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Educating Children on Nutrition and Weight
Aug 02 2013A new University of Minnesota study is offering tips on how to talk to your kids about food, nutrition and weight.
Most parents know that one-third of U.S. children are overweight or obese and, of course, they want their own kids to be healthy.
“Many of them ask their health care providers, ‘What should I say? Should I have a conversation? Should I avoid it?’ And health care providers wonder themselves, ‘What do I tell parents?'” U of M researcher Jerica Berge said.
So Berge led the new study to find out.
She said while some parents believe you have to lay it on the line and tell a kid they’re overweight, the study titled Parent Conversations About Healthful Eating and Weight and published in JAMA Pediatrics, suggests otherwise.
“It really does help to focus more on the healthy eating rather than confronting a child directly about their weight,” Berge said.
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Source: WCSH6 Portland
Why Americans can’t afford to eat healthy
Jul 23 2013The easiest way to explain Gallup’s discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being “Whole Paycheck.” Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times.
It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point’s carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile — if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blowhard — that’s because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.
As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism — the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.
In this chapter of that larger tragicomedy, lawmakers whose campaigns are underwritten by agribusinesses have used billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize those agribusinesses’ specific commodities (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) that are the key ingredients of unhealthy food. Not surprisingly, the subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that recession-battered consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to “choose” the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support.
Corn — which is processed into the junk-food staple corn syrup and which feeds the livestock that produce meat — exemplifies the scheme.
“Over the past decade, the federal government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop … artificially low,” reports Time magazine. “That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain.”
Yes, it is a bargain, but one created by deliberate government policy that serves the corn industry titans, not by any genetic advantage that makes corn derivatives automatically more affordable for the budget-strapped commoner.
The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry, notes Time, is “that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit.”
So while it may be amusing to use Americans’ worsening recession-era diet as another excuse to promote cultural stereotypes, the nutrition crisis costing us billions in unnecessary healthcare costs is more about public policy and powerful special interests than it is about epicurean snobs and affluent tastes. Indeed, this is a problem not of individual proclivities or of agricultural biology that supposedly makes nutrition naturally unaffordable — it is a problem of rigged economics and corrupt policymaking.
Solving the crisis, then, requires everything from recalibrating our subsidies to halting the low-income school lunch program’s support for the pizza and French fry lobby (yes, they have a powerful lobby). It requires, in other words, a new level of maturity, a better appreciation for the nuanced politics of food and a commitment to changing those politics for the future.
Impossible? Hardly. A country that can engineer the seemingly unattainable economics of a $5 McDonald’s feast certainly has the capacity to produce a healthy meal for the same price. It’s just a matter of will — or won’t.
Source: salon.com
Child Obesity Down in Many States
Jul 22 2013U.S. childhood obesity is due to children in homes, schools and neighborhoods where it’s easy to eat excess calories and difficult to work off, an expert says.
Dr. Tom Farley, commissioner of the New York City Health Department, and Mayor Chip Johnson of Hernando, Miss., talked about the strategies that have been effective in addressing the obesity epidemic in their communities at a conference of Voices for Healthy Kids, a joint initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and American Heart Association.
“To reverse this epidemic, we must create a healthier food environment for them and engineer physical activity back into their daily lives,” Farley said during the keynote session.
Last year, four states and five cities or counties had measured declines in their childhood obesity rates. The specifics varied for each location, but the declines generally were measured since the mid-2000s and range from a 1.1 percent decline among students in grades 5, 7 and 9 in California, to a 13 percent decline among K-5 students in Mississippi. All of the locations took comprehensive action to address the epidemic.
“As community leaders, we have an obligation to create an atmosphere and opportunity for good health in our cities,” Johnson said. “This can be done in a variety of ways such as hosting a farmers market that makes locally grown, healthy food available to people from all parts of the community; mandating sidewalks in all new and redeveloped properties; and creating a park system to offer opportunities for recreation on a daily basis.”
In Mississippi, Johnson said the obesity and overweight rate fell from 43 percent in the spring of 2005 to 37.3 percent in the spring of 2011 among Mississippi public school students in grades K-5.
Farley said the obesity rate fell from 21.9 percent in 2006-07 to 20.7 percent in 2010-11 among New York City public school students in grades K-8, a 5.5 percent decline.
