This is a new occasional feature where I'll highlight
studies that seem to confirm the obvious.
In Philadelphia, land of the cheese steak, five elementary
schools participated in a program where candy and soda were eliminated from the
vending machines, and kids were rewarded with raffle tickets for "making
healthy food choices." And guess what? If kids eat less sugary snacks,
they gain less weight. Astonishing stuff, this.
One interesting finding was that kids spend $2 per day on
snacks that add up to about 600 calories, presumably of the junk food kind.
Those things come from the corner store, where there may not be a lot of
options besides Drake's cakes. The group that conducted the study, The Food
Trust, says that they are "working with" local shops to get them to
stock more fruit, vegetables and water. Because storeowners love it when people
who aren't their customers tell them what to sell.
The language used in the story is very interesting when you
consider the climate of weight loss. The writer refers to
"kids who got fat" and then switches to "obese" and
"overweight". This doesn't give you much information. If a kid is 2
or 3 pounds overweight, is that fat? When does overweight become obese? (I
personally prefer the term "fatty-boombalatty", but that's just me.)
Getting kids to eat healthy is important, and it certainly
would help if the food offered in school were better for you. My school lunch
choices were pizza, hamburger, or cheeseburger, all of which came with French
fries, or the disturbing looking hot lunch of the day. The fries were -- and
this is not a joke -- "vitamin C enriched," which probably was meant
to meet some sort of mandate. A study like this at least calls attention to the
issue, which is great, but the conclusions aren't exactly earth shaking.
image: Yahoo.com
