Fewer children became overweight at five Philadelphia elementary schools that adopted a nutrition plan.
(The schools) replaced sodas with fruit juice. They scaled back snacks and banished candy. They handed out raffle tickets for wise food choices. They spent hours teaching kids, their parents and teachers about good nutrition.
What have they got to show for it?
The number of kids who got fat during the two-year experiment was half the number of kids who got fat in schools that didn’t make those efforts.
About 40 percent of students in grades four to six were overweight or obese when the study started. At the experimental schools, 7 percent of normal-weight students became overweight compared to 15 percent at the control schools. The overall number of overweight students declined by 10 to 15 percent at the nutrition-focused schools; it rose 20 to 25 percent at the schools that made no changes.
The experimental schools rewarded children for exercising. Lessons focused on nutrition, such as using food labels to teach fractions. Children were “measured and weighed periodically and surveyed about food and exercise.”
While the program helped some overweight students slim down and kept most normal-weight students from gaining, there was little effect on obese children.
They replaced sodas with fruit juice?
That part can’t have helped, since fruit juice is full of sugar, roughly as much as (if not more than) a normal soda.
As a diabetic, I can’t drink fruit juice. Way too much sugar. But I doubt juice is worse than normal (non-diet) sodas. If kids can’t make it on water from drinking fountains, which was good enough for us in the neolithic era, they should be able to opt for diet soda over fruit juice.
I think there is a difference between naturally occurring sugars and processed sugars, particularly the now-ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, which is a cheaper substitute for cane sugar. I’ve heard people say that our obesity epidemic began around the same time this substance was introduced.
I read about sugars in a book called “Sugar Busters,” which suggested eliminating processed sugars, processed flours, and white potatoes from your diet and replacing them with natural sugars, whole grains, and sweet potatoes. There’s more to it, of course.
I eventually lost 40 pounds following their advice, my cholesterol went way down, and it wasn’t really hard to eat that way, as they allow you to eat a lot of things low-fat diets (which I could never follow) had prohibited. You can get the book in any library, and an entire chapter of it is devoted to diabetes. I highly recommend it, and I don’t own stock in it or anything.
So, let’s see-
Schools that get rid of the a la carte crap and students eat healthier? They should just go back to the traditional one hot meal per day lunchroom. It’ll probably save money too. The only times I ever drank any soda or ate candy during my 13 years of school were during class parties.
And even more surprising, making the kids exert themselves in phys ed class makes them lose weight!?! Wow. Maybe they should just go back to the traditional PE class, where the only time a pencil was used was to take attendance.