jenk

A well-written essay by Harriet Brown. I've got the full thing here, but most of it is behind cuts:

May 30, 2006
Essay
Well-Intentioned Food Police May Create Havoc With Children's Diets
By HARRIET BROWN

Earlier this year, our small Midwestern school district joined the food wars, proposing a new policy that would discourage all food in classrooms, ban nuts and sugary foods and do away with vending machines.

So much for peanut butter sandwiches, snacks for kindergartners and birthday cupcakes.

Like the policies put in place by school systems around the country, this one was driven by anxiety — about food quantity, quality and safety — and by the ever-increasing pressure for children to look a certain way and to weigh a certain amount.

Unlike the earlier "mommy wars" or the "war on drugs," which centered around simpler black-and-white divides, the 21st-century food wars are fuzzier, though the feelings run just as deep.

Some schools say they are concerned about food allergies, and it is true that for some children a stray bite of someone else's peanut butter sandwich can mean anaphylaxis and even death. But I don't think allergies are the main reason that districts across the country are racing to put new food policies in place. After all, children are allergic to strawberries, wheat and dairy, too, but there are no proposals that I'm aware of to ban any of those foods.

I fear there's something else at work — a fear borne out by a flier my fifth grader brought home saying that at the monthly pizza hot lunch, no child would be allowed to buy a second slice of pizza. The district says the new ruling is to avoid bad feelings caused by "inequities": if everyone can't have extra helpings, no one can.

This solution may seem rather Solomon-like. But if equity is the issue, I'll eat my lunch tray. I believe the schools are overreacting to the so-called obesity epidemic, and in the process are doing our children more harm than good.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for good nutrition and exercise. I don't buy soda for my own children or bring home fast food. But these food wars go beyond good sense and good science. They're misguided and red herrings, based more in conjecture and politics than on solid research-based solutions.

They squander precious social and fiscal capital, and distract us from more complex but reality-based approaches.

Leading the way is the Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act now before Congress, calling for updated definitions of "minimal nutritional value" of foods served in schools, including those sold in vending machines and at fund-raisers.

In theory, such legislation would improve the nutritional options. In reality, it sounds like another call for the food police — highly fraught and bound to backfire.

A look at what's happening on the state level confirms this. In Arkansas, for instance, children's report cards now include their B.M.I., or body mass index, along with their grades. The governor, Mike Huckabee recently lost more than 100 pounds and is passionate about stopping the "obesity epidemic." Maryland is considering a similar standard.

Never mind that B.M.I. is only a measure of height against weight and does not take into account muscle mass, body type or other factors. (Tom Cruise has a B.M.I. of 31, which puts him in the "obese" category.)

"You're setting kids up to feel bad about how they are," says Dr. Nancy Krebs, chairwoman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Nutrition and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado.

Such efforts usually fail, making weight problems and eating disorders worse. A recent Internet discussion board among families with anorexic and bulimic children identified middle school health classes, which focus on weight, as the No. 1 trigger for their teenagers' disorders.

The food wars are being fueled by our emotionally fraught relationships with food, and by increasingly hysterical rhetoric.

We often hear, for instance, of a rising tide of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, especially in children. But the science behind such pronouncements is shaky. A study of nearly 3,000 children presented at the American Diabetes Association's 2005 conference suggested that a third of the children diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, which is associated with being overweight, were later found to have Type 1 diabetes, linked to genetics.

Abigail C. Saguy, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies media framing of obesity, says it's hard to know if rates are truly rising, since no nationally representative data are available.

One study of teenagers in the Cincinnati area found that the diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes went from 7 per 100,000 teenagers per year in 1982 to 7.2 per 100,000 teenagers per year in 1994 — a difference that could easily be a result of better diagnostics.

"The term 'epidemic' refers to the rapid and episodic onset of infectious diseases and is associated with fear of sudden widespread death," Dr. Saguy says. In reality, she adds, new research shows no significant difference in death rates between "normal" and overweight Americans; mortality rates rise only for those with a B.M.I. exceeding 35 — only 8 percent of the country.

What the food wars seem to reflect more than anything is our ambivalence about eating and about our bodies. What they will do, I am afraid, is create even more anxiety around feeding our children and ourselves — anxiety that will, in turn, make it harder for all of us to be "joyful and competent with eating," in the words of Ellyn Satter, the author of "Your Child's Weight: Helping Without Harming" and a nationally recognized nutrition expert.

Besides, like other misguided public health campaigns (remember "Just Say No"?), putting children on de facto diets at school just doesn't work. In a 2003 experiment involving 41 schools, more than 1,700 children — many of them American Indian — were served lower-calorie and lower-fat lunches and were taught about healthy eating and lifestyles.

While the children took in fewer calories from fat at school, they experienced no significant reduction in their percentage of body fat.

Another study, in rural Nebraska in the mid-1990's, put one group of elementary school students on lower-fat and lower-sodium lunches, increased their physical activity at school and offered more education about nutrition. Compared with students having no special program, the active, lower-fat group showed no differences in body weight or fat, or in levels of total cholesterol, insulin or glucose after two years.

Researchers concluded that pupils whose school lunches offered 25 percent fat (compared with 31 percent in the control group) were compensating for the reduction by eating higher-fat foods at home.

Big surprise. Anyone who's dieted for a day, a week, a month and then overeaten to compensate is familiar with the deprivation-binge-deprivation cycle — and with the weight gain that often accompanies it. One Harvard study showed that 39 percent of nurses who lost weight through dieting regained it, and in fact wound up 10 pounds heavier on average than those who didn't lose weight.

Early in my children's lives, I was a no-sugar, no-fat mom, the legacy of my own childhood with a constantly dieting mother. I thought I was doing the right thing, until a friend told me that every time my children stayed at her house, the first thing they did was ask for ice cream. With sprinkles. And chocolate chips. And gummy worms. By rigidly restricting their sugar intake, I had made it a highly sought out pleasure — the last thing I'd intended.

Ms. Satter recommends giving children regular access to treats, at school and at home, by including those foods with more nutritious choices at meals and snacks. "Avoid either extreme of forbidding snack-type food or letting children graze on them," she says. "In the long run, this makes children eat more, not less."

What worries me even more than the words being thrown about in the food wars are the unspoken messages we're giving our children about their bodies, themselves and the food they eat. Prohibiting that second slice of pizza sends a message that pizza is bad, that there are good foods and bad foods, safe foods and dangerous foods — a perceived dichotomy that every anorexic is all too familiar with.

I can hear the howls of outrage, imagine the letters I will get as a result of saying this. But I will say it anyway: We have nothing to fear but fear itself. That is, our twin fears of fat and food, and the consequent distortions in the way we feed ourselves and our children, will damage us far more than a bowl of ice cream every now and again.

"Emphasize providing, not depriving," Ms. Satter suggests. "Maintain the structure of meals and snacks so children can count on getting fed — and fed enough."

So serve another slice of pizza. Bring on the chocolate cupcakes. Dish up the broccoli soup and burritos, the strawberries and cheesecake. Give kids more time to run around and play, and also more time to eat. Teach them about the joys of food, not the terrors. And maybe they'll grow up less ambivalent and healthier than we are.