Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

The Psychology of Smarter Lunchrooms

Pat Hartman March 30, 2020 1 Comment

We have seen how a perceived need to mold people’s behavior — even for quite innocent and beneficial purposes — can easily conflict with the very human resistance against being molded. Motives that we label good or evil can both make use of psychological tendencies. We discussed the multi-faceted tool known as the EAST formula.

People can often be persuaded to act in certain ways by being shown that the desired behavior is Easy, Attractive, Social, and/or Timely. The “social” motive is a multifaceted one with a lot of possible uses. The social drive manifests in superficial ways, like the desire to be trendy. Often, the result does not make a lick of difference in any meaningful way, and is inconsequential. A Little Mermaid lunchbox and a Mario Brothers lunchbox both fulfill the object’s function of bringing nutritious food to school for a child.

The social drive is also potentially dangerous, in elemental ways that can harm both the individual and society. It plays out in successively deeper waters, moving from family solidarity, to public-spiritedness, to nationalism, to jingoism, to xenophobia, and onward to even more destructive phenomena.

Bullying of overweight and obese people, for instance, is an example of the social drive gone sour. We do not want abusive behavior toward obese people to be a cultural norm. And yet, it is disturbingly easy to persuade people to buy into the bully mindset, and to bond over engaging in ugly behavior.

Department of FOMO

Another branch of the enormous social realm is FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. This gussied-up version of pack mentality has always been active, of course. At a certain point in history, monarchs thought it was cool to send massive armies halfway around the world to aggress on strangers. The king offered social currency to the lords: “Listen, Duke, just go and kill people for the glory of my kingdom, and when you return I will bestow upon you a new job title. How does Viceroy sound?” Fear of missing out on juicy rewards is a strong motivator.

Of course, each nobleman was obliged to bring along an army made up of his own serfs. Now the territory shifts, and we are in a different part of the EAST Formula. The relation of the landowner to the serfs is more like the parent-child relationship. The power is there to narrow down the illusion of choice to no choice at all. In many families and cultures, children are not entitled to be gently persuaded. Like serfs, they are not eligible for social currency.

Illusion of choice very thin

In the olden days, no landlord needed to take the trouble to convince the peasants that crusading is the hip thing to do. With lower-class people, the persuaders can bring in the big gun: the Power of Defaults, which comes under the E in EAST Formula, and stands for Easy. For example, if voting is the desired behavior, a government makes voting easy with automatic registration or some other method.

In the Middle Ages, the male serfs were expected to automatically join the boss’s army. Horrible as the experience might be, through the Power of Defaults, it would be easier than the alternative. Because the nobleman could say, “Of course you don’t have to fight. You stay here and till the land. Instead, your wife and daughters will come along as hostesses at the Officers’ Club.”

The dictator; or the government agency in charge of molding the behavior of others to prevent obesity; or the parent at home — all possess a huge advantage. Whatever they don’t want others to do, they can put roadblocks in the way. The step they do not want people to take is made less easy, and a lot of people don’t take it.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Smarter Lunchrooms Strategies for Your Home: Meals and Snacks,” Extension.org, 09/09/19
Image by The Behavioral Insights Team

The EAST Formula and Its Dark Side

Pat Hartman March 27, 2020 1 Comment

The subject under discussion here recently has been the application of choice architecture and other principles used by the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement to encourage the consumption of healthful foods in the cafeterias of educational institutions.

The same basic ideas can be adapted for home use, especially in summer when kids are around more. This website about healthy food choices also offers links to slides, leaflets, and a webinar for parents that explains behavioral economics, and shows how to introduce simple and feasible strategies aimed at promoting healthier eating habits. It’s all about the nudge: the subtle, non-coercive intervention meant to gently steer people toward a certain course of action.

These operative principles are not limited to food-related areas of life, not at all. As Childhood Obesity News has mentioned, many forms of behavior can be molded by applying the tenets summarized by the acronym EAST: portray the desired behavior as Easy, Attractive, Social, and/or Timely.

For instance, we related how a study showed that rather than request that people “Please don’t cheat,” it is much more effective to ask, “Please don’t be a cheater.” The word Attractive in this context does not necessarily mean that people like it. It basically means, to draw the attention. One proven way of making an idea Attractive is to personalize it. When someone is directly asked to not be a cheater, that puts a name and a face on the hypothetical cheater — their name and face.

