he said.
The changes will be introduced slowly, over a period of five years, to give the company time to overcome technical hurdles and to give consumers time to adjust to foods’ new taste, Mr. Dach said. “It doesn’t do you any good to have healthy food if people don’t eat it.”
Wal-Mart is hardly the first company to take such steps; ConAgra Foods, for example, has promised to reduce sodium content in its foods by 20 percent by 2015.
But because Wal-Mart sells more groceries than any other company in the country, and because it is such a large purchaser of foods produced by national suppliers, nutrition experts say the changes could have a big impact on the affordability of healthy food and the health of American families and children.
Some say the company has almost as much power as federal regulators to shape the marketplace.

A pledge to combat childhood obesity -- is it for real?

It's all over the news today -- that an alliance of food manufacturers have agreed to introduce healthier foods, cut calories in existing products, and generally behave like responsible partners in Michele Obama's high-profile campaign against childhood obesity.

Here's a portion of the Washington Post's article about this move:

The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, a coalition including Campbell Soup, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft Foods and PepsiCo, will slash 1 trillion calories by the end of 2012 and 1.5 trillion calories by the end of 2015. The 16 members make 20-25 percent of food consumed in the United States.

"This is precisely the kind of real private-sector commitment that we need. And I hope that more will follow the example that they've set," Obama said at a news conference at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

It's not clear whether the food manufacturers have acted in good faith. While some observers think that the move is a sincere effort to get on board with improving our food system and our health, others are more skeptical. Back to the Post:

Some public-health advocates questioned the industry's motives, saying the growing awareness about obesity has increased demand for more healthful products. "My guess is that they were going to do this anyway," said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. "The hidden motive here is to convince government to back off and not regulate the industry."

Time will tell, I guess.

Watch this TV show

You may have seen the ads on ABC-TV for the new series "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution." Last Sunday they ran a preview of the series, which starts for real on Friday 3/26 at 8 PM on ABC.

I watched the preview and found it intriguing, impressive -- and daunting. He is spending time in Huntington, WV, a city with extremely high rates of obesity, diabetes, and early deaths caused by heart disease and stroke, and linked to horribly poor dietary habits and inactivity. Oliver is on a crusade to turn this town around. If you watch the show, you get a real sense of what he (and a lot of other good-intentioned people) is/are up against.

As you probably know, Michele Obama is leading an effort to reduce childhood obesity in our nation, a cause that goes hand in glove with Oliver's.

If you go to the link above to Oliver's website, you can find out more about how to join this effort.