Source: upi.com
Nutrition During First 1,000 Days of Life Crucial for Childhood and Economic Development
Jul 17 2013A new Lancet series on maternal and childhood nutrition finds that over 3 million children die every year of malnutrition—accounting for nearly half of all child deaths under 5. Along with state-of-the-art global estimates on the long-term burden of malnutrition, the series presents a new framework for prevention and treatment that considers underlying factors, such as food security, social conditions, resources, and governance.
Professor Robert Black, Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, led the consortium of experts who produced this series—a follow-up to the groundbreaking 2008 Lancet Nutrition Series, which revealed how pivotal the first 1,000 days—from the start of pregnancy until the child’s second birthday—are to the well-being of both the individual and the society in which he or she lives.
“This series strengthens the evidence that a nation’s economic advancement is tied to the first 1,000 days of every child’s life,” says Black. “Malnutrition can haunt children for the rest of their lives. Undernourished children are more susceptible to infectious diseases and achieve less education and have lower cognitive abilities. As a result, undernutrition can significantly impede a country’s economic growth.” While some progress has been made in recent years, Black and colleagues estimates that over 165 million children were affected by stunting and 50 million by wasting in 2011.
Maternal nutrition is essential for the health of the mother and the survival and development of her child. The study estimates that 800,000 neonatal deaths are caused by fetal growth restriction. Furthermore, newborns who suffer from this and survive are at a substantially increased risk of stunting during the first 24 months after birth.
Undernourished women are more likely to die in pregnancy, to give birth prematurely, and to have babies who are born premature or too small for their gestational age. Over a quarter of all babies born in low- and middle-income countries are small for their gestational age—putting them at a significantly increased risk of dying. And more than one quarter of all newborn deaths are attributed to restricted growth in the womb due to maternal undernutrition.
An article accompanying the Series, led by Professor Joanne Katz, Department of International Health at the Bloomberg School, provides in-depth evidence on the mortality risk of infants small for their gestational age. Past studies have focused on low birth weight, but this can exclude many children who exceed the standard weight limit but were born prematurely or are small for their gestational age. “To prevent neonatal deaths, we should track whether the baby was born too small or too soon, not just the baby’s birth weight. This will allow us to better implement the appropriate interventions to prevent these conditions and improve survival,” says Katz.
“Countries will not be able to break out of poverty or sustain economic advances when so much of their population is unable to achieve the nutritional security that is needed for a healthy and productive life,” explains Black. “We need to redouble our efforts and invest in what we know works. As the study led by Professor Zulfiqar Bhutta of Aga Khan University shows, scaling up 10 proven interventions—including treatment of acute malnutrition, promotion of infant and child feeding, and zinc supplementation—can already save 900,000 children a year.”
Source: healthcanal.com
Maternal Depression Linked to Childhood Obesity
Jul 10 2013Mothers who experience depressive symptoms often display obesity-promoting practices and have children who are overweight or obese, according to a new study by investigators at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM). These data recently were published in the journal Academic Pediatrics.
The study compared moms’ self-reported depressive symptoms, such as loss of interest, fatigue, low energy and poor concentration, with their children’s Body Mass Index (BMI) at age five, as documented in their medical records. Mothers reported depressive symptoms 23.4 percent of the time, with those reporting moderate to severe depressive symptoms more likely to have an overweight or obese five-year-old child compared to mothers without depressive symptoms.
“We see a high prevalence of both depression and obesity in our practice and previous studies have shown a correlation,” said Rachel S. Gross, M.D., M.S., FAAP, attending pediatrician, CHAM, assistant professor of pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and lead author of the study. “We wanted to formally investigate the link and expand our current understanding of maternal depression, the mother–child relationship and associated outcomes.”
The study cohort included 401 mother-child pairs, of which 288 children had documented height/weight status at age five in their medical records. Researchers conducted a 30 minute interview with moms (primarily low-income, Hispanic and black mothers in the Bronx) whose children had received care at Montefiore’s Comprehensive Family Care Center, asking questions about mom’s mental health and their children’s eating habits including mealtime practices and feeding styles.
Data shows that mothers with depressive symptoms, who are likely to have less than a high school education and be unemployed, tend to display permissive parenting where they place fewer demands on their children. They are less responsive to their child’s needs, choosing parenting strategies for coping that require less cognitive effort and often neglect to set limits on the child’s behavior. They were more likely to have children who consumed more sweetened drinks, infrequently had family meals, more commonly ate at restaurants and had fewer regular breakfasts, than children with mothers without depressive symptoms. Depressed moms also were less likely to model healthy eating than non-depressed mothers.
