good nutrition

The federal government will spend more than $1 billion this year on nutrition education - fresh carrot and celery snacks, videos of dancing fruit, hundreds of hours of lively lessons about how great you will feel if you eat well.

But an Associated Press review of dozens of rigorous scientific studies shows that these programs almost never change the way kids eat. And there is no indication they will make a dent in the growing epidemic of childhood obesity.

"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 evidence is in the children. Nationally, obesity rates have nearly quintupled among 6- to 11-year-olds and tripled among teens and children ages 2 to 5 since the 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The medical consequences of obesity in the United States - diabetes, high blood pressure, even orthopedic problems - cost an estimated $100 billion a year. Kentucky cardiologist Dr. James Holsinger Jr., nominated as the next surgeon general, says fighting childhood obesity is his top priority.

Thus far, the federal government has put its money on education as the solution. But a review of 57 trials aimed at changing kids' eating habits found just four showed any real success.

That reinforced a slew of disappointing studies:

# Last year a major federal pilot program offering free fruits and vegetables to school children showed fifth graders became less willing to eat them than they had at the start. Apparently they didn't like the taste.

# In Pennsylvania, researchers went so far as to give prizes to school children who ate fruits and vegetables. That worked while the prizes were offered, 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, they might even think they are, but they're not.

The studies don't tell Leticia Jenkins anything she doesn't know. She's one of the bravest teachers in America - not because she gave her seventh- and eighth-graders 30 sharp knives to chop tomatoes, onions, jalapenos and limes for a lesson on salsa and nutrition, but because she understands the futility of what she is trying to do.

"Oh, it's so hard, because at the end of the day sometimes I take a moment, I think, 'Gosh, I did all this, and we still see them across the street picking up the doughnuts and the coffee drinks,' " she said.

The challenges to changing the way children eat are as numerous as the factors that have prompted the obesity epidemic in the first place.

The forces that make kids fat "are really strong and hard to fight with just a program in school," said Dr. Philip Zeitler, a pediatric endocrinologist and researcher who sees "a steady stream" of obese children struggling with diabetes and other potentially fatal medical problems at The Children's Hospital in Denver.

What does he tell them?

"Oh, God, I haven't figured out anything that I know is going to work," he said. "I'm not aware of any medical model that is very successful in helping these kids. Sure, we try to help them, but I can't take credit for the ones who do manage to change."


source:www.clarionledger.com