“Harnessing the power of defaults”

Obviously, objections could be made to a lot of the points and sub-points involved in the EAST formula. A widely used strategy is to make one possible choice more cumbersome. For instance, there is white milk on the table, and if you want the higher-calorie chocolate, you can go to the refrigerator and fetch it yourself. The unspoken message is, “Do things our way. Because we set it up so that doing it your way is annoying.” At which point, a lot of subjects will acquiesce.

The experts call this “harnessing the power of defaults,” and some say the concept has been too easily grasped by oligarchs throughout history. In a dictatorship, there is no chocolate milk in the fridge. The choices are either drink this, or go without.

When the tyrant’s directive is the default choice, with the alternative being violent death, governmental administration is greatly simplified. But it is morally questionable, which is why some critics object.

Choice architecture, in both the physical and metaphysical realms, is cheap to implement, and it often works. When the intervention’s design is subtle enough, children do not even realize that their perceived autonomy is being steered. To achieve compliance, the use of this psychological approach, rather than one of many possible other methods, all seems quite progressive and enlightened.

Critics, on the other hand, do not admit to the possibility of benign manipulation, and regard this whole area of expertise as nanny state baloney, mind control, and a scummy imitation of free will. When people carry around extra pounds, they resent the government butting in, even — and especially — when the mission is to save them from themselves.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Smarter Lunchrooms Strategies for Your Home: Meals and Snacks,” Extension.org, 09/09/19
Image by Alan Light/(CC BY 2.0)

The Parts of Smarter Lunchrooms

Pat Hartman March 26, 2020 1 Comment

The further the basic principles behind the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement are looked into, the more intricacy they reveal. It all has to do with social engineering, which is like fire, or a hammer — a tool that can be used for good or ill. The first layer of complication is, whose definition of “good” does a particular act of social engineering serve?

In the area of childhood obesity, good is the reduction of obesity, which can be accomplished in a number of ways. The most obvious, of course, is the totalitarian, authoritarian approach — only providing a very small amount of food, and/or low-calorie food. This method works exclusively in particular settings and circumstances, like prison camp.

In a free society, or a relatively free segment of society, social engineering needs a gentler face, with the objective of shaping people’s behavior while providing them with the illusion of autonomy. Childhood Obesity News has looked at the science of “choice architecture.”

Varying degrees of choice architecture can be effective in dealing with kids of different ages. With a very young child, a parent can sometimes get away with, “Do you want peas or corn?” Not even the sharpest lawyer could deny that a choice has been offered. And yet, both are nutritious vegetables.

Shall we shop for back-to-school clothes at Target or Walmart? Neither one of those establishments is Bergdorf Goodman — and yet, the element of choice is undeniably present. Some children never vibe with this approach. Still, it is certainly worth trying.

Getting things done

The Behavioural Insights Team, a branch of government in the United Kingdom, pioneered the concept of EAST, and here is how that acronym breaks down: To encourage a behavior, make it Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely. How could this be adopted to a parenting situation? Let’s take white milk versus chocolate milk, and apply each EAST sub-principle, beginning with “the power of defaults.”

A parent could set a glass of white milk on the table, and the easiest thing for a child to do would be to drink it. Unfortunately, kids being what they are, there might be a request for chocolate milk, which is in the refrigerator. Then, a parent could say, “Okay, if you will please take the glass to the refrigerator, pour the white milk back in the bottle, pour chocolate into your glass instead, and bring it back to the table.”

That’s what the experts call the “hassle factor.” It is so much easier to accept the default white milk. According to EAST, “most gyms in the UK will ask you to pay through monthly automated transfers from your bank account so that the default is that you continue paying.”

The other elements

People are attracted by pictures, color and personalization. And by rewards. In a lunchroom setting, dishes are made attractive by giving them quirky, creative names. At home, if a child has a white-milk mug with her or his photo on it, or a drawing of a favorite cartoon character, will that child be content with the default white milk inside? Again, with kids’ health at stake, any strategy is worth trying.

To make a phenomenon social, show people that others are doing it. It’s decent, it’s normal, it’s cool. Children have a golden age of being impressionable, when they want to imitate everything that grownups or bigger children do. The ability to optimize and maximize that stage is a stellar parental talent.

“Timely”can mean a lot of different things. For instance, if a child is very thirsty, she or he might gulp down white milk without demur. At another time, when uncomfortable dehydration is not an issue, the same child might insist on chocolate milk, and be willing to wait for it. Or fight for it.

