School Wellness Policies Are Here! Will They Work?

It’s definitely back to school time! I touched on school lunches last week and the difficulties that can be encountered when attempting to improve them. But beyond the school lunch, did you all know that for the first time by law, all districts in the United States that participate in the National School Lunch or Breakfast Program must have a Local School Wellness Policy in place before the start of school year 2006. This law is essentially a government reaction to the childhood obesity crisis.

Your school district most likely has the policy completed. There may be a lot of changes in your district or very few. School districts were given quite a bit of lee way as to what went into the policies. But the law does require that the wellness policies must have these five general components:

1. Goals for nutrition education, physical activity and other school-based activities
2. Nutrition guidelines for all foods and beverages available on all campuses
3. Guidelines for school meals that meet or exceed what is required by law (nutrition standards and other program regulations)
4. A plan to measure implementation of the policy, and appointing at least one person to ensure the policy is carried out in every school
5. Community involvement –parents, students, school food services, the school board, school administrators, and the public at a minimum must form a committee to develop the school wellness policy

Number 5 most likely has already been taken care of. However, your district’s committee may still be active and you could possibly join it. Take special note of number 2. This means nutrition guidelines for any food available at all on campus. Not just what is served in the cafeteria or sold in the vending machines and student stores, but includes food and drinks brought in for class parties or sold as fundraisers. Before your kids next birthday party you might want to check with your school before you bring in those brownies. Things may have changed.

Or they might not have changed much at all. Again, the law left a lot of room for interpretation. Some districts have made sweeping changes, such as banning sugary drinks and junk food, while other districts have remained somewhat status quo just meeting the barebones of what is required by law.

Find out what is in your school district’s wellness policy. If you don’t think it’s good enough for our kids, you have a say in the matter. Get other parents and caregivers together to lobby for changes on your campuses. And keep your radar on for news stories about districts across the country putting their wellness policies into action. You will probably learn about some innovative programs that could work for your school district.

Will these policies really help change the school environment? Will there be a crack in the childhood obesity epidemic? Or do they just not go far enough?
Stay tuned….

To learn more about local school wellness policies visit the USDA’s Team Nutrition website.

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Facing the "Freshman 15"

Anybody sending their teen off to college this year and wondering “will my kid succumb to the Freshman 15? Of course I am speaking of the dreaded weight gain our teens can face when they start college in a brand new environment. I just taped an interview for a program called HealthZone with Amy Hendel that airs on Time Warner Cable here in Los Angeles on that very topic (for those in the Southern California area I’ll let you know when it airs). I shared some tips on how our new collegiates can practice healthy behaviors when they go off to school and thought, hey, that needs to go on the blog! So here goes

Freshman year is certainly a time of major change in your teen’s life. Often they are out on their own for the first time with a virtual smorgasbord of food awaiting them. If they are living in the dorms they have access to all you can eat buffets every day 3 times a day! And of course there’s late night study snacking, midnight pizza runs, skipping meals then bingeing later, weekend parties, stress eating and so on. There’s a lot of gnoshing going on in college (I personally remember falafel runs at one in the morning, yikes!).

We certainly don’t want our teen to start chronic dieting, that’s not healthy either. We want to guide them to practice healthy behaviors from the start. So here are some tips you can share with them to get them going:

• Serve yourself smaller portions in the cafeteria and resist going back for seconds.
• Eat slowly to give your brain time to register that you’re full. It generally takes 20 minutes for that message to get from your belly to your brain.
• Drink water or nonfat milk with meals and you’ll be less likely to overeat.
• Rethink your drink – stay away from high calorie beverages like regular soft drinks and ‘fruit’ flavored drinks. Even juices have a lot of calories. Stick to sugar free beverages, water, nonfat or 1% lowfat milk.
• Don’t skip meals! This can lead to bingeing later. Start with breakfast to get your body going and help you concentrate better in class.
• Have a fruit and/or vegetable with every meal. They’re low calorie, high fiber and help fill you up.
• Keep healthy low calorie snacks in your dorm room or apartment for those late snack attacks i.e. 94% fat free microwave popcorn, Skinny chips, grapes, bananas, apples, baby carrots, whole grain cereals etc.
• Keep in mind that fat-free doesn't mean calorie-free. Fat-free muffins, frozen yogurt, and other snack foods often contain so much sugar that they can have just as many calories as the fatty versions.
• Try to be active every day and/or incorporate it into your daily routine. i.e. walk to class instead of driving or park far away.

Granted some of these this will take some self-discipline because all that food is so tempting. But with a little practice these strategies can eventually become habit. Good luck!

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Something Else To Blame for Childhood Obesity

It’s probably no secret to any of you that we have a childhood obesity problem (and an adult obesity problem too for that matter) in this country. What does seem to be a secret is why? Everyone has their theories – kids don’t get enough physical activity, they eat too many calories, they drink their calories, they eat too much junk, the Food Guide Pyramid is to blame – and the list goes on. The truth of the matter is we haven’t quite figured it out yet because it is a very complicated problem.

Here’s a familiar theory with a new spin to throw into the mix. According to pediatrician Dr. Robert Lustig the high calorie, refined carbohydrate, low fiber western diet is to blame. Well no duh! But he offers a more in depth explanation, actually a more scientific one in the August issue of the journal Nature Clinical Practice Endocrinology & Metabolism. Lustig says this diet has resulted in a state of hyperinsulinemia in our kids' bodies (ours too) that interferes with their ability to control their appetites.

