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The Childhood Obesity Epidemic
in America: Part I
by Antoinette Bruno and Amy Tarr
Obesity is on the rise among the
American population. According to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC), 64 percent of adults in America are obese
or overweight. As if it is not enough that the problem is rampant
among adults, we are condemning our children to a future of morbid
obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a host of other medical conditions.
A study published this past June showed that 40 percent of Arkansas
public-school students from kindergarten through high school were
overweight or at risk of becoming too heavy. And, according to a
study published in the September 2004 edition of the American Journal
of Public Health, more than 40 percent of New York City public-school
students are overweight, and nearly one quarter are obese. Childhood
obesity is a national issue, affecting children in rural, suburban,
and inner-city communities. With as much as half of a child’s
weekly meals provided by schools today, an overhaul of the national
school nutrition program is a good place to start addressing the
problem - and long overdue.
Over the past thirty years, the
nutritional makeup of processed food in America has changed as a
result of numerous economic, political and social factors. Efforts
to bring down the cost of food in the early to mid ‘70s led
to huge corn surpluses among American farmers, resulting in the
creation of new food products and the development of high fructose
corn syrup (HFCS), an inexpensive sweetener. As US foreign trade
policy loosened, palm oil imported from Malaysia was touted by American
manufacturers as a stable, tasty and economical fat that could extend
the shelf life of baked goods, regardless of its high saturated
fat content. High fructose corn syrup found its way into Coke and
Pepsi, as well as frozen foods and boxed macaroni and cheese. And
palm oil became McDonald’s preferred oil for cooking French
fries. The availability of cheap and easy food appealed to the changing
American family in which either both parents worked or only one
parent was raising the family.
 The
biggest factor affecting schools’ cafeteria offerings is the
U.S. Department of Agriculture's commodities program, which supplies
large quantities of ingredients at bargain prices to schools across
the country. The commodities program allows agribusiness to make
money from surplus products that are not necessarily in the best
health interest of children. The National School Lunch Program,
which began serving meals in 1946, today impacts more than 28 million
students a day. Schools get a major portion of food from the commodities
program. Every year, the USDA buys hundreds of millions of pounds
of excess meat and animal products to boost falling prices. These
high-fat, high-cholesterol products are then distributed at low
cost to school dining programs. Despite the general awareness that
a diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables helps prevent obesity,
heart disease and cancer, in 2001, the USDA spent $350 million on
high-fat beef and cheese for schools while it spent $161 million
on fruits and vegetables. The commodities program may be supporting
the agricultural community, but our kids are paying the price.[1]
“We are commodifying foods
that we don’t really need, and all the leftover food goes
into school lunch. Propping up agriculture has nothing to do with
safe, whole foods,” says Ann Cooper, former Executive Chef
and Director of Wellness and Nutrition of The Ross School in East
Hampton, New York. “We need to take school nutrition out of
the U.S. Department of Agriculture and put it into Health and Human
Services, where it belongs.”
Major cutbacks in state public
school funding, the result of caps on property taxes in the late
‘70s and ‘80s, have also contributed to unhealthy school
lunch programs. The cafeterias of some of the most overcrowded schools
have resorted to outsourcing meals and reheating them before serving
them to students, ceding control of the nutritional content of those
meals. The same cutbacks have drastically reduced physical education
programs in public schools throughout the country. It may seem obvious
that an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, where TV and video games
are the leisure activities of choice, contributes significantly
to the overweight and obesity problem, but the knowledge gap about
the health benefits of exercise continues to grow.[2]
Not to be forgotten are the fast
food chains, with their marketing campaigns targeting young children
and teenagers. Since the ‘90s, fast food chains, led by Pizza
Hut, have infiltrated school campuses, selling their branded products
outside of the federally regulated cafeteria, by setting up carts
on the lawn or snack bars inside the school. By 1999, 95% of 345
California high schools surveyed were offering branded fast foods
for lunch. The soft drink industry has also tapped into schools
as a market for their products, offering “pouring contracts.”
For agreeing to exclusively sell, Coke, for example, schools can
receive commissions and a yearly bonus – sometimes as much
as $100,000.[3]
While the curriculum in schools
may include nutrition lessons on balanced, healthy eating habits,
those lessons are being negated by the practices of school cafeterias,
and even further negated by parents at home. Many children aren’t
getting any guidance from parents because adults lack awareness
about healthy eating habits themselves. And in an era where parents
spend so little time with their children, it’s easier for
them to bring their kids to a fast food restaurant rather than cook
a healthy, balanced meal and have to argue with the kids to get
them to eat it.
