January 29, 2012, CBS news, Bill Whitaker

New federal guidelines aimed at making school lunches more nutritious were announced this past week. It may seem like a welcome trend, but in the Los Angeles school district, many students are calling healthier inedible.

CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports that everything inside one L.A. school cafeteria may be nutritious, but few students have anything good to say about L.A.’s health lunch menus.

“It tastes bad. It looks bad. It doesn’t even look like it’s real food,” said Baleria Franco, a student at Hollywood High School.

“The healthier it gets, the more disgusting it is,” said student Kevin Albrecht.

Some can barely describe what “it” is.

“I guess it’s like wheat pasta, but it doesn’t look like pasta,” Franco said.

“It’s called a barbecue ‘sandwich’, but it looks like an imitation Sloppy Joe,” said student Marina Sangit.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For the past ten years, the Los Angeles school district has been working to overhaul the menu. First to go: canned sodas. Then came the push for fresh fruits and vegetables, which today account for nineteen percent of total spending, up from just two percent in 2005.

Old standbys like corn dogs are out and turkey burgers are in – moves hailed by UCLA nutritionist Wendy Slusser.

“It is common sense to serve a child healthy food,” Slusser said. “The big question is why aren’t we all doing this. And it is because it is a shift, in where we were, and change takes time.”

READ MORE VIA Some call healthy L.A. school lunches inedible – CBS News.

January 28, 2012, Christina Hoag, AP, San Jose Mercury News

Students at Roosevelt High School have declared a food fight to win back peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Fed up with new, healthy cafeteria cuisine that features dishes like ancho chili chicken with yakosoba edamame and tortellini with butternut squash, they’re petitioning the school district to return old favorites like PB&J and calzones to the lunch lineup.

“We, the students of Roosevelt High School, would like to be served food that we can enjoy eating, rather than the ‘healthier’ food that we just throw away,” states the petition being circulated at the 3,200-student school located in a low income neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles.

School districts across the nation, including Los Angeles Unified, are revamping lunch trays to meet tighter federal nutrition standards designed to stem obesity, which affects about a third of children nationally. The U.S. Department of Agriculture this week announced new guidelines calling for milk to be skim or low-fat, grains to be whole, and double the amount of fruit and vegetables.

But as many parents can attest, getting kids to try new foods, especially ones that are good for them, can be a battle of wits and wills. Little kids tend to be less finicky than big kids, who look for that elusive factor of “coolness” in everything from fashion to French fries.

“Essentially, you’re competing with McDonald’s,” said Susan Levin, director of nutrition education for the
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Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, who works with school districts on their menus. “But it can be done.”

The emphasis on nutrition is a major swing from the 1990s when some schools featured brand-name fast-food burgers and pizza for lunch and sold potato chips, cookies and sodas in vending machines.
With national attention turning to climbing rates of childhood diabetes and other weight-related ailments, many districts have now outlawed everything from trans fats to deep-frying. Some have even dispensed with chocolate milk because of the added sugar.

But districts have found that getting kids to change eating habits isn’t easy, and involves both smarter menus and a dollop of marketing.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 650,000 meals a day, saw school lunch participation plunge by some 12 percent after unveiling the new dishes. Kids have gradually come around—participation is now down by only 5 percent as compared to last year.

Chicago Public Schools saw a 5 percent drop when it did a menu makeover last year.

High school students have some of the toughest palates to please.
READ MORE via LA schools struggle to make healthy meals popular – San Jose Mercury News.

January 28, 2012, Brittany Givens, Seascoastonline.com

U.S. Department of Agriculture Under Secretary Kevin W. Concannon said school lunch programs should be providing children with more fruits and vegetables.

“We have a serious problem of obesity in the country,” Concannon told a group of local nutrition and health services professionals Friday. “We really need to focus on activity and healthy foods.”

Concannon was the featured speaker in a roundtable discussion at Community Campus. The event was attended by representatives from programs such as St. Vincent’s, Southern New Hampshire Services and the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. Participants discussed ways in which schools could improve lunches and how the USDA has been able to help people in tough economical times.

This week, 101,000 schools across the country celebrated a nutrition week by improving the dietary value of school lunch programs.

Concannon discussed ways that the USDA plans to take these efforts further and shared reasons for the program’s success. He said that one of the USDA’s major goals is to improve the diets of Americans from birth.

Representatives from local nutrition organizations voiced concerns over the current situation in schools. Many were concerned with the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in schools and wanted to see less canned foods and sugar.

Other concerns included a need for more storage space for fruits and vegetables, as well as easier and cheaper ways to provide milk and meat.