So what does mean? The basics are after a meal, the hormone insulin is released into the blood in response to the carbohydrate in food. Insulin helps that food get into the cells so they can do their work to keep the body going. Sounds ok right? Well, according to Lustig the current western diet is causing too much insulin to be released resulting in this state of hyperinsulinemia. This sends our kids' appetites into overdrive, triggering them to eat eat eat! And as a result gain more and more weight. (Along with too many calories, too much refined carbohydrate and lack of fiber, he says too much fat and fructose - a sugar- and too little dairy contribute to hyperinsulinemia as well). Ideally with the perfect diet our kids don’t reach that state of hyperinsulinemia and their appetites stay in check.

So what is an ideal or perfect diet? For starters one with more high fiber whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Sounds simple enough, but our kids aren’t really used to eating whole grains and lots of fruits and vegetables. Most of their grain foods come from refined flour like that found in hamburger buns, bagels, white bread, white rice, pasta, pastries, pretzels and so on.

What can we do? Try starting slowly by adding a fruit or a vegetable to every meal (talk with your kids about what vegetables they actually like). To gradually add in more whole grains try going half and half i.e. mix whole wheat pasta with your regular pasta, mix white rice with brown rice. If you’d like more ideas on getting more whole grains into their diet (and fruits and veggies) and yours, let me know and I can dedicate a post to just that. And if you all have some good tips to share please send them along.

If you are interested in reading Lustig’s article here’s the link http://www.nature.com/ncpendmet/journal/v2/n8/full/ncpendmet0220.html

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Fixing the School Lunch: How Hard Can It Be?

School lunches are certainly the hot button issue sweeping the country these days. They’ve become quite the target of blame for the childhood obesity crisis. But are they responsible? Or are they just one piece of the puzzle (or pie since we are talking about food)? And if they do carry even some of the blame, isn't it a no brainer to make them healthier? If you are at all interested in this topic, have concerns about what your child’s school is serving for lunch or any interest in making changes to the school lunch program, check out the August 20th article in the New York Times, The School Lunch Test by Lisa Belkin.
Warning: the article is a little on long side but worth the read (it’s got to be if I’m steering you to another writer’s column). Belkin does a great job of laying out the complexities of what it takes to design a healthier school lunch program and the obstacles that can get in the way (yours truly worked with the Los Angeles Unified School District to pass the landmark food and beverage policies "The Healthy Beverage Resolution" and the "Obesity Prevention Motion", which eliminated the sale of unhealthful soft drinks and snacks on all district campuses; and let me tell you they were neither easy to pass nor implement!). She profiles a couple of districts across the country currently trying to make changes for the better and some of the difficulties they are facing.
One of the major issues most folks aren’t aware of is that the school meal program (many districts serve both lunch and breakfast) is not funded by a district’s budget. Instead school food services must operate independently as a business. It’s their job to stay out of the red and in the black. They have to at least break even to keep the meal program going. At the same time they must meet nutritional guidelines set by the United States Department of Agriculture. These include guidelines for calories, fat, saturated fat, protein, iron, vitamin A, calcium and vitamin C. School food service directors are often caught between a rock and a hard place, loaded with the task of providing both a complete meal that meets nutrient guidelines, and one that the kids will eat and buy. If the kids don’t buy it, they don’t make money and there goes school lunch.
We won’t get anywhere even with the healthiest of lunches if kids don’t eat them. So what is the solution? How can we get our kids to accept healthier options? What will it take? Do we need more nutrition education in the classroom (YES YES YES)? Should teachers and administrators act as ‘healthy eating’ role models? Take a look at the article and send me your opinions and comments. What do you think it will take to make healthy changes in the school lunch program happen?
I look forward to hearing from you :) Here’s the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/magazine/20lunches.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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Marketing Food to Our Kids Online?

Parents and caregivers beware! Is online food marketing directed at your kids a concern for you? Have you ever given it much thought? Does that term even make sense? We seem to worry so much about all the junk food advertising our kids see on television, but what about what they see on those food manufacturers’ websites? Well, they’re seeing A LOT!
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released the first study of its kind detailing exactly what our kids are seeing and doing when they visit those websites. In the appropriately titled First Analysis of Online Food Advertising Targeting Children, Kaiser looked at over 4000 web pages. They report a variety of techniques food manufacturers’ use to engage kids in online activities in order to get them to spend time on their websites. Kids can play games (Kaiser has termed these “advergames”) or enter themselves in sweepstakes and other promotions. If they missed the commercial on TV, they can watch it again on their site. Some of the sites use our kids for market research by asking them to vote for different products, or to take a poll. Other sites require users to purchase their products in order to gain access to more pages on the site or to collect points to win product related merchandise. Some sites ask kids to email their friends to tell them to visit the site (another clever Kaiser generated term, “viral marketing”).All of these techniques are designed to create brand loyalty in our kids.
And how do they know about these sites? More marketing of course, food companies promote their ‘kid friendly’ websites in TV ads and on packaging. Online advertising certainly doesn’t reach as many kids as television advertising. But consider this, when a child sees a commercial on TV they are exposed to it for about 15-30 seconds, 60 max. When they visit that brand’s website they get in much deeper. They can spend hours perusing the site and checking out different products.
So what does this all mean? You tell me. What are your thoughts on this kind of food marketing to our kids? Not a big deal? Or are you concerned? Let me know what you think.To check out this study click here

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