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.

December 2, 2011, Shreveport Times

Rachel Boogaerts is dispensing a dose of nutrition advice disguised as play to youngsters in Shreveport.

A graduate student at Louisiana Tech University, Boogaerts plans to become a dietitian. She developed a game based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s MyPlate meal guidelines with help from Deborah Harris, director of the Caddo Parish school system’s child nutrition program. She tested the activity with members of the Physical Activity and Wellness Club at Fairfield Elementary Magnet School in Shreveport.

Teams of Fairfield students raced to build the healthiest plate, choosing photos of foods from every group. Boogaerts even threw in a couple of ringers — candy and donuts — to test the students’ nutritional savvy.

Fifth-grader Eric Harper gave the game a thumbs-up, saying it helped him learn more about combination foods. While he and classmates know about the food groups and basic nutrition, he would like Boogaerts to include more information about serving sizes.

Eric, 10, has a weakness for pizza but said he only eats it occasionally. His other favorites are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and raw carrots. His lunches, packed by his mom, consist of yogurt, an apple and a sandwich.

Encouraged by his mom, he’s expanding his culinary horizons.

“I like sushi. My mom wanted me to try it really bad, so I did,” Eric said.

That adventurous streak isn’t common among Eric’s peers, Boogaerts said.

“In the child nutrition department, it’s about finding foods the kids will eat,” she said. “They’re having a hard time with the new whole grain bread. The kids think it’s burnt. They’re having a hard time with the sweet potato fries too.”

She hopes the MyPlate game will at least make children more aware of choices, even if they don’t change their eating habits immediately.

“All health decisions are important, but food is such a major part of it, and people don’t realize that,” Boogaerts said. “Encouraging healthy habits this early in life is our goal. It’s baby steps. It’s about kind of making it cool to eat healthier foods.”

via Turning nutrition education into a game | Shreveporttimes | shreveporttimes.com.

CNN Madison Park, November 30, 2011

Goodbye, free plastic toys inside Happy Meals — at least in one major California city.

A new San Francisco law goes into effect on Thursday that prevents fast-food restaurants from giving away trinkets, action figures and other toys in their kid’s meals unless their food meets nutritional requirements.

And McDonald’s kid’s meals do not. The meals have to be less than 600 calories and contain fruits (a half-cup) and vegetables (3/4 of a cup). They must have less than 35% of the total calories coming from fat, less than 640 milligrams of sodium and less than 0.5 milligrams of trans fat.

The current Happy Meal consisting of a hamburger, kid’s-size fries and a cola would meet the calorie, calories from fat, sodium and trans fat requirements under the San Francisco law. It would contain 500 calories, 125 calories from fat and 600 milligrams of sodium.
But it would not meet the fruit and vegetable quota. The pickle and onion on the hamburger does not come near the required ¾ cup of vegetables. The French fries do not count as a vegetable, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

The new law will affect about 50 fast-food restaurants in San Francisco such as Burger King, Carl’s Jr. and Subway.
“Our efforts are geared towards addressing childhood obesity epidemic,” said San Francisco City and County Supervisor Eric Mar, who proposed the ordinance.

About one-third of children in the United States are either overweight or obese, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health advocates have long accused fast-food restaurants of enticing children to eat fast-food meals high in fat and sodium by using toys tied to characters in new movies.
But it has had a greater impact beyond the city, Mar said.
“We inspired other local cities, parent activists and health organizers to take up the issue too,” he said. “We started a national dialogue in San Francisco. It has become a national issue.”

Similar initiatives have been proposed in New York in an effort to curb childhood obesity. And Santa Clara County initially passed the ban early last year.

Starting Thursday, parents who order Happy Meals at the 19 McDonald’s locations in San Francisco will have to request the toy and pay 10 cents. That amount will be donated to the Ronald McDonald House of San Francisco.

McDonald’s said in a statement: “While we will fully comply with this law, we also have a responsibility to give our customers what they want.

“Parents have told us they’d still like the option of purchasing a toy separately for their child when they buy them a Happy Meal or Mighty Kids Meal.”

