Hey Kid, Wanna Buy a Cupcake?

Future headline:

"Sixth Grader Suspended for Possession of Cupcakes 
with Intent to Sell"

I just read in Bloomberg Business Week that a growing number of USA school districts are banning bake sales on school grounds, or restricting the distribution of home-made cookies and sugary treats in similar ways. Schools in Maryland, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Mississippi, New York City, and Texas are making bold or brash moves to show they are warriors in the battle against the rising tide of childhood obesity. But by banning bake sales, are they building levees to ward off the threats of obesity, or just making the flood-water look more appealing?

Or, is something else, something maybe more sinister and effective, poised to remove cupcakes from their sugary throne?

Personally, I think banning all bake sales during school hours will hurt more than it helps. These bake sales raise needed funds for extra-curricular school groups such as bands and athletic clubs. Plus, to decree that bake sales are leading the scourge of school-age obesity is to ignore the bigger picture: the world of everyday food in school.

Move over, Mrs. PTA Mom’s banana bread, while M&M Mars and Frito-Lay** have their day in school peddling unhealthy calories. It’s easy in most schools for a child to buy potato and other chips, candy bars, toaster tarts, salty hot dogs, and manufactured cookies.  This year, a Robert Wood Johnson study found that

“Federal law bans only a small subset of competitive foods, such as sodas and certain types of candy, from being sold in cafeterias during mealtime. But those products are available to kids in other venues at school, even during lunch.”

These items are likely to contain less fiber, more artery-clogging fats and mood-affective high-fructose corn syrup than their home-baked counterparts. Pile a severe lack of nutrition education on top of this kind of junk food availability, and you can see an environment conducive to eating too much of the wrong things… bake sale or not.

There’s a sensible way to do this!  With an emphasis on nutrition education and leading by example, it’s possible to limit rather than ban school bake sales. I agree, daily cupcake handouts would be counterproductive in this battle. Moderation is obviously the key, and schools can easily find ways to limit the frequency of bake sales. It’s also possible to distribute recipes for healthier baked goodies, and allow or insist on the sale of some non-food items during the bake sale. It’s even possible to use these events as an opportunity to send kids home with healthy eating coloring books or handouts, or handfuls of donated local produce. (Think outside the little white box wrapped in string!)

Please don’t demonize the cupcake! There’s a time and place for it in a healthy child’s diet.

**Frito-Lay does offer a page about sensible snacking that discusses portion size and salt. But doesn't discuss nutrients, vitamins, protein, building strong bones, or fiber.

Bountiful Bite: Sugarcoating Obesity

The recent firestorm over Strong 4 Life's anti-obesity ads blew the lid off a smoldering brew of outlooks on how to discuss childhood obesity. On the one side are doctors and educators who feel it's time to "stop sugarcoating it" and startle parents and local governments into action to help obese children, and on the opposing side are some parents and others who council or care for children, who think the extra attention of shock ads will only make obese children more vulnerable to teasing and disfavor.

They do have a legitimate concern. Schoolyard bullying happens, and now social media has allowed the verbal attacks to multiply.  Adults spewing a bitter lack of understanding or kindness have raised their anonymous voices online.

 I've been trolling through reader comments lately on food blogs that touch on legislation or the politics of obesity. There's a lot of venomous ranting out there, including comments like "4 words - don't eat so much." Aside from being hateful, which it is, that's also a comment coming from ignorance. If it were that easy to lose weight even lazy people would probably succeed. I mean, show me someone who likes being morbidly obese and I'll show you pigs flying.

Obese people experience hunger in a different way than "fit" people, often more frequently and with more discomfort. Researchers are studying various hormones and body chemistry and finding some meaningful correlations between weight, hormones, "peptides" and diets. Dieters who cut calories to below 1,000 per day or those who cut out carbs risk struggling with fatigue, dizziness, gallstones, gout, ketosis and even migraine headaches*.  In short, just trying to eat less is both difficult for obese people and not an effective way of trying to keep weight off.