Rewards must also be timely. Most people, most of the time, will shun delayed gratification and opt for the immediate kind.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “EAST Four simple ways to apply behavioural insights,” BehaviouralInsights.co.uk, undated
Image by The Behavioral Insights Team

The Basics of Smarter Lunchrooms

Pat Hartman March 25, 2020 2 Comments

In the previous post, we mentioned the Theory of Constraints as a strategy to prevent children in a lunchroom from choosing higher-calorie drinks and to steer them, unawares, toward the lower-calorie alternatives. Today’s post takes a more comprehensive look at this theory.

Several years ago, supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics turned its attention to child nutrition and created the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement with several purposes in mind — to improve student eating behaviors; reduce food waste; and increase sales — and to accomplish these ends without incurring extra costs to the institution.

The underlying philosophy is the “nudge.” In theory, if healthier choices are easier to see and easier to reach, humans will opt for what is, in essence, low-hanging fruit. Part of the objective here is to build on basic human instincts. For instance, many of us have received the advice to never grocery-shop when hungry, because we will make unwise purchases, and too many of them. Likewise, cafeteria employees are advised to place the most nutritious food items in positions to be encountered before the not-so-good stuff, on the theory that hunger will spur the students to pick up the first thing they see.

One tenet of the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement (SLM) is that its principles apply not only to school lunchrooms, but to restaurants, food courts, and even domestic kitchens. Another is that eating habits are influenced by environmental cues. In all, there are 60 low-cost or cost-free strategies, which boil down into six major categories:

— Manage portion sizes

— Increase convenience

— Improve visibility

— Enhance taste expectations

— Utilize suggestive selling

— Set smart pricing strategies

The University of California is one of the teaching institutions that can send technical assistance providers to schools across the country. When they arrive at a school that has requested their expertise, one of their suggestions is to turn an area of the lunchroom into a Nutrition Corner, where colorful charts, graphics and other informational material can be displayed.

The placement of “clear, clean, and colorful” signage containing useful nutrition information is a top priority. One of their creations is a handbook that supplies a year’s worth of 10-minute workshops for busy staff members.

Action for Healthy Kids is an organization that educates school administrators and staff about the need for these services. Institutional change is not always a top-down proposition. This group urges parents, workers, and educators at any level to bring the SLM ideas to the attention of higher-ups, in case they have not heard, or possibly have been exposed to the principles but disregarded them. This group says,

Smarter lunchrooms reinforce healthy eating and nudge kids toward nutritious foods by using evidence-based, lunchroom-focused principles to promote healthy eating. Smarter lunchroom makeovers can involve changes as simple as hanging student artwork or rearranging food in your cafeteria to encourage students to eat more of the foods we want them to eat (like fruits and veggies).

The site has a link to the Smarter Lunchrooms Self-Assessment Scorecard, to provide evidence of need for change in certain areas.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Smarter Lunchrooms Movement (SML),” SnapedToolkit.org, 2016
Source: “Smarter Lunchrooms Movement,” UCANR.edu, 2020
Source: “Smarter Lunchrooms,” ActionForHealthyKids.org, 2019
Image by Cornell University

Schools Challenged to Find New Ways

Pat Hartman March 24, 2020 1 Comment

We saw that in 2011, Oregon had the lowest child obesity rate. By 2018, eight other states had better numbers. Those statistics change from year to year, and always there is some dialogue about the completeness and accuracy of the data.

Among those routine controversies, an occasional fresh idea turns up. Late in 2011, a paper was published by Amy McLain, a student at Pacific University. (After earning a master’s degree in Occupational Therapy, she went on to work for Kaiser Permanente and Billings Clinic, then gained more experience as a school occupational therapist in South Africa. Since 2013, she has been an Occupational Therapist at Ernest Heath-Advanced Care Hospital of Montana.)

The very interesting paper, “The effectiveness of occupational therapy in preventing childhood obesity in the school setting,” began of course with a comprehensive catalogue of all the reasons why childhood obesity must be ended. It went on to present a case for occupational therapy’s potential effectiveness as a front line preventer of childhood obesity.

The author recommends making much more extensive use of occupational therapists in the school environment, and enumerates the several areas of expertise that the OT is involved in: “[…] prevention and intervention techniques including diet and nutrition, exercise, behavior modification and lifestyle changes.” McLain wrote,

Although it is not written in the scope of OT practice to create prevention programs, specifically obesity in the school setting, OTs have the skills, imaginative tools, program development training, and holistic viewpoints of individuals to do so.