The announcement that the money would go to charity was met by skepticism by Corporate Accountability International, a corporate watchdog group.

“As McDonald’s long has, it is again using a charity that helps children get well to defend a practice that contributes to a range of diet-related conditions like diabetes. Currently McDonald’s uses its contributions to the charity to defend the hundreds of millions it spends marketing its junk food brand to kids each year,” according to the group’s statement.

Mar said he met with several franchise owners in the city regarding the ordinance. Despite initial opposition to the law last year, he said that there’s growing awareness that having healthy options is good business practice.

Earlier this year, hamburger chain Jack-in-the-Box announced it would discontinue kids’ toys in their meals for children.
Also this summer, McDonald’s announced that it would revamp its iconic Happy Meal to contain healthier options.

The meals will carry apple slices, reduced portion of French fries and a choice of beverage, including new fat-free chocolate milk and 1% low-fat white milk, instead of defaulting to soda. The changes started in September and will spread nationwide by the end of March 2012.
However, the new version of the Happy Meal still does not meet the requirements of the San Francisco law.

Although the San Francisco law has been criticized as legislating health and nutrition, Mar said the responsibility ultimately falls on the parents. But, fast-food restaurants play a role and “benefit from the pester power of the kids of young ages,” he said.

“It’s our job as a local legislator to protect public health,” he said. “Nothing is more important than children’s health.”

He said the momentum for this law came from pediatricians and mainly parents who live in the lowest income neighborhoods. “They were the main voices of our campaign,” he said.

The long-term goal is to move children’s meals toward lower fat, sodium and calories, Mar said.
Happy Meal toys no longer free in San Francisco – CNN.com.

September 29, 2011, Yahoo News

Despite some evidence that taking fish oil pills during pregnancy can help children’s brain development, a new study suggests that the supplements make no difference in measures of intellect when the kids are six years old.

The findings support the results of an earlier Norwegian study that also found no differences in IQ among seven-year-olds whose mothers did or did not take fish oil supplements while pregnant and breastfeeding.

Fatty acids, such as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), that are found in fish and other foods are considered to be important for the developing fetus.

The question, however, has been whether adding more of these fats to mothers’ diets through supplements will further benefit the baby.

In the current experiment, researchers asked expectant mothers during the second half of their pregnancies to take fish oil, fish oil plus a folate supplement, folate alone or a pill that did not contain any supplements.

Nearly seven years later, the team, led by Dr. Cristina Campoy at the University of Granada in Spain, gave intelligence tests to 154 children from this group.

The kids performed similarly on the tests, regardless of what type of pill their mothers had taken during pregnancy.

The results, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, do not mean that fatty acids like DHA are not important.

In fact, the researchers found that the children of women who had high levels of DHA in their red blood cells around the time they gave birth scored above average on the intelligence tests at age six.

These mothers, however, were not necessarily given fish oil supplements. Rather, the result could reflect mothers’ intake of DHA from various sources over a longer period of time, and might mean that long term fatty acid intake “is more beneficial than receiving supplementation alone during pregnancy,” the authors wrote in their study.

A recent study in Australia also found that DHA supplements did not help the visual development of babies (see Reuters Health story of May 26, 2011).

The current study did not measure the diets of the children, something that could have influenced the results, said Dr. Ingrid Helland at Oslo University Hospital, who led the earlier Norwegian research.

“It might be that subtle beneficial effects of (prenatal fish oil) supplementation are being overshadowed by other factors (genetics, social stimulation, nutrition etc),” Helland wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

She is not totally giving up on the idea that taking fish oil might be beneficial.

“If a friend would ask me if she should take supplements or not, I would recommend supplementation, but emphasize that we still do not have any scientific proof that it benefits the child,” said Helland.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/nW3xdX American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, online August 17, 2011.

via Fish oil pills don’t improve kids’ braininess.

