Don’t tell Shirley Flake that children won’t eat vegetables.
Flake, a master gardener in Baton Rouge, is one of the volunteers behind the University Terrace Elementary School garden, an expansive, 16 x 30-foot organic plot with 10 raised beds of edible crops. Two years ago, Flake and other volunteers from University United Methodist Church formed the garden to introduce children at their high-poverty partner school to fresh, healthy foods.
Every Tuesday morning during the school year, Flake and seven other gardeners work alongside about 15 fifth-graders awarded garden duty for their good behavior. The volunteers also teach the entire fifth grade once a month about gardening techniques and nutrition. University Terrace has long had a butterfly and flower garden, but the vegetable garden is part of a growing national movement to address childhood obesity through gardening education.
“The students do everything, from sowing to weeding to pruning,” Flake says. “In the beginning, they don’t really understand the farm-to-table connection, and they’re even a little grossed out by it at first. But it doesn’t take long for them to get hooked.”
Against a backdrop of startling statewide childhood obesity statistics, the University Terrace garden project is one of an encouraging handful in Baton Rouge meant to move the needle. Gardens have emerged in several schools and neighborhoods, including low-income areas where residents lack access to affordable healthy food. Elsewhere, parents have begun the process of school lunch reform. Volunteer groups have created significant opportunities for children to engage in exercise. And the local park system has dedicated more than $8 million in park improvements or new facilities.
Overweight and obesity rates have tripled nationwide over the past 30 years, with one in three American children now considered too heavy, according to the recently formed White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity. In Louisiana, the overweight and obesity rate is 48%, reports the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge—one of the world’s leading obesity and nutrition research institutions.
71% of U.S. children had televisions in their bedrooms in 2009. Parents reported the top reasons were to keep a child occupied and to help a child sleep.
Kids ages 6 to 17 need at least 60 minutes a day of physical activity, including moderate-to-vigorous exercise as well as muscle- and bone-strengthening activities.
Children and adults should fill half their plate with fruits and vegetables, according to the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Despite decades of research, scientists can’t point conclusively to one cause, nor have they found evidence that any one strategy successfully slows the epidemic, says Peter Katzmarzyk, Ph.D., Pennington’s associate director for population science and a top researcher in the field.
“It’s very challenging,” says Katzmarzyk, who also chairs the center’s Louisiana Report Card on Physical Activity & Health for Children and Youth. “Unlike a public health issue like smoking, everyone has to eat, and they have to interact around this issue of food. These interactions are very complex.”
In the three years the report card has been released, Louisiana has earned a D for its performance in 15 categories and indicators, including and fruit and vegetable consumption and time spent watching TV or videos.
The report does illuminate something encouraging: the state earned its highest grade, B-, in “Progress on Government Strategies and Policies,” for passing nine bills relevant to physical activity or the prevention of obesity since 2004. These new laws included the total restriction of unhealthy vending at public elementary schools and a reduction by half of unhealthy vending in high schools. Legislation also created the Healthy Food Retail Act to spark investment in low-income neighborhoods.
Enforcement and funding on most of the bills remains a challenge. But that may change. Katzmarzyk points out that he’s never seen interest in childhood obesity as robust as it is now, due in part to the Obama administration’s national Let’s Move! campaign and its audacious goal of solving the epidemic in one generation. Katzmarzyk thinks that timeline is unrealistic, but he’s hoping the jolt of awareness will spark more school gardens, healthier diets and changes to the built environment, such as the addition of sidewalks, well-mapped bike paths and shorter commutes.
“It’s going to take that kind of multi-level approach,” he says.
Earlier this spring, University Terrace’s weekly gardening students planted and tended about a dozen crops, including tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, purple hull peas and banana peppers. Many were planted early enough to yield produce before school ended. Flake says the most rewarding part of the program was sending kids home with backpacks full of vegetables.