Concannon also spoke about USDA’s efforts to help those who cannot afford to eat healthy.

“We’re living through a … tough time in the economy,” Concannon said. “I’ve been to food banks and pantries and I always hear, ‘I never thought I’d be here.’”

The USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has helped 46 million people, Concannon said.

via USDA official stresses need for nutrition in school food | SeacoastOnline.com.

January 25, 2012, Houston Chronicle

School lunches, long saddled with an unhealthy reputation, are getting a makeover.Instead of salt-doused fried foods, highly processed white bread and sugar-laden desserts, cafeteria trays will be carrying whole wheat pizza, leafy green and orange vegetables and fresh fruit.The changes, announced Wednesday by first lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, mark the first major nutritional adjustment to the $11 billion school meal program in 15 years.

Under the new guidelines, which were directed by the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, schools must limit calories, trans fat and sodium, while serving students a wider variety of fruit, vegetables and whole grains.The nutritional overhaul reflects both a societal shift toward a more health-conscious diet and a growing concern about childhood obesity, which affects 17 percent of the countrys children.”When we send our kids to school, we expect that they wont be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we try to keep them from eating at home,” Obama said in a statement.The updated regulations were first proposed a year ago, giving school districts the opportunity to make comments and revamp their menus.

After opposition by potato growers and food companies, Congress blocked proposed changes that would have limited starchy vegetables to two servings a week and required pizza makers to increase the amount of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable serving.

Local districts effortsThe new rules, which will affect 32 million children, will be phased in over the next three years.Many Houston-area school districts have already taken steps to raise nutritional standards, instituting changes that mirror many of the new USDA requirements.

Read more via School lunches get a healthy makeover – Houston Chronicle.

Feeding preschoolers smaller portions of the main dish at lunchtime means they’ll eat more fruit and vegetables on the side and fewer total calories, according to a new study.

Researchers said the finding may give parents one extra strategy to encourage youngsters to eat more greens, as childhood obesity rates continue rising and research suggests that kids lag well behind guidelines for fruit and veggie consumption.

With main courses, “you need to be careful and use the age-appropriate serving,” said Sara Sweitzer, a nutrition researcher from the University of Texas at Austin.

“If they fill up on the entree, obviously the fruit and the vegetable are the last to get eaten,” added Sweitzer, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

Parents can make sure they’re providing the right amount of food both by inspecting what’s left in the lunch box when kids come home, and by talking to their kids about how much they eat.

“Go ahead and ask your child, ‘Do you want a whole sandwich or do you want just half a sandwich?’” she advised.

READ MORE VIA: Smaller servings mean more balanced meals for kids: study – chicagotribune.com.

January 9, 2012, Blisstree.com, Deborah Dunham

As the battle to point the finger at someone for our nation’s childhood obesity epidemic continues, one top New York City Department of Health official now says that the free breakfast program in city schools is to blame. It’s what she says is causing poor kids to get fat, but in reality, she couldn’t be more wrong–or more insensitive.

Director of Community Epidemiology, Gretchen Van Wye said the in-class meals that these students receive each morning at certain urban schools is resulting in over 21% of the underprivileged kids eating two breakfasts.

According to a recent study that analyzed the free breakfast program for 2,289 third-, fourth- and fifth-graders in East and Central Harlem, North and Central Brooklyn, and the South Bronx, researchers compared kids who ate the free breakfasts and and found that about one in five were eating breakfast twice. When presenting these findings to her agency co-workers, Van Wye stated:

Special care should be taken to ensure that children are not inadvertently taking in excess calories by eating in multiple locations.

But in direct opposition to that, another health official told the New York Post:

We’d rather have kids be hungry than fat? Horrible! The evidence is so shaky. And the implications are terrible—kids going hungry.

While they both make valid points, it seems like they’re missing the main culprit of childhood obesity, which is the type of food, not necessarily the quantity.

The in-class breakfasts at these city schools are said to feature “tempting treats” such as cream cheese and bagels, string cheese and apple loaf. And, based on what people like Jamie Oliver have revealed in the past, we all know the unhealthy foods probably don’t stop there. Yes, the federal guidelines mandate that the meals be roughly 450 calories, but 450 calories of what? Because a breakfast with 450 calories of fresh fruit, low-sugar cereal and skim milk would likely not contribute to childhood obesity, even if a student ate it twice a day.

Instead of arguing about this and possibly putting a much-needed program in jeopardy, the health officials need to pay more attention to the quality of food served, versus the quantity these underprivileged kids are eating. After all, if they come from poor homes where food is lacking, how can anyone deny them a healthy breakfast? Or two?

via Not Solving Childhood Obesity: Health Officials Say Free School Breakfast Makes Poor Kids Fat.