Feeding practices, such as preparing daily breakfast, modeling healthy eating, and setting limits on the child’s diet, all require active maternal involvement, possibly explaining why these practices were less common among depressed mothers.
Researchers also investigated the activity levels and sleep patterns of all 401 children and found that children of mothers with depressive symptoms slept fewer hours per day and had less outdoor play time than those with mothers without depressive symptoms. Inadequate sleep has been linked to increased risk of child obesity and limited daily outdoor play time can also impact weight.
“Our findings suggest that maternal depression plays a role in childhood obesity and supports the need for educational resources for low-income families to encourage active engagement and positive feeding practices,” Dr. Gross said. “In order to reverse the national obesity trend, we believe that providing access to mental health specialists in the pediatric primary care setting may represent an opportunity for early childhood obesity prevention. This could have a long term impact on the obesity epidemic, especially among ethnic minority, low-income families, who are known to be at the highest risk for both early child obesity and maternal depression.”
Source: newswise.com
USDA Helps Make Nutrition Education Fun For Kids
Jul 01 2013Research shows that students with healthful eating patterns tend to do better in school, and it’s important that children begin learning about food and nutrition when they’re young.
In support of that goal, the Food and Nutrition Service recently released three free sets of curriculum educators can use to empower children to make healthful food choices and develop an awareness of how fruits and vegetables are grown.
The Great Garden Detective Adventure curriculum for 3rd and 4th grades includes 11 lessons, bulletin board materials, veggie dice, fruit and vegetable flash cards, and ten issues of Garden Detective News for parents/caregivers. Kids will discover what fruits and vegetables are sweetest, crunchiest, and juiciest through investigations and fun experiences connecting the school garden to the classroom, school cafeteria and home.
Dig In! is a supplemental unit for 5th and 6th grades with 10 inquiry-based lessons, a gardening guide, Dig In! at Home booklets for parents/caregivers, and six colorful posters encouraging fruit and vegetable choices.
Both Garden Detective and Dig In! lessons are linked to education standards in one or more of the following subjects: Science (National Academy of Sciences), English Language Arts (Common Core State Standards Initiative), Math (Common Core State Standards Initiative), and Health (American Cancer Society).
Anyone can access and download these materials from the Team Nutrition Web site. Schools participating in the Child Nutrition Programs (e.g., National School Lunch Program) can also order free print copies of materials. The Great Garden Detective Adventure will be available in print this month and Dig In! in August.
For younger children, FNS’ updated Grow It! Try It! Like It!: Preschool Fun with Fruits and Vegetables links activities at child care centers with resources for use at home. Since routine food choices for young children are determined by their families and adult care givers, these lessons encourage children to try new fruits and vegetables again and again. Children are taught to touch, smell, and taste new fruits and vegetables. The curriculum also integrates planting activities to help little ones connect the delicious food choices at the table with the different growing conditions and plants that produce fruits and vegetables.
The curriculum includes one introduction and resource book, six lesson books (three fruits and three vegetables-nutrition education and gardening activities), take home materials, a supplemental materials CD and The Cool Puppy Pup DVD. Child care centers and schools participating in the Child Nutrition Programs will be able to request free print copies later this year. All materials are currently available online.
Source: blogs.usda.gov
Promoting Proper Nutrition for Your Children
Jun 25 2013Proper nutrition is vital for helping your children to grow up healthy and strong, improving their concentration in the classroom, promoting proper brain function, and for creating an overall sense of physical and mental well-being.
There are several things that you can begin doing to improve the health of your child. Improving their eating habits now is likely to benefit them for life.
Encouraging your child to eat a wide variety of healthy food options is a giant step in the right direction. Raising picky eaters will make it more difficult to incorporate healthy foods into family meals. Children that grow up eating an eclectic mix of foods tend to maintain a varied diet throughout their life. Introduce new vegetables and other healthy ingredients often, experiment with ethnic foods, and, when they are old enough, have your child join in on the cooking process to develop a healthy, positive relationship to food.
