Every parent wants good things for their children: a positive outlook on life, a healthy respect for authority, a strong sense of self, a disease-free body…a healthy body weight. Despite our best intentions, a recent report suggests that for the first time in two centuries, the current generation of children may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. With all the advances in medicine, how could this possibly be true? The blame falls squarely on today’s toxic food environment.

In short, your kids are eating too much junk. And who can blame them? Junk food tastes great. The good news is that healthy food also tastes great. Take these simple tips and transform your child’s diet into one that is packed with good health.

1) Add Color
Adding bright and colorful fruits and veggies to your child’s plate will get their diet on the fast track to health. Fresh fruits and veggies are filled with fiber, vitamins and minerals that are essential to good health. If your kids are resistant then make it fun. Serve veggies with salad dressing as a dip. Cut fresh fruit in the colors of the rainbow and place them on a skewer. Serve a color themed meal – all green, all red or all orange. Use your imagination and you’ll come up with an endless number of ways to make fruits and veggies fun to eat.

2) Think Whole Foods
Processed foods are the biggest problem with our modern diet. Packaged and refined food products are devitalized and filled with empty calories that quickly lead to weight gain. Unfortunately, processed foods make up a large portion of the diet of many children. Train your kids to opt for whole foods, rather than packaged ones. Whole foods are foods that are in their natural state. An apple. A piece of sprouted grain bread spread with natural peanut butter. A piece of hormone-free chicken. A bowl of beans. You get the idea.

3) Use Wholesome Sweeteners
Refined sugar and corn syrup are packed into many of the foods that your kids love. There are more wholesome sweeteners available – sweeteners that add vitamins and minerals rather than empty calories. Use the following rather than white sugar or corn syrup:

Sucanat: This pure, dried sugar can juice retains its molasses content. Use it to replace white sugar in baking.
Pure Maple Syrup: Forget the “fake” syrups containing corn syrup. Pure maple syrup contains potassium, calcium and some amino acids.
Brown Rice Syrup: Use this dark syrupy sweetener instead of corn syrup. It takes longer to digest and won’t spike your blood sugar like refined sugar.
Dates: Throw a few seeded dates into your blender to sweeten your smoothie rather than adding white sugar.

4) Make Smart Substitutions
Kids love pizza and pasta and peanut butter sandwiches, and that’s not going to change any time soon. Rather than fight your kids on their favorites, try making smart substitutions to make their favorites more nutritious.

Pizza: Up the nutritional content of your pizza by opting for wheat crust over white, adding veggies to the toppings and sticking with lean meat toppings.
Pasta: Use sprouted grain or whole grain pasta rather than traditional white pasta. Add veggies to your pasta sauce. Stick with red sauce, since white sauce is so high in fat.
PB&J: A PB&J, made with white bread using sugar-filled peanut butter and corn syrup-filled jelly, is fairly void of any real nutritional value. Try the PB&J Makeover recipe below instead for a sandwich that will provide real wholesome fuel for your child’s day.

5) Ban Sugary Drinks
One of the best things that you can do for your child’s good health is to instill in them a love for water rather than sugary drinks. Soda pop and juices are filled with empty calories that encourage weight gain. The easiest way to do this is to stock your house with lots of pure, filtered water. Don’t have fruit drinks or soda pop readily available so that they grow accustom to drinking only water.

Well if this isn’t a sad sign of the times, I’m not sure what is: makers of child car safety seats traditionally designed for children up to 65 pounds are now marketing for heavier kids — up to 85 pounds. Experts are saying the reason for the enlarged child seats is largely because of the increasing rate of childhood obesity. In fact, more than a quarter of a million U.S. children ages 1 to 6 are heavier than the weight limits for standard car seats, and most are 3-year-olds who weigh more than 40 pounds, according to a recent study found! (Did you know that unless exceptionally tall, a 3-year-old weighing more than 40 pounds would generally be considered overweight?)

If you’re wondering how this whole child car seat trend was first noticed, it appears that researchers at a safety center at Johns Hopkins Hospital became interested in the topic because they often saw children who were very obese; they also saw how the JHH  car-seat technicians struggled to find car seats to fit them.