With the spotlight on childhood obesity, schools across the country are looking for ways to get kids to eat more fruits and vegetables. In New York, the Department of Health decided to do some research. How much, it wondered, would a school need to cut its prices for apples, oranges and bananas to increase sales by 5 percent over a year?
Brian Wansink was called in to play detective. But the director of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab soon discovered he had been hired to answer the wrong question. Price wasn’t the problem. It was the presentation.

In the school cafeterias Wansink surveyed, whole fruits were displayed in steel bins in dimly lighted areas of the lunch line. Wansink went to discount store T.J. Maxx and bought a cheap wire fruit rack. He found an extra desk lamp, which he used to shine on the fruit. “Sales of fruit in one school went up 54 percent. Not in a semester: by the end of the second week,” Wansink said. “It would have gone up faster, but they kept running out of fruit.”

The debate about how to fix school lunch has, until now, focused largely on what is sold in schools: Public health advocates argue that french fries and cookies should be banned, and some schools have done just that. Food manufacturers and some parents retort that such deprivation will only encourage students to get their fix elsewhere. Now, researchers such as Wansink are turning their attention to how school food is sold and to whether marketing and incentives can help fight obesity, often at little or no cost.

Federal regulators, charged with improving the school lunch program on a tight budget, are paying attention. Cass Sunstein, a leading behavioral economist and a co-author of the seminal text “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” is the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture held a two-day conference on how behavioral economics can improve federal food policy. This fall, the agency will award $2 million to fund more research in the field.

The attractions are clear. Such solutions — sometimes called “nudges” — can be low-cost. They also are flexible. Although most people think of school lunch as a monolithic federal program, lunchrooms across the more than 14,000 U.S. school districts vary, and most decisions about what and how students eat are made locally. Most important, implementing change doesn’t require a vote in Congress. Though Michelle Obama has made childhood obesity her signature issue, legislation that would increase funding for school lunch and boost nutrition standards remains stalled.

“These ideas offer a way to be more effective with the meals we are already serving,” said Joanne Guthrie, the USDA’s assistant deputy director for nutrition in food assistance and nutrition research. “There’s a lot of talk about putting more whole grains and dark green vegetables in the lunchroom. But it may not be the best way to improve health unless we are sure the kids will eat them.”

Wansink is a pioneer of food behavioral research. (His first book, “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” demonstrated how simple acts, such as eating from a smaller plate, can help reduce food consumption.) Wansink became interested in school food after a two-year stint in Washington working at the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. The controlled environment of school cafeterias and their often-perverse incentives — at a time when one-third of American children are overweight or obese, USDA guidelines continue to mandate calorie minimums but not maximums — is a perfect research laboratory.

Take payment options. Most schools accept debit cards or PIN numbers, which help the lines move faster and make it impossible to tell which students receive a free or reduced-price lunch. In a yet-unpublished study, Wansink and Cornell lab co-director David Just found that students who pay with debit cards are more likely to buy desserts and junk food, while those who pay cash tend to choose milk, water, fruits and vegetables. The decision comes down to this: Would the student rather have a brownie or use the money later to buy music or movie tickets? “It introduces what we call a ‘pause point’ in what would otherwise be a mindless transaction,” Wansink said.

Wansink does not advocate an all-cash system. Instead, he says one solution might be to limit what students can buy with their debit cards. Parents might choose to follow recommendations, or they could set specific standards themselves: no peanuts, say, for a child with an allergy, or no desserts, period. Children who still want to buy a forbidden product would have to fork over the money themselves. Wansink calls the idea “cash for cookies.”

Researchers are also interested in the idea of incentives, many of them gobsmackingly simple. At a New York middle school, Wansink found that when the salad bar was moved to a prominent location near the cashiers, sales increased by between 200 and 300 percent.

David Just of Cornell and Joseph Price, a behavioral economist at Brigham Young University, offered rewards to students at 15 elementary schools in Utah who bought and ate fruit or vegetables with lunch. Sales jumped 40 percent where students were offered 25 cents and 22 percent where they were offered a nickel. When the reward was a raffle, delaying gratification, the impact was less dramatic.