“That was our dream. We wanted the children to be exposed to the plant-food connection and healthy living, and we knew that if they grew it, they would eat it,” she says. “We never heard any complaints. When they work in the garden, they really appreciate the effort that went into growing it.”
Several other gardens have emerged in Baton Rouge and around the state. Kiki Fontenot, vegetable community/school garden specialist at the LSU AgCenter, is working now with 10 school gardens statewide. Those include Dutchtown High School in Ascension Parish and the University Laboratory School in Baton Rouge, which is considered the state’s demonstration school garden.
Raymond Jetson is pastor of Star Hill Church. He and other volunteers with the year-old initiative Better Baton Rouge are planning to organize community and school gardens in Scotlandville.
“We have a cluster of people who are passionate about community gardens and childhood obesity,” he says.
Jetson says that last spring, the group worked with students at Scotlandville Magnet High, who mapped the availability of fresh produce at neighborhood stores. With evidence of a “food desert,” (the term used to describe the lack of access to healthy food within walking distance), the project’s next step is to partner with schools to set up gardens, says Jetson.
“Childhood obesity is such a large issue that no single entity is going to ameliorate it,” he says. “It will take a lot of people working together before we make any real progress.”
Despite the inability to pinpoint a sole cause of the childhood obesity epidemic, the scientific community agrees that human beings are programmed to be more active than our world now requires.
“We’ve engineered the physical activity out of our lives. You don’t really have to move anymore to get through life,” says Katzmarzyk. “There a mismatch between biology—what your body needs in terms of movement—and your environment.”
Health advocates decry suburban sprawl. They also point fingers at the erosion of school-based physical education.
Skipping breakfast: More than half of males and two thirds of females skip this crucial first meal.
Eating too often outside the home: For teens, that means fast food and snacks. The more meals eaten at home, the healthier your teen is likely to be.
Guzzling sugary soft drinks: In 1978, only 37% of American kids regularly drank sodas. By 1998, that number had leapt to 56%.
LSU Health Sciences Center Chief of Pediatrics Stewart Gordon, MD, is a veteran childhood obesity advocate and chair of the Louisiana Council on Obesity Prevention and Management. He says that, despite legislation passed in 2004 that mandated 30 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous exercise in public school grades K-6, few schools have actually restored PE to this level. This remained the case after the legislation was updated in 2009 to include grades K-8, says Gordon.
“If we could just create a portion of the LEAP test about exercise, maybe we’d see some results,” he says. “We’ve got great laws, but it’s up to the school districts to enforce this one. And this is something that’s important for a number of reasons. Healthier kids get better grades.”
Stepping into the void, some nonprofits are bringing promising opportunities for exercise to local children. Girls on the Run is one.
In 2008, Hydie Wahlborg had planned to run the Chicago Marathon, but she missed the cutoff.
“You could still get a spot if you agreed to raise money for a charity,” recalls Wahlborg, “so I started looking for one that pulled my heartstrings.”
She found Girls on the Run, a national after-school running program for third-, fourth- and fifth-graders of all income levels. It also promoted a healthy outlook, good nutrition and self-esteem. Wahlborg became so immersed in it that she forgot about the marathon and began a year-long process of opening the state’s first Girls on the Run chapter in Baton Rouge.
In fall 2009, the program opened with 24 girls from two schools. By last spring, 240 girls at 14 different schools were enrolled, attending twice-a-week lessons in which they jogged or discussed things like confidence and bullying. Each 10-week program culminates in a 5K race, which the girls run with adult running buddies. About half the participants in the spring session were considered low-income.
“It’s so much more than just a running program, and childhood obesity is more than getting children physically active,” says Wahlborg. “We teach them to work through who are they are as individuals. If a girl can understand more about herself, she can take care of her community and her body.”
Wahlborg expects Girls on the Run to number about 20 schools and 325 girls in Baton Rouge this fall.
In 2007, restaurateur and triathlete Pat Fellows swam 34.1 miles from Ocean Springs to Bay St. Louis to raise money for childhood obesity. Immediately after, he began tackling the issue