Stay away from processed foods as much as possible. If you are a working mother or father, this may be easier said than done. However, getting into the habit of preparing homemade meals using fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, healthy oils, and other non-processed ingredients will become easier with time. Learn to make easy meals using wholesome ingredients. Avoid pre-packaged, frozen foods. Even canned soups are far less nutritious than freshly made soups. Processed foods, in general, tend to be loaded with preservatives, salt, saturated fats, and other unhealthy ingredients.
Keep soft drink and other junk foods out of the house. Soft drink, junk food, and other types of processed food items are common culprits of childhood obesity and the development of other health problems.
Make sure that you follow the same healthy eating guidelines that you set for your children. Setting an example that the entire family can follow will ensure consistently healthy eating habits that will improve the overall health of your children.
Source: entwellbeing.com.au
G8: How Good Nutrition is a Path to Economic Growth
Jun 19 2013Under-nutrition remains one of the defining features of many developing countries.
Even in high-growth markets such as India or Nigeria, as many as 40 per cent of children under the age of five grow up stunted from inadequate access to nutrients. Physically weaker, malnourished children are more prone to disease and more likely to die prematurely. A young child’s developing brain is also highly sensitive to nutrient intake, without which cognitive damage can become permanent by a child’s third birthday.
For generations, children in the developing world have grown up with their natural capacities limited by poor nutrition. Studies have shown that stunted children are 19 per cent less able to read than their peers and score 7 per cent lower on maths tests, and after school earn 20 per cent less and are 33 per cent less likely to escape poverty. In countries where there is large-scale malnutrition, the economic impacts are considerable.
If the relationship between educational attainment and economic productivity needs to be better understood, the best evidence points to a combined loss of GNP resulting from increased healthcare costs and reduced productivity of as much as 11 percent in Asia, Africa and Central America, where malnutrition is concentrated. The high growth we see today in these countries will be difficult to sustain with so much stranded human capital.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, chair of the G8, was therefore right to hold a high-level meeting on nutrition last weekend, alongside the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the government of Brazil. The $4.1-billion committed by attending governments, businesses, UN agencies, NGOs and charities to nutrition over seven years is perhaps less important than the first ever political agreement to prioritize nutrition as a policy area in its own right.
Among the many commitments that underpin the Global Nutrition for Growth Compact, two stand out. First, southern countries with the greatest burdens will increase their own investments. Second, governments and UN agencies will itemize nutrition spending as distinct from other categories, in particular health, education and food budgets. Differentiating nutrition spending from food will in particular help shift the popular belief that malnutrition is rooted in hunger. In Africa, this approach means economies will not escape the negative impacts of under-nutrition until mid-century.
High-burden countries should look to successes among the BRICs. By focusing on nutrition over many years, Brazil reduced its stunting rate among children from 37 per cent to 7 per cent. In Maharashtra, India, stunting fell 40 per cent in six years with similar efforts. As in other areas, direct knowledge transfer between southern countries is expected to increase without the involvement of traditional western allies.
Global corporations have an important role to play, not least because an enormous future work force and consumer base is at stake. New products, services and supply chains can be developed to support the most efficient means of tackling under-nutrition, typically community programs encouraging breastfeeding, hand-washing and nutritional supplements. Financial returns of $15 for every dollar spent, equivalent to road-building or irrigation, mean emerging markets are also increasingly equipped to finance their own programs.
These are relatively straightforward investments compared with addressing the world’s food supply infrastructure, or the minefield of sovereign taxation policies or company reporting. Malnourished children result in weaker economies and this means less trade for everyone. Breaking the cycle of deprivation would add $125-billion a year to the global economy by 2030. With a $10-billion price tag, it could be among the best money we have ever spent.
Source: theglobeandmail.com
Obesity Campaign Slammed for Digitally Fattening Kids
Jun 18 2013The face of a smiling, chubby little girl is appearing in ads all around California, but the little girl is actually much thinner and healthier.
The public service ad by First 5 California features an overweight girl drinking sugar with a straw, but the ad has been criticized because the child model’s weight was digitally altered to make her look fatter. “They are taking a perfectly healthy little girl and Photoshopping her to make her look unhealthily obese,” Adweek media reporter Emma Bazilian told ABC News. “It’s no surprise that people are outraged at that.” People like Marilyn Wann, author and an activist in the fat acceptance movement, took her outrage straight to the Internet, asking on her Facebook page, “How creepy is it to Photoshop this child in this manner? If public health messages lie like this, why should people trust them?”