December 21, 2011, Los Angeles Times, Shari Roan

Feeding young babies solid foods such as crackers, cereals and bread, which tend to be high in salt, may set them up for a lifelong preference for salt, researchers reported Tuesday.

The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggests that efforts to reduce salt intake among Americans should begin early in life.

It is even possible, the authors said, that infancy contains a “sensitivity window” in which exposure to certain foods and tastes programs the brain to desire them in the future.

Americans’ fondness for salt, a source of dismay for health experts, is well known. A 2010 report from the Institute of Medicine concluded that the average intake of 3,436 milligrams a day for Americans over age 2 is more than double what is recommended, and that new government standards are needed to reduce the salt content in processed and restaurant food.

But little is known about the biology behind our love affair with salt. Researchers don’t even know what receptors are involved in tasting it. And though babies are born with a clear preference for sweet foods and an absolute distaste for bitter foods, they appear indifferent to salt in the first few months of life, said Leslie Stein, the lead author of the study and a senior research associate at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

“When you give 2-month-old babies salt water, they have no facial expression,” Stein said. “This could mean that the baby doesn’t detect the salt or just doesn’t give a hoot about it.”

To get at the issue, Stein and her colleagues first gave 61 healthy 2-month-old infants a mild solution of salt water: Based on facial expressions and how much they drank, the authors concluded the infants indeed were indifferent to the taste.

READ MORE via Giving salty food to babies may create a lifelong preference – latimes.com.

December 14, 2011, Brittni Johnson, Winter Park/Maitland observer

For Marva Forbes and her family, dinner was coming home, hot oil in a pan and frying up some chicken.

“As a rule,” she said.

There was also lots of pizza, McDonald’s and chips and candy for snacks. Not much thought went behind planning meals for her family, which includes three of her children and two grandchildren.

“Our eating habits were: we just ate,” Forbes said.

That is until four years ago, when her 6-year-old grandson started going to Winter Park Day Nursery. The nursery, which offers free training from their chef on how to make healthy, affordable meals, taught Forbes and her grandchildren the wonders of eating healthy.

Adopting the Nemours program

Though the nursery has always had a healthy meal plan, a year ago they adopted a new program offered by the Nemours obesity prevention initiative. The initiative has already helped 11,000 Central Florida kids and more than 600 child-care providers. With a recent $50,000 grant from the Winter Park Health Foundation (WPHF), it will help 14 more providers in Winter Park, Maitland and Eatonville.

Preschools are struggling when it comes to teaching healthy habits, said Dr. Lloyd Werk, director of Nemours’ Florida Prevention Initiative.

“There’s a knowledge gap, and we can help fill it,” he said. “This is where we can make a difference.”

They hope to saturate the entire Winter Park area with their program.

Nemours will have volunteers and paid staff train the child-care providers on two programs: Nemours Healthy Habits for Life and the Nemours plan for a healthy lifestyle: 5-2-1 Almost None. Healthy Habits teaches preschool children about “sometimes” and “anytime” food, eating the colors of the rainbow and including movement in all play. Almost None focuses on more exercise, reducing TV and computer time, making nutrition interesting and limiting sugary drinks.

“We’re trying to build a culture of wellness,” Werk said. “Many of our lifelong habits are developed in this time period.”

WPHF President Patricia Maddox agreed and said this program will help expand their current efforts, which include teaching public school children healthy habits, to an even younger group.

“The earlier habits are engrained in our lives … the better chance we have to keep them,” Maddox said.

Changes to the nursery

Since implementing Nemours’ program, the Winter Park Day Nursery has most changed their movement policy. Now, they include movement at least two to three more times than they did before. There isn’t any sitting around and waiting to start activities there. Kids are encouraged to play a slow-motion game, copy the leader and act like animals. They hop and skip to their next activity. It’s all about integrating movement into parts of the day they never thought they would.

And it’s the kids’ favorite part of the day — moving and playing is natural for them, unlike sitting quietly, Nursery Director Ali DeMaria said.

Games to teach nutrition include learning “sometimes” and “anytime” foods. Pizza pops up, and the children crouch down for “sometimes,” she shows cereal with fruit so they hop up and down from the energy they would get from that “anytime” food.

Next, they roll dice to see what movement they’ll do and how many times they’ll do it. The children obviously love it, excitedly hopping around, dancing and wiggling.

DeMaria loves that the teachers have a new resource to teach children about nutrition, and the children are really grasping the concepts.

“They know more about what they’re given,” she said.

