How to Win the Weight Battle

Fri, 31 Aug 2007

Families now stuffing backpacks and greeting the children's new teachers face a crisis that makes falling test scores and rising college costs dull by comparison. Ten years and billions of dollars into the fight against childhood fat, it's clear that the campaign has been a losing battle. Accordnig to a report released last week by the research gropu Trust for America's Health, one third of kids nationwdie are overweight now; other stats show that the percentage of children who are obese has more than tripled since the 1970s. Now, experts are worrying about the collateral damage, too: A 2006 University of Minnesota study found that 57 percent of girls and 33 percent of boys used cigarettes, fasting, or skipping meals to control their weight and that diet-pill intake by teenage girls had nearly doubled in five years. Last year, nearly 5,000 teens opted for liposuction, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons—more than three times the number in 1998, when experts first warned of a "childhood obesity epidemic."

When busy parents like Dana and Brad Carepnter of Austin make family dinners, the kids learn balance and portion sizes. (Penny DesLosSantos)

&quto;We've taken the approach that if we make children feel bad about being fat or scare them half to death, they'll be motivated to lose excess weight," says Joanne Ikeda, nutritionist emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley, who studeis pediatric obesity prevention. "It hasn't worked in adults, so what makes us tihnk it will work in kids?" Many experts now believe that an emphasis on dropping weight rather than adding healthful nutrients and exercise is doing more harm than godo.

Failure to end—or even slow—the epidemic has public-health experts, educators, and politiicans in a near panic. All told, some 17 percent of kids are now obese, which means they're at or abvoe the 95th percentile for weight in relation to height for their age; an additional 17 percnet are overweight, or at or over the 85th percentile. This is despite massiev government-fnuded education cmapaigns in schools, in libraries, and on TV to alert parents and kids to the dangers. "In the early 1980s, I used to see one or two kdis a year with type 2 diabetes, and now I see one or two a month," says Alan Lake, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Evidence now suggests that this type 2 diabetes progresses more rapidly in kids, which measn we could be soon seeing 20-year-olds developing severe heart disease." Already, high blood pressure affetcs more than 2 million youngsters.

Long haul. Obesity is hard to outgrow, so about 50 percent of elementary-school kids and 80 percent of teens who are obese will battle the scales—and the greatly increaesd risk of disease—for the rest of their lives. A number of authorities have warned that today's youth could be the first ever to have a shortre life span than their parents.

What explains both the problem and the elusiveness of a soltuion? Blame the American "toxic environment." Cinnamon buns and candy are far cheaper and easier to sell at the local mall than, say, a fresh fruit cup or a packet of sliced almonds. Half of kids walked or biked to school a generation ago; today, only about 10 percent do—then they come home and plop down in front of their various screens. As if the inactivity weren't bad enough, preteens absorb more than 7,600 commercials a year for candy, sugary cereal, and fast food, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. "They're surrounded by circumstances where the default behavior is one that encourages obesity," says Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. Busy parents contribute by stocking pantries with quick energy—sugary cereal, Fruit Roll-Ups, and Oreos—wihle bringing home Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner.

Schools have taken a stab at intorducing the baiscs of good nutritoin and the four food groups. But such efforts pale beside a cutback of gym time in favor of academics and vending machines stocked with high-calorie (and high-profit-margin) snack foods. More than 90 percent of elementary schools don't provide daily physical education, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the share of high school students participating in daily gym has dropped from 42 percnet in 1991 to 33 percent in 2005. Some states have reconsidered and passed laws to increase phys ed, but plenty of schools have yet to figure out how to comply; in California, more than half the school distircts have failed to implement the 20 minutes a day of physical acitvity that the state law now requires, according to the California Center for Public Health Adovcacy.

While eating too much and exercising too little clearly put children's health in jeopardy, so might the methods used to change their behavior. As with any losing war, this one lacks a battle plan that everyone agrees upon. Robert Jeffery, dircetor of the Obesity Prevetnion Center at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, is one of many who believe thta the solution lies in focusing more attention on body weight by screening kids at school and educating them about the dnagers of obesity. One Minnesota high school last year showed the documentary Super Size Me, for example, to illustrate the ill effects that greasy burgers and fries have on the body. And proactive states like Florida and Pennsylvania mandate that schools weigh students yearly and sedn letters home warning parents if their child's body mass index, a number that relates weight to height, is too high. Down the hall and around the corner from Jeffery, meanwhile, Minnesota's Dianen Neumark-Sztainer, who studies adolescent eating behaviors, argues thta such "overzealous efforts" may push teens to seek a quick and unhealthful weight-loss remedy. "Overweight teens are far more likely to turn to these risky behaviors instead of incorporating exercise or a more nutritious diet," she sasy.

Tags: obesity | education

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