February of 2012 saw the publication of “Lunch Line Design Utilizing Constraints and Bottlenecks to Prevent Childhood Obesity,” which also espoused newish ideas. The uncredited writer mentions the Theory of Constraints. A constraint is a system’s weakest link. If it can be correctly identified and effectively modified, the fixing of this constraint can improve operations greatly, without extensive repair work on the larger system. This philosophical construct seems to be what the slang term “quick’n’dirty” was coined for.

A constraint is any factor that limits the organization from getting more of whatever it strives for, which is usually profit… Since the focus only needs to be on the constraints, implementing TOC can result in substantial improvement without tying up a great deal of resources, with results after three months of effort.

We are told that TOC is an on-going process, which only makes sense. When a system’s weakest link is modified, then, whatever used to be the second-weakest link will necessarily receive a promotion in rank, and become the new weakest link. There will always be something to work on.

What we are talking about here is a plan devised by a research cooperative called Smarter Lunchrooms. According to them, they are in the business of “helping students make smarter choices by subtly changing their behavior… One really interesting case study involves the wise implementation of a bottleneck.” A bottleneck is any complication or inconvenience that stands between the consumer and getting what s/he wants. By adding a contrived complication to a school lunch line the managers can prevent the consuming student from choosing the more fattening beverage.

The experiment looked at guiding the choice of regular skim milk versus chocolate milk and soda. So, this group partnered with a school to change the layout of the lunchroom and placed the chocolate milk and soda in an area where it was difficult to get to and only very few children could be there at any one time. At the same time, the school then placed the regular skim milk in an area where it was easily accessible.

Their findings: chocolate milk and soda sales went down and the sales of regular skim milk went up.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Obesity Rates for Youth Ages 10 to 17,” StateOfChildhoodObesity.org, October 2019
Source: “The effectiveness of occupational therapy in preventing childhood obesity in the school setting,” DocPlayer.net, 10/31/11
Source: “Lunch Line Design Utilizing Constraints and Bottlenecks to Prevent Childhood Obesity,” Shmula.com, 02/20/12
Image by Adrian Sampson/(CC BY 2.0)

School and Home Work Together

Pat Hartman March 23, 2020 1 Comment

In looking back over the past decade, and how schools need to both feed kids and prevent them from becoming obese, it is clear that reform needs popular support. For instance, in “The School Food Struggle” we saw how the L.A. Unified School District was accused of self-sabotaging its own efforts by offering “ethnic” dishes. But to such a huge, diverse student body, at least some of the innovations that were criticized as being weird choices must have been things they ate at home.

There was also good news, as various official bodies gathered to give recognition and praise to some schools. In 2011, the Alliance for a Healthier Generation lauded 275 American schools for distinguishing themselves with “healthy eating and physical activity programs and policies based on stringent standards.”

The America’s Healthiest Schools list is announced annually. In 2019, 355 schools in 23 states were celebrated for their accomplishments. The large majority of those recognized serve high-need student populations, and all meet these criteria:

— Meet or exceed federal nutrition standards for school meals and snacks
— Offer breakfast daily
— Incorporate physical activity before, during or after the school day
— Implement district wellness policies and update progress annually
— Involve parents and community members in decision-making

Former CEO Ginny Erlich explained how the standards have to do with not only meals but the school stores, and with more opportunities for physical activities before and after school. In praising one particular institution, Southeast Polk Junior High School, Erlich mentioned the unlimited servings of fruits and vegetables and added,

They also have options for healthy beverages. They have daily physical education. They have intramural programs and quick physical activity breaks throughout the school day. Staff have gotten involved, too. They have regular exercise classes in the school fitness center which provides a great modeling opportunity for students to see the staff engaged in physical activity.

Alliance for a Healthier Generation is still quite active, led by current CEO Kathy Higgins. Since the Alliance’s inception, its programs have helped 48,000 schools and 29 million children. The organization works with businesses and communities to promote healthy practices in schools, including PE, daily recess, and meals that include fresh produce.

At that same time, Oregon was the state with the lowest childhood obesity rate, and an uncredited writer for The Register-Guard asked why. Even then, it was suspected that energy balance was not the only factor in play, and that complexity was added because “obesity results from an interplay of diet and lifestyle, with everything from entertainment choices to transportation systems playing a role.”