Verbal prompts also have been found to be effective. In 2007, Marlene Schwartz, the deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University, created a study in which cafeteria workers at one school asked each student whether they would like to add fruit or fruit juice to their lunch. Ninety percent of students took the fruit or juice, and 70 percent consumed it. In the school with no verbal prompting, 60 percent of students took fruit or juice, and 40 percent consumed it.

Schwartz says she is confident that nudges can affect eating habits. But she also wants school food to become more healthful across the board. “It’s a very American thing to believe that everyone is entitled to as much choice as possible,” she said. “In reality, that’s not the best way to design a school lunch program. All the research suggests that people eat what’s in front of them, and if it’s not there, we don’t miss it.”

Ann Cooper, who calls herself the Renegade Lunch Lady and is the nutrition director for the Boulder Valley, Colo., public schools, puts it more bluntly: “I have never heard of a kid dying because they couldn’t have their chocolate milk.”

Still other researchers, such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Paul Rozin, say the problem is not what foods people consume but how much of them. Eaters have what he calls “unit bias,” which means they are inclined to eat one of something, whether it’s a package of chips, a cookie or a soda. If the package is smaller, they will eat that and be happy. They will do the same when the serving is much bigger. Schools, Rozin suggests, might order smaller packages of chips and cookies.

“We should just change the world of eating by making it a little more work to get the calorie-dense foods,” Rozin said.

Wansink agrees that such changes could help. But he’s far more fascinated by low-cost, easy tweaks at individual schools. This week, the Cornell lab is holding a training session on such initiatives for teachers, food service directors and parents from across the country. “Every lunchroom is unique,” he said. “Maybe the salad bar doesn’t have wheels. Or maybe they already have got rid of the chocolate milk. The goal is to give people the tools to innovate.”

Small changes steer kids toward smarter school lunch choices.

WASHINGTON — Maybe it should have just stuck with Snap, Crackle and Pop.

The Kellogg Company has agreed to advertising restrictions to resolve an investigation into its claims about the health benefits of its Rice Krispies cereal, the Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday.

The agreement expands on a settlement order that Kellogg agreed to last July over similar claims that another cereal, Frosted Mini-Wheats, was “clinically shown to improve kids’ attentiveness by nearly 20 percent.”

The commission acted against Kellogg as public health researchers and obesity opponents have intensified their challenges to the marketing of sugary foods.

“We expect more from a great American company than making dubious claims — not once, but twice — that its cereals improve children’s health,” Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the F.T.C., said in a statement.

Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, said it was unusual for the commission to act in a case involving health claims made for food products, an area traditionally handled by the Food and Drug Administration.

Last summer, Kellogg unveiled product packaging claiming that Rice Krispies “now helps support your child’s immunity” and that the cereal “has been improved to include antioxidants and nutrients that your family needs to help them stay healthy.”

In the order covering Frosted Mini-Wheats, Kellogg had agreed to stop making claims about benefits to “cognitive health, process or function provided by any cereal or any morning food or snack food” unless the claims were true and substantiated.

The new expanded order bars the company from making “claims about any health benefit of any food unless the claims are backed by scientific evidence and not misleading.”

In a statement, Kellogg, based in Battle Creek, Mich., said it had “a long history of responsible advertising,” but did not specifically address the latest accusations.

“We stand behind the validity of our product claims and research, so we agreed to an order that covers those claims,” the company said. “We believe that the revisions to the existing consent agreement satisfied any remaining concerns.”

Jennifer L. Harris, a psychologist who studies food marketing at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, said the agreement highlighted the need to tighten requirements so that all health-related claims on packaging are based on scientific evidence, which is not the case now.

“As parents become more health-conscious, these claims try to make high-sugar cereals healthier than they really are,” she said.

A study by the Rudd Center found that the least healthful cereals were the ones most heavily marketed to children, and that children were exposed to more advertising for highly sweetened cereals than for any other kind of packaged food.

via Kellogg to Restrict Ads to Settle U.S. Investigation – NYTimes.com.

The Guardian, Jo Tuckman, May 27, 2010

The Mexican government is to ban junk food and fry-ups in primary and secondary schools in an effort to combat one of the worst obesity problems in the world.