So what does the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have to say about all this? “We don’t recommend that a parent use a restraint system for a child that has outgrown that system,” said Eric Bolton, a spokesman for NHTSA. “It is risky.”

For more information: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,190291,00.html#ixzz1GgrEpLsf

Seriously?? Who knew?

According to the National Center on Physical Activity and Disability (NCPAD), a study done on 171 school children aged 7 to 11 who were overweight showed that increasing their exercise also increased their math skills!

Dr. Catherine Davis, a clinical psychologist at Georgia Prevention Institute published a study in Health Psychology showing that “for children to reach their potential they need to be active.”

In the study, children who had increased physical activity and who raised their heart rates to 79% of normal (considered “vigorous exercise”) were able to improve their math skills without any tutoring or additional assistance. Reading skills, sad to say, were not impacted or improved during the course of this experiment.

So how can this be? According to the study findings, it is thought that the aerobic activity engaged in by the children increases blood flow and creates more connections between neurons. Similar studies among adults have also shown that exercise benefits the brain.

You can find more information at the source:

Medical College of Georgia (2011, February 11).
Exercise helps overweight children think better, do better in math.
ScienceDaily.

It’s nice to see communities come together to combat the child obesity epidemic.

Of special note, in Tuscon, Arizon, the Pima County Health Department, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and Arizona’s leading newspaper for kids, families and classrooms — Bear Essential News for Kids — have teamed up to launch a new program to get kids moving!

Together, these organizations have created a regular feature in the Bear Essential News for Kids newspaper called “Power Up With Healthy Choices.” 4th graders from Booth Ficket Magnet School were some of the many students who received the first edition and it’s already making a difference. Kids are recognizing the importance of eating healthy and becoming more informed about good eating habits and also learning about the “science behind the food they eat.”  The publication additionally promotes fitness as a way of life and encourages its young readers to routinely exercise with their parents and families.

Donald Gates from the Pima County Health Department says childhood obesity is a major problem, and the education needs to start young. “Chronic diseases related to obesity and the healthcare spending related to obesity is reaching 147 billion dollars a year in the United States alone,” says Gates.

My take from this publication program is that it takes a consolidated effort by community leaders to advocate the importance of healthy eating and fitness at an early age. I would love to see a similar kind of effort take place in the local Arlington, Virginia community. If anyone knows of such an effort here locally, please let us know about it! We’d love the opportunity to highlight community efforts like these in our own back yard!

Hot off the presses

The USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) has just awarded $4.9 million to the University of Michigan to reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity among Head Start preschoolers in Michigan. The long-term outcome for this program is to reduce the prevalence of overweight and obese children and adolescents ages 2 to 19 years.

Why preschool age children?

Preschool years are reportedly a critical time for children to develop eating behaviors, positive or negative. And in the US, 1 out of every 5 children is obese in the preschool age category. Moreover, low-income children are 2 times more likely to be overweight than their middle-class or upper income counterparts.

“Obesity is perhaps the most pressing nutritional problem in America, with childhood and adolescent obesity rates tripling in the past 30 years,” says NIFA director Roger Beachy, Ph.D., who made the award announcement Monday at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.

“A goal for NIFA is to support research and develop methods, built on sound science, that will reverse the rising trend of obesity and help children and their families adopt healthy eating habits that will last a lifetime.”

Core programs and research:

The NIFA grant will make the following efforts possible:

• Development of an obesity intervention program based on the premise that enhancing a child’s ability to control certain emotions and behaviors is a key component of effective obesity prevention
• Evaluation of 600 Head Start children and their families and their response to the Preschool Obesity Prevention Series (POPS), a curriculum that focuses on obesity-related health behaviors
• Evaluation of the response to the POPS intervention combined with the Incredible Years Series (IYS), an evidence-based program designed to improve preschoolers’ emotional and behavioral self-regulation.

The University of Michigan team members propose that combining intervention strategies of POPS and IYS will lead to the greatest improvements in obesity-related health behaviors.

Cooperative Extension and Head Start educators who collaborate in the project will receive training and educational curricula and assist in determining the effectiveness of the program.

And the best part of this trial? If successful, the results will be widely disseminated to teachers around the country.

For more information, please visit the USDA web site.