No doubt, obesity is a preventable condition for most people. We live in the climate of what's been dubbed "SAD" eating, the Standard American Diet. It consist of exactly the high-calorie, saturated-fat heavy, low nutrient foods that lead to storing body fat, craving food, and gaining weight. The trouble is, once we have trained our young bodies to be overweight, they learn to try to maintain that weight.

So we need to shut down the angry, accusatory ranting about "fat people" being lazy. This is a dangerous lying stereotype which doesn't help get at the truth or solve a problem.

I feel that Strong4Life, in running these ads and billboards, has yanked the lid off an epidemic of obesity that's boiling over anyway. We have to face it, and we should make sure that as we do, we take the "victims" of obesity and turn them into "fighters" and winners. We need to change the rhetoric the way we did with breast cancer victims. There was a time when it was all hush-hush, don't shame the woman by revealing her surgery. Today we treat breast-cancer patients like the fighters they are. We need to approach obesity the same way.

sources:
 * http://www.livestrong.com/article/518807-negative-side-effects-of-eating-less-than-1-200-calories-a-day/

Who's your Nanny? Fast Food, Children, and Iron Man

Last month I didn't post on The Bountiful Bite. I guess I felt overwhelmed by the proliferation of magazine, newspaper articles, and blogs on dieting and eating better, the TV appearances by guest nutritionists and neatly packaged eating lessons of Dr. Oz. One question keeps beating through my mind... with all this helpful advice and places to buy less processed, less salty, and less junky food, why is obesity rising so rapidly?

Why oh why? Why don't our kids come bursting in the door asking for low fat milk and home-made granola bars? OK, let's start with that question.

Of the roughly $110 billion a year Americans spend buying fast food*, it's estimated that close to a third of this is purchased by and for children and teenagers.  Not that surprisingly, teens ordered more fast food than any other age group during non-meal times after school and in the evening. While most fast food restaurants have begun touting their "healthy choices" for children, it's largely a veneer over the ugly fact that they're still selling most kids very fatty, salty, high calorie junk food. According to the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity (Yale University), Just 12 of 3,039 possible kids' meal combinations met nutrition criteria for preschoolers; 15 met nutrition criteria for older children. Digest THAT for a second.

Guess how much is spent marketing and advertising soda and fast food to children? Over 4 mill..er, Billion dollars, also reported by the Rudd Center. So, what can a mom or dad, or teenager do... what should we expect or insist on? I mean, wouldn't it be cool if you could get a Thomas the Train toy with your organic strawberries, Iron Man stickers with a bowl of whole wheat noodles, and Justin Beiber's signature on roller blades? Wouldn't it be cool if California avocados and Florida oranges were subsidized the way the stuff that makes high-fructose corn syrup is, and all the fast food joints were spending millions trying to get your kids to eat them?

But they don't.

• McDonald's 13 websites got 365,000 unique child visitors and 294,000 unique teen visitors on average each month in 2009.**

Our kids are getting bombarded with brightly colored character-driven fast food, soda and candy marketing on facebook, YouTube, spiral notebooks, billboards, TV, t-shirts, at the high school football game... you name it, 'McDiabetes' companies are present and promoting.

People, especially politicians like to complain about "the Government" creating a "Nanny State" to oversee what our children eat. I'd like to see kids come home from first grade or 4th grade and say hey Mom hey Dad "Spiderman came to our school today and showed us how to make roasted sweet potato"  But I know, the minute they turn on the computer, the TV, or skip down the supermarket aisle, it's not braised broccoli Big Food will be pushing.

So who's your nanny now?




*http://www.vivavegie.org/101book/text/nolink/social/supersizeme.htm
**http://fastfoodmarketing.org/fast_food_facts_in_brief.aspx

 For more marketing facts/insights, go to http://fastfoodmarketing.org/media/FastFoodFACTS_MarketingRankings.pdf