And while the nursery has always had healthy meals, chef Shirley Shankle has made the change from canned to fresh fruit. She exposes the children to vegetables every day, and they are encouraged to try new things. She likes making eating broccoli a game — dinosaurs eating trees. Parents tell her that their children know what they’re eating and request “anytime” foods. Shankle said she loves getting the kids to try new things, and, eventually, like them.

“I feel that this is their most impressionable age,” she said.

Changes at home

Forbes sees those habits growing stronger at home, though it wasn’t easy at first. Her children now ask for carrots instead of candy, she bakes everything and her microwave has gotten dusty. Her picky family eats asparagus, which Forbes never imagined in a million years. They spend lots of time walking and outside, and television and computer time is stopped at 30 minutes each from the ding of an egg timer. They feel healthy.

“It’s funny because I never thought I could,” she said. “Everything has changed.”
Healthy habits for preschool.

December 8, 2011, San Francisco Chronicle, Erin Allday

Santa Clara County’s ban on fast-food toys for kids has had no effect on the nutritional quality of the meals served there, but the restaurants are doing a better job of promoting the right food, or at least not promoting the junk, Stanford researchers say.

In a report published today, Stanford scientists found that Santa Clara County fast-food restaurants – unlike some of their peers in San Francisco, where restaurants got around a similar ban by charging a dime for toys – seem to have stopped promoting their fat- and salt-laden children’s meals with toys.

Parents can still buy the toys for a few dollars, but posters or other marketing materials in the stores have been stripped away. In one restaurant, a healthy children’s meal is now the only one that comes with a free toy.

“I was happy to see that the restaurants were taking steps in positive and meaningful directions,” said Jennifer Otten, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford’s Prevention Research Center and lead author of the study, which is published online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“They removed toy marketing posters from the doors, and the posters below the cash register at eye level for children,” she said. “At one particular restaurant, they removed signs of the toy altogether, so if you were a parent purchasing the children’s meal, you wouldn’t know a toy existed.”

The Santa Clara County ban, which took effect in August 2010, was the first in the country, and spurred similar legislation in San Francisco.

After San Francisco’s ordinance became law last Thursday, McDonald’s franchises started offering Happy Meal toys for just 10 cents – a move that irritated many local politicians and parents who complained the restaurants weren’t following the spirit of the law.

The Santa Clara ban so far seems to have gone off without a hitch. Notably, very few fast-food restaurants fell under the ordinance, because it only covers businesses in unincorporated parts of the county. The Stanford study, in fact, looked at only four restaurants that are affected by the ban.

4 months to comply

The study found that within four months of the ordinance taking effect, all the fast-food restaurants were in compliance. The restaurants were scored before and after the ban on the overall quality of their children’s menus – including not just the nutritional content, but how food is marketed – and simply removing the free toys and related promotional materials resulted in scores that were roughly three times higher.

Before the ban, only five of the 120 children’s meal combinations available on those menus met national nutritional standards, and that number didn’t change after the ban.

Supervisor Ken Yeager, who introduced the Santa Clara toy ordinance, said he hadn’t really expected the restaurants to improve their menus overnight. The fact that parents are aware of the toy ban, and perhaps questioning the nutritional quality of the meals they buy their kids, is good enough for now, he said.

“We’re not trying to come down with a heavy stick on the fast-food industry,” Yeager said. “If these type of ordinances bring attention to the issue and apply pressure to either do less advertising directly to kids, or change their meals, then it’s all for the good.”

Next: Eating habits

Still, it’s too soon to say whether the ordinance – either in Santa Clara County or San Francisco – has actually improved children’s eating habits.

Otten, the study’s lead author, surveyed roughly 900 fast-food customers both before and after the Santa Clara County ban became law, asking them what they had ordered for themselves and their children. She plans to release results from that survey early next year, along with results of a similar survey in San Francisco.

Public health and nutrition experts said they aren’t expecting miracles from those customer surveys. Toy bans may prove to be a great first step toward steering children and their parents away from greasy tacos and French fries, said Pat Crawford, co-director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Weight and Health.

“But wouldn’t it be great if you asked for the children’s meal, and it immediately defaulted to fruit and vegetables and milk? And a whole wheat bun?” she said. “We’re moving in that direction, but those of us who are so concerned about the health of children want to see it move faster.”

National nutrition guidelines

A nutritious children’s meal includes the following:

Calories: No more than 485 for the whole meal, and no more than 200 for a single item.

Sugar: Less than 10 percent of calories from sweeteners.

Sodium: Maximum 600 mg per meal and 480 mg for an item.

Fat: Less than 35 percent of total calories from fat; less than 10 percent from saturated fat.

