Nutrition education ineffective

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 scientific studies examining 57 such programs found mostly failure. Just four showed any real success in changing the way kids eat — or any promise as weapons against 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 results have been disappointing, to say the least:
• 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.

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. The medical consequences of obesity in the U.S. — diabetes, high blood pressure, even orthopedic problems — cost an estimated $100 billion a year. Kentucky cardiologist Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., nominated as the next surgeon general, says fighting childhood obesity is his top priority. The challenges to changing the way children eat are as numerous as the factors that have prompted the obesity epidemic in the first place:

Parents.
Experts agree that although most funding targets schools, parents have the greatest influence, even a biological influence, over what their children will eat. When children slim down, it's because "their families get religion about this and figure out what needs to happen. If the mother is eating Cheetos and white bread, the fetus will be born with those taste buds. If the mother is eating carrots and oatmeal the child will be born with those taste buds," said Dr. Robert Trevino, at the Social and Health Research Center in San Antonio, Texas. Most kids learn what tastes good and what tastes nasty by their 10th birthdays."If we don't reach a child before they get to puberty, it's going to be very tough, very difficult, to change their eating behavior," said Trevino.

Poverty.
Poorer kids are especially at risk, because unhealthy food is cheaper and more easily available than healthy food. Parents are often working, leaving children unsupervised to get their own snacks. Low-income neighborhoods have fewer good supermarkets with fresh produce. Parks often aren't safe and sports teams cost money.

Advertising.
Children between 8 and 12 see an average of 21 television ads each day for candy, snacks, cereal and fast food — more than 7,600 a year, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study. Not one of the 8,854 ads reviewed promoted fruits or vegetables. There was one ad for healthy foods for every 50 for other foods. Children may be the best sources to explain why lessons about nutrition don't sink in.

The USDA doesn't have the resources to undertake "long term, controlled, medical modeled studies" necessary to determine the impact of its programs. Doctors like Tom Robinson, who directs the Center for Healthy Weight at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University, said those studies aren't needed. The research has already shown they don't work. "I think the money could be better spent on programs that are more behaviorally oriented, as opposed to those that are educationally oriented, or studies that just describe the problem over and over again," he said. There may be pieces of solutions found in limited studies currently being tested around the country. In some situations, obese and overweight children can lose weight and get healthy through rigorous hospital and clinic-based interventions that involve regular check-ins, family involvement, scheduled exercise and nutrition education. School programs that increase physical activity are also more likely to have an impact than nutrition education.

Courtesy of AP

Steve - this is a sobering, yet refreshing study. It shows that what exists is not working.

We were so happy they addressed parental responsibility for being the overriding factor in nutrition education. We could throw billions of dollars per year for school nutrition education, but it will not make an ounce of difference without parental change. Schools have to involve parents in their nutrition education programs, because many need it more than the children!