 Unfortunately
research shows that overweight and obesity is a socioeconomic issue.
People of lower incomes rely more heavily on cheap fast food and
have limited resources for their children to participate in safe,
healthy exercise activities. Struggling parents also rely on free
breakfast and lunch programs to feed their children in the summer
months. Activists like Alice Waters refuse to look at this health
problem from a paradigm of poverty, believing that all children
are deserving of fresh, healthy, and good-tasting food. “There’s
not a single good thing to eat in the whole school. The fact is
it simply costs more to serve real food,” she says. Waters
also expresses concerns that children in America lack any awareness
of where their food comes from. Nor do many kids know how to dine
properly using a knife and fork, while participating in intelligent
conversation with their peers. “We’re simultaneously
killing our kids, our environment and our culture.”
Waters’ comment is not an
exaggeration - death is the ultimate result of obesity. Risk of
death increases by 2% for each pound of excess weight for people
ages 50 to 62 and 1% per excess pound for ages 30-49.[4]
The more overweight our children are, the more likely they will
develop illnesses and die young.
Fixing the public school cafeteria
program is going to cost money. But isn’t it better to spend
money on healthy and safe food for our kids, instead of spending
the money on fixing the problems associated with an overweight and
obese population? Research by MetLife, the CDC, and the American
College of Cardiology indicates that the three key conditions linked
to obesity — diabetes, arthritis, and heart disease —
cost employers more than $220 billion annually in medical care and
lost productivity.[5] What
if that money had gone to funding school lunch programs and developing
nutrition curriculum?
Alice Waters wants to take it
a step further, advocating to make lunch an academic subject, where
food is integrated into the curriculum. Her vision for the future
may at first seem bold, but it makes sense. “Take lunch out
of maintenance and put in it in academia. Teach [children] all of
the instruments of ecology and relation to culture. Develop curriculum
that integrates food into all of the academic subjects. They get
credit for being in the kitchen and for taking nutrition. It becomes
something that has legitimacy. Every kid needs to learn how to cook
for himself, needs to learn how to cultivate a garden, plant seeds,
learn about sustainability, be taken to a garden, be able to put
his hands in the earth. Because they’re so disconnected.”
The eating habits that we instill
in our children now will carry over into their adult lives. If we
repeatedly expose our kids to high-fat, high-sugar foods, our children
will develop an affinity for those kinds of foods, and be susceptible
to becoming overweight or obese in their adulthood. But if we teach
our children to eat healthy, delicious, balanced foods, we can create
positive eating habits and a healthier adult population in America.
Vocal individuals like Alice Waters
and Ann Cooper are being heard, but they aren’t being taken
seriously enough. It’s time for all of the stakeholders -
the foodservice industry, school administrators, parents and teachers,
hospitals, insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and
the government - to step up to the plate and accept some of the
financial and social responsibility for this overwhelming issue.
As adults, we are responsible for the food choices we make for ourselves,
but our children, the most vulnerable members of our society, cannot
choose. And so it is our duty to make healthy food choices for them.
This is the first article
in a series of features on the obesity epidemic. Stay tuned for
more in the coming weeks on StarChefs.com
Click
here to share your thoughts on the childhood obesity epidemic.
1
Lanou, Amy Joy, and Sullivan, Patrick, “School Lunches a Dumping
Ground for Agribusiness,” www.reclaimingdemocracy.org. (First
published by www.TomPaine.com, 2003.)
2
Critser, Greg, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People
in the World, Houghton Mifflin, 2003, p 71.
3
Ibid., pp 47-48.
4
Ibid., p 99.
5
Leopold, Ronald, MD, MBA, MPH, “Reining in the Rising Cost
of Obesity,” Business and Health, August 2004:22.
Additional Resources:
American Dietetic Association, “Position of the American Dietetic
Association: Dietary Guidance for Healthy Children Ages 2 to 11
Years,”
Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2004.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Physical
Activity and Good Nutrition: Essential Elements to Prevent Chronic
Diseases and Obesity,” 2004.
US Department of Health and Human Services, “Surgeon General’s
Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity,”
2001.
http://www.chefann.com
http://www.ediblegarden.org
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