Beverages: No drinks with caffeine or added sweeteners.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/07/BAJR1M9LUC.DTL#ixzz1fw5uYhCT

Fast-food toy ban no aid to nutrition, study says.

Parents have good reason to worry about the sugar content of children’s breakfast cereals, according to an Environmental Working Group review of 84 popular brands.

Kellogg’s Honey Smacks, at nearly 56 percent sugar by weight, leads the list of the 10 worst children’s cereals, according to EWG’s analysis. In fact, a one-cup serving of the brand packs more sugar than a Hostess Twinkie, and one cup of any of the 44 other children’s cereals has more sugar than three Chips Ahoy! cookies.

In response to the exploding childhood obesity epidemic and aggressive food company advertising pitches to kids, Congress formed the federal Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children to propose standards to Congress to curb marketing of kids’ foods with too much sugar, salt and fat.

But EWG has found that only one in four children’s cereals meets the government panel’s voluntary proposed guidelines, which recommend no more than 26 percent added sugar by weight. EWG has been calling for an even lower cap on the maximum amount of sugar in children’s cereals.

“When I went to medical school in the 1960s, the consensus view was sugar provided ‘empty calories’ devoid of vitamins, minerals or fiber,” said health expert Dr. Andrew Weil. “Aside from that, it was not deemed harmful. But 50 years of nutrition research has confirmed that sugar is actually the single most health-destructive component of the standard American diet. The fact that a children’s breakfast cereal is 56 percent sugar by weight – and many others are not far behind – should cause national outrage.”

“Cereal companies have spent fortunes on convincing parents that a kid’s breakfast means cereal, and that sugary cereals are fun, benign, and all kids will eat,” said noted NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle. “The cereals on the EWG highest-sugar list are among the most profitable for their makers, who back up their investment with advertising budgets of $20 million a year or more. No public health agency has anywhere near the education budget equivalent to that spent on a single cereal. Kids should not be eating sugar for breakfast. They should be eating real food.”

“As a mom of two, I was stunned to discover just how much sugar comes in a box of children’s cereal,” said Jane Houlihan, EWG’s Senior Vice President of Research. “The bottom line: most parents would never serve dessert for breakfast, but many children’s cereals have just as much sugar, or more.”

Studies suggest that children who eat breakfasts that are high in sugar have more problems at school. They become more frustrated and have a harder time working independently than kids who eat lower-sugar breakfasts. By lunchtime they have less energy, are hungrier, show attention deficits and make more mistakes on their work.

About one in five American children is obese, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has reported that childhood obesity has tripled over the past 30 years.

“It has been said that exploding rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in today’s children will lead them to be the first in American history to have shorter lifespans than their parents,” Weil said. “That tragedy strikes me as a real possibility unless parents make some dramatic changes in their children’s lives.”

“Nearly 20 percent of our children and one-third of adults in this country are obese. Our children face a future of declining health, and may be the first generation to have a shorter lifespan than their parents. We must provide consumers with the information they need to make healthier choices and prevent misleading claims about the nutritional contents of food,” said Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT). “Cereal is a prime example of this—we know that children do better in school if they have breakfast. But we also know that the type of breakfast matters. And yet, as the Environment Working Group’s report shows, many children’s cereals have sugar content levels that are above 40 percent by weight. Our children deserve better, and it is critical that we take action to combat America’s obesity epidemic.” Congresswoman DeLauro serves on the appropriations subcommittee responsible for the Food and Drug Administration and agriculture, where she oversees drug and food safety.

10 Worst Children’s Cereals
Based on percent sugar by weight

1.) Kellogg’s Honey Smacks 55.6%

2.) Post Golden Crisp 51.9%

3.)Kellogg’s Froot Loops Marshmallow 48.3%

4.) Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch’s OOPS! All Berries 46.9%

5.)Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch Original 44.4%

6.) Quaker Oats Oh!s 44.4%

7.) Kellogg’s Smorz 43.3%

8.)Kellogg’s Apple Jacks 42.9%

9.) Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries 42.3%

10.) Kellogg’s Froot Loops Original 41.4%

Some cereals are better than others. Nutrition expert Marion Nestle recommends:

1. Cereals with a short ingredient list (added vitamins and minerals are okay).
2. Cereals high in fiber.
3. Cereals with little or no added sugars (added sugars are ingredients such as honey, molasses, fruit juice concentrate, brown sugar, corn sweetener, sucrose, lactose, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup and malt syrup).

Among the best simple-to-prepare breakfasts for children are fresh fruit and high-fiber, lower-sugar cereals. Better yet, pair fruit with homemade oatmeal.

Top 10 Cereals that will Rot Your Kids Teeth Out.