A study pointed out Oregon’s efforts to improve the nutrition level of school lunches, and the heightened nutritional information provided by restaurants, as elements of the overall improvement. One indicator seemed to stand head and shoulders above the rest:

Oregon has the nation’s highest percentage of babies who are breast-fed at the age of six months — 23.7 percent.

By a strange coincidence, conversely, the state with the highest rate of child obesity, Mississippi, had the lowest six-month breastfeeding rate. While the study pointed out that correlation is not always identical with causation, some attention should at least be paid.

Breastfeeding is a particularly acceptable suggestion to many people, because there is no known downside. When states look for ways to reduce child obesity, encouraging breast-feeding cannot possibly cause any harm.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Four Iowa schools recognized for childhood obesity reduction,” RadioIowa.com. 06/13/11
Source: Healthier Generation Announces 2019 List of “America’s Healthiest Schools”,” healthiestgeneration.org, 09/16/19
Source: “Our Impact,” HealthierGeneration.org,
Source: “Oregon kids (relatively) fit,” RegisterGuard.com, 07/20/11
Image by Laurie Avocado/(CC BY 2.0)

The School Food Struggle

Pat Hartman March 20, 2020 1 Comment

In the fall of 2011, new federal nutrition standards were applied to school meals. Local districts scrambled to meet the requirements and pay for more health-promoting menus. News originated in Los Angeles, because of its status as a major trend-setting American city with an enormous education apparatus, responsible for 650,000 meals per day.

There had been test runs during the summer, where some new offerings seemed fine. But mass production is another matter, and some items did not adapt well to the exigencies of scale, and others didn’t keep well.

There were all kinds of complaints. Nobody wanted to learn how to appreciate bean burgers, quinoa, Caribbean meatballs, vegetarian curries, or Pad Thai. Students pronounced lunch “inedible” and threw it away. The press spoke of “unopened milk cartons and untouched entrees and salads being heaved, en masse, into school dumpsters.” Multiple acts of rebellion wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, and tons of food that the inhabitants of LA’s Skid Row would no doubt have appreciated.

Rebelling the school lunch reform

Thousands of kids just said no. Some brought snacks from home, or stopped off at a convenience store for chips and sugar-sweetened beverages to tide them over.

A high school principal wrote a letter to the food services director, comparing the new program to alcohol prohibition, which caused so much crime in the United States from 1920 to 1933. At the same time, young people strove to undermine the reforms. It wasn’t long before cracks started to appear in the system that was put in place, including what was called “an underground ring of junk food bootlegging.”

Noted pontificator Rush Limbaugh alleged that only 13% of students were participating in the lunch program, while 87% shopped the black market. He took up the cause of individual sovereignty:

If people can find a way around what’s dictated to them they will do it, and a black market ends up being created… There is a mafia, there is an organized crime of alternate food at lunch!

Of course he capitalized on the controversy to throw shade on the free lunch program. If these kids can afford to buy junk food from their profiteering peers, why did they need a government-financed meal program in the first place?

The food services department acquiesced to popular demand, and brought back menu items it had recently banned. Even the dreaded pizza made came out of retirement, although it was redesigned with whole-wheat crust and low-fat cheese.

Journalist Maressa Brown took a scolding tone, accusing that administration had “set themselves up to fail.” She claimed that the students could not be blamed for rejecting unfamiliar dishes, because adults would do the same thing:

Even the most refined foodies were once kids who probably picked at their plates and blew off anything that wasn’t PB&J or mac ‘n’ cheese. Knowing this, they’ve gotta get creative. You have to be innovative when turning kids onto different fare than they’re used to. Furthermore, here’s a news flash: Junk food can be made healthier!! And kids will still eat it!

Of course, it is always easier to criticize the efforts that other people make. Brown claimed that the managers of school menus could have been much more successful by hiding vegetables in soup, and swapping turkey burgers for beef. They should have substituted organic preparations for condiments that are based on high fructose corn syrup. Their worst mistake was in expecting to change young people’s preferences overnight, because…

Turning to ethnic, gourmet cuisine isn’t the answer to making a dent in childhood obesity. Getting creative by healthy-izing the foods they already know and enjoy is.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “L.A. School District’s Healthy Lunches Spur Junk Food ‘Black Market’,” TheNewAmerican.com, 12/23/11
Source: “Students Eating ‘Junky’ Food Is Better Than Not Eating at All,” TheStir.CafeMom.com, 12/23/11
Image by fitri agung/(CC BY 2.0)

Schools, Institutions, and Food

Pat Hartman March 19, 2020 No Comments

In 2011, the Alliance for a Healthier Generation sponsored a nationwide contest rewarding the healthiest schools with recognition. Four elementary schools in New York City scored high by distinguishing themselves with “healthy eating and physical activity programs and policies that meet or exceed stringent standards.” One took chocolate milk off the menu; one offered yoga classes for kindergarteners and their mothers; one taught health and wellness classes to staff members at lunch; while another offered kids a cooking class.

