"Any person looking at the published literature about these programs would have to conclude that they are generally not working," said Dr. Tom Baranowski, a pediatrics professor at Houston's Baylor College of Medicine who studies behavioral nutrition.
The results have been disappointing :
Last year a major federal pilot program offering free fruits and vegetables to school children showed fifth-graders became less willing to eat them than they had been at the start. Apparently they didn't like the taste.
In Pennsylvania, researchers went so far as to give prizes to school children who ate fruits and vegetables. That worked while the prizes were offered, but when the researchers came back seven months later, the students had reverted to their original eating habits: soda and chips.
In studies where children tell researchers they are eating better or exercising more, there is usually no change in blood pressure, body size, or cholesterol measures. The participants want to eat better, and might even think they are, but they're not.
The studies don't tell Leticia Jenkins anything she doesn't know. She's one of the bravest teachers in America -- not because she gave her seventh- and eighth-graders 30 sharp knives to chop tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, and limes for a lesson on salsa and nutrition, but because she understands the futility of what she is trying to do.
"Oh, it's so hard . . . Sometimes I take a moment, I think gosh, I did all this and we still see them across the street picking up the doughnuts and the coffee drinks," she said.
Nationally, obesity rates since the 1970s have nearly quintupled among 6- to 11-year-olds, and tripled among teens and children ages 2 to 5, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The medical consequences of obesity in the United States -- diabetes, high blood pressure, even orthopedic problems -- cost an estimated $100 billion a year. Kentucky cardiologist Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., nominated as the next surgeon general, says that fighting childhood obesity is his top priority.
The challenges to changing the way children eat are as numerous as the factors that have prompted the obesity epidemic.