The agency behind the ad says the goal is to start a dialogue about healthy eating. “This campaign serves to educate parents … on the realities and dangers of childhood obesity and get them to change their behaviors,” First 5 spokeswoman Lindsay VanLaningham said in a statement to ABC News. But it’s hardly the first childhood obesity ad to turn into a giant controversy.
Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta used real overweight kids in a campaign designed to attack Georgia’s childhood obesity epidemic, a tactic some people called downright mean. “If you use real kids, you’re going to be called fat-shamers,” reporter Bazilian said. “On the other hand, if you take this kid and you Photoshop them, it’s really a no-win situation. “But the latest ad, with its enhanced chubbiness and all, shows one thing is clear: People are talking about childhood obesity, which appears to be the point.
Source: ABC News
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BPA Exposure Linked to Childhood Obesity in Older Girls
Jun 13 2013It’s almost impossible to avoid BPA, a chemical that’s found just about everywhere. But, a new study cautions that young girls who are exposed to high levels may become obese.
“Our study suggests that BPA could be a potential new environmental obesogen, a chemical compound that can disrupt the normal development and balance of lipid metabolism, which can lead to obesity,” wrote the authors of the new study, published June 12 in PLoS One. “Worldwide exposure to BPA in the human population may be contributing to the worldwide obesity epidemic.”
Worldwide obesity has almost doubled since 1980, according to the World Health Organization. More than 1.4 billion adults and 40 million children are estimated to be overweight.
About two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are overweight or obese, in addition to about one-third of children and adolescents, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
BPA refers to bisphenol-A, an industrial chemical widely used in plastics and in the lining of aluminum cans to protect them from corrosion. It’s also found in other materials like cash register receipts.
BPA can disrupt the endocrine (hormones) system, and has been linked to health effects. Recent studies have linked BPA exposure to risk for asthma, kidney and heart disease, brain changes and thyroid problems. Animal studies have also found developmental risks.
The Food and Drug Administration says BPA “is safe at the very low levels that occur in some foods.” The agency said it is conducting additional studies to determine whether or not the chemical is safe as currently used in packaging and containers.
Because of concerns about the chemical’s effects on developing infants, the FDA formally banned BPA from baby bottles and sippy cups in July 2012. Many companies had already been phasing the chemical out of those children’s products.
The FDA rejected a petition for an outright ban of BPA in March 2012, citing a lack of compelling scientific evidence.
The new study involved more than 1,300 children in grades 4 through 12, who attended school in Shanghai. The team led by researcher Dr. De-Kun Li, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, Calif., took urine samples from students to determine BPA exposure levels. They also assessed the students for other risk factors for childhood obesity, including physical activity levels, their dietary habits and family history.
Children were divided into groups based on their BPA exposure levels. The researchers found girls between ages 9 and 12 with higher-than-average BPA levels were two times more likely to be overweight or obese. Girls of those ages with “extremely high” BPA levels were five times more likely to be in the top weight percentile for children.
For all the 9- to 12-year-old girls studied, 36 percent of those with a higher-than-average level of BPA in their urine were overweight or obese compared with 21 percent of those with a lower-than-average level of BPA.
The researchers, however, found no risk increases in girls older than 12, or boys of all ages.
“Girls in the midst of puberty may be more sensitive to the impacts of BPA on their energy balance and fat metabolism,” Dr. Li said in a statement.
Previous research has also linked BPA to obesity. A Sept. 2012 study found children with highest levels of BPA exposure — as measured in urine — had two-fold increased chance of being obese compared to kids with the lowest levels, regardless of how many calories they were taking in through their diets.
That study’s author, Dr. Leo Trasande, an associate professor in pediatrics, environmental medicine and health policy at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, told CBSNews.com Thursday that the new findings among Chinese school children corroborated what his team found.
“This study adds further concern about the recent FDA decision not to ban BPA from food uses,” said Trasande. “While unhealthy diet and poor physical activity are clearly the leading causes of the obesity epidemic, environmental chemicals are increasingly known to be independent contributors,” he added.
The American Chemistry Council, an industry group, disputed the “flawed study,” pointing out it failed to show a causal link between BPA and obesity.
“Attempts to link our national obesity problem to minute exposures to chemicals found in common, everyday products are a distraction from the real efforts underway to address this important national health issue,” the council said in a statement. “It is important to note that the FDA has said unequivocally that BPA is safe for its approved uses.”
Source:cbsnews.com
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