At the same time, the gigantic L.A. Unified School District, which had removed soda from its school cafeterias in 2002, banned chocolate and strawberry flavored milk, because of its sugar content. The schools of Berkeley, CA, and Boulder, CO, also shunned those drinks.

Playgrounds and farms

In the summer of 2011, Indiana, one of the unhealthiest states, was a mess, so the nonprofit organization KaBOOM! created three new playgrounds. As an anti-obesity measure, 10 of the city’s public schools initiated fruit and vegetable gardens for the benefit of students, teachers, and the community.

In the fall, Indianapolis Parks Foundation and Indiana University Health got together to form Indy Urban Acres, an organic farm project that is still active, providing food, education, and volunteer opportunities to local residents.

At the higher education level, the 19 hospitals collectively known as IUHealth teamed with Green B.E.A.N. Delivery to form “Garden on the Go.” The truck still sells fresh produce in low-income areas of Indianapolis, but is currently closed due to the pandemic crisis — a real shame because its customers are in serious need of food availability.

Schools across America

The cost to prepare a school meal includes labor, benefits, food, and transportation. Nationwide, it hovered around $3.09. Idaho got used to the idea that, because of a new federal law requiring more fruits and vegetables, school meal prices would go up. In those days, an elementary school lunch was $1.50 and a secondary school lunch was $1.75.

A New Hampshire senator, among others, asked the federal government to rethink the new school lunch requirements that had been announced, in order to comply with the previous year’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The Food Service Director of Maine noted that while fulfilling the new rules would cost as much as an additional 64 cents per plate, the federal government was expected to reimburse states only an additional 6 cents per plate.

The aspect that really bothered many people was that the money to pay for this would be extracted from SNAP and other food programs. Sure, in the long run, society and the government as a whole would recoup the costs by needing to treat less obesity. But meanwhile, the availability of funding was a sore point everywhere.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Four city schools recognized as among nation’s healthiest,” GothamSchools.org, 06/16/11
Source: “Hitting The Streets: Health System Offers More Than Words In Fight Against Obesity, Indiana University Health,” MedicalNewsToday.com, 06/17/11
Source: “School lunch prices will go up,” IdahoPress.com, 06/14/11
Source: “Ayotte calls on feds to reconsider new school lunch requirements: Says they are too costly to implement,” Fosters.com, 08/08/11
Image by woodleywonderworks/(CC BY 2.0)

Food Interventions and Schools — Some History

Pat Hartman March 18, 2020 No Comments

This post and the next few will look backward over the past decade, at interventions that have been implemented through public schools, in an effort to curb childhood obesity. Schools are affected by federal, state, and local rules and restrictions, so uniformity is sometimes hard to achieve. In a way this is good, because various schools and districts have been able to try different responses and gather data from their experiments.

In another way, this is bad, because voters and taxpayers don’t want experiments — they want proven methods that work. But the only way to prove any method is to try it. Which brings us back to the place where things simply may not work.

In late 2010, a federal school nutrition bill was criticized because it would be financed by taking money from food stamps, achieving possibly no net gain to the stated goal, which was to improve children’s nutrition. Reporter Braden Goyette interviewed Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, and wrote,

According to Berg, there’s a lack of understanding for the connection between hunger and obesity. When people have so little to stretch on food, what’s filling will take precedence over what’s healthy. Especially with the proposed cuts, there’s practically no money to spend on fruits and vegetables after filling staples like pasta and meat.

Only a year before, a study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine posited that nearly half of all American children — including 90% of black children — would be dependent on food stamps at some point in their childhood. The child nutrition bill was generally recognized as a good thing, but not if it could only be financed at the expense of food stamp recipients.

Thanks but no thanks

Three years later, for The Atlantic, Olga Khazan looked back at how this played out in America’s second-largest school system, Los Angeles Unified. The title of her article made a bold and doom-laden assertion: “Here’s Why Making School Lunches Healthier Won’t Solve Childhood Obesity.”