From the beginning of the next school year, school shops will no longer be allowed to stock fizzy drinks, sugar-stuffed fruit juices, processed snacks, or more local delights such as chilli soaked sweets. Nor will school kitchens offer traditional standards such as fried tacos.

“The kids are going to complain, of course,” the education minister Alonso Lujambio told W Radio today. “We are going to start a profound cultural change.”

The ban does not affect junk food vendors who congregate at school gates at home time, although Lujambio promised future efforts to encourage them to sell healthier products.

President Felipe Calderon launched an anti-obesity campaign in January. Public officials refer to Mexican children as the fattest in the world. While the comparative figures are questionable, one study concluded that 26% between the ages of five and 11 were overweight. The proportion of overweight adults is approaching that in the US.

The health minister Jose Angel Cordoba said consumption of fruits and vegetables in the last 15 years had fallen by 40% while consumption of sweetened drinks rose by 50% .

Dependence on junk foods is compounded by falling rates of exercise caused, in part, by chaotic urbanisation that eats up open spaces.Many Mexicans also have a genetic propensity to store fat, as well as to develop diabetes.

The stampede towards unhealthy eating is also visible in rural areas where a recent study in isolated indigenous villages found many cases of mothers who immediately bought their children junk food treats after picking up government anti-poverty hand outs.

The school ban comes after years of resistance from corporations such as Coca Cola and Pepsi. Lujambio praised their new “co-operative spirit” with reference to their diversification into healthier products, including bottled water which is hugely profitable in a country where few trust tap water. “Our hope is that children start demanding other kinds of products,” he said.

via Mexico bans junk foods in schools | World news | The Guardian.

Health ministers, alarmed at the growing number of obese children, agreed on Thursday to try to reduce children’s consumption of junk food and soft drinks by asking member states to restrict advertising and marketing.

Reuters, Stephani Nebehay, May 20, 2010

The global recommendations on marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children are guidelines to the 193 member states of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Diets containing large amounts of fat, sugar or salt contribute to chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancers, which cause 60 percent of all deaths worldwide, the United Nations agency says.

“Childhood obesity is increasing globally now. The rate of increase in the developing world is greatest because of a rapid change in diet and physical activity patterns,” Timothy Armstrong of WHO’s department of chronic disease and health promotion told Reuters.

An estimated 42 million children under the age of five are overweight, 35 million of them in developing countries, according to the WHO. Overweight is one category below obese.

“The risks presented by unhealthy diets start in childhood and build up throughout life,” the WHO guidelines say.

Armstrong credited the United States with ringing the alarm bell. “The global attention to child obesity has changed significantly, with the new U.S. administration taking it on as a major issue.”

U.S. Surgeon-General Regina Benjamin endorsed the plan at the WHO’s annual ministerial meeting.

“The set of recommendations on marketing of food and non-alcoholic beverages to children should play a significant role in helping member states promote healthier patterns of eating as part of efforts to reduce the growing epidemic of childhood obesity,” Benjamin said in a speech.

“This is a priority for the Obama administration, in particular for the First Lady, who has raised awareness of childhood obesity and the importance of healthy eating.”

Michelle Obama this month unveiled a 70-point plan for reducing childhood obesity within a generation, including a call for marketing healthier food, but stopping short of recommending regulatory action or a federal tax on sugary sodas.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say two thirds of American adults and 15 percent of American children are overweight or obese.

“Since 1980, our obesity rates have doubled for adults and tripled for children,” Benjamin told a news briefing on Tuesday. “The problem is even worse for blacks, Hispanics and native American children.”

The WHO recommendations include limiting children’s exposure to television advertising and making schools and playgrounds free from all forms of marketing of junk food and sugary drinks.

WHO adopted a global strategy on diet and physical activity in 2004, a year after clinching a treaty controlling tobacco.

On Thursday, ministers also agreed to curb binge drinking and other growing forms of excessive alcohol use through higher taxes on alcoholic drinks and tighter marketing regulations.

WHO targets child obesity with food marketing curbs | Reuters .