At the time, L.A. Unified contained over 650,000 students, of whom 42% — that’s almost half — were categorized as overweight or obese. This, despite the fact that Los Angeles schools had banned soda and junk food sales back in 2004. When the new, healthier lunch menus were introduced, kids just brought in junk food from outside. The district backed down somewhat and loosened the standards and discontinued some of the more “exotic” dishes that kids were not adventurous enough to try, or to develop a taste for.

Still, 32% of students did not avail themselves of the fresh fruit offerings, and nearly 40% abjured the vegetables. Worse yet, among those who helped themselves to fruits and vegetables, about a quarter of them threw away the fresh food, wasting it. Los Angeles students were throwing away an estimated $100,000 worth of perfectly good food every day.

Supposedly, a child needs to try an unfamiliar vegetable eight or 10 times before deciding they like it. How many kids, realistically speaking, are willing to try something more than once? Therein lies one of the sad contradictions of young human existence. Very few kids like the taste of beer, whiskey, or tobacco on their first try. And yet they persist, until their palates become accustomed to these poisons. But new vegetables? Forget it. If a tryout even happens at all, it’s one and done.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Cutting Food Stamps in Favor of School Lunches Will Hurt Kids,” TruthOut.org, 10/04/10
Source: “Here’s Why Making School Lunches Healthier Won’t Solve Childhood Obesity,” BusinessInsider.com, 05/24/14
Image by Shane Global/(CC BY 2.0)

Food and Nutrition, Experience and Perspective

Pat Hartman March 17, 2020 No Comments

Looking at the career of one particular bureaucrat/business executive illustrates the benefits of varied experience. It also hints at the drawbacks, from the perspective of the public, of being ruled by people who are comfortable working for two masters whose goals are often at odds: the government and big business. Thousands and thousands of bureaucrats, in their official capacity, have made life pleasant and profitable for businesses, only to be rewarded in later years with speaking fees and sinecures.

The website OpenSecrets.org specializes in describing these “revolving door” careers. We are interested in one of its profile subjects, G. William Hoagland, as an authority on matters relating to nutrition. He began with six years as an economist in the Congressional Budget Office, followed by two years as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture. He was Majority Staff Director of the Senate Budget Committee for several years; then Staff Director for U.S. Senator Pete V. Domenici; then director of budget and appropriations for the Senate Majority Leader.

In 2007 Hoagland made the transition to the private sector as Vice President of Public Policy for Cigna Corp, which sells health insurance plans to both employers and individuals. In 2012 he became Senior Vice President of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a “think tank” that proposes such sensible ideas as automatic voter registration and expanded mail-in voting.

So, what about kids and food?

Hoagland’s essay, “What’s Happened in the 50 Years Since the White House Food and Nutrition Conference?“, is based on knowledge of many facets of society. He notes that the current administration’s ambition to limit the SNAP program threatens to “increase food insecurity for 3.1 million current SNAP recipients and reduce free lunches for nearly 982,000 school children.”

But what about the big picture? Overall, in the past five decades, have feeding programs administered by the federal government actually had an impact on America’s health?

Some programs with science-based nutrition guidelines, like the school meal programs and WIC, have made modest improvements in the diets and health of their target populations. In fact, from 2010-2016, there was a decline in childhood obesity rates among low-income children enrolled in WIC — one of the only groups to see a decline in obesity in recent years.

Also the government-imposed standards have made school breakfasts and school lunches 40% more nutritious. But still, human nature wins. By and large, people eat what they want to eat, rather than what they should eat; and diet-related conditions like type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, and especially obesity, continue to affect the populace.

The government has been criticized for deferring to the wishes of the agriculture industry rather than the needs of SNAP recipients, but Hoagland defends it. He throws a bit of shade on medical schools for neglecting nutritional education.

Although the government has made a good effort, and stark starvation has pretty much been eliminated, he admits that some Americans are still affected by food insecurity, and ends with this quotation:

Even more importantly, we have not been successful in eliminating poor diets, obesity, and preventable chronic disease. Common-sense policies are needed to put the “N” (for Nutrition) back in SNAP and improve diet quality among SNAP participants — and the population at large.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “What’s Happened in the 50 Years Since the White House Food and Nutrition Conference?,” MedPageToday.com, 12/04/19
Source: “Hoagland, G. William,” OpenSecrets.org, undated
Image by Camp Pinewood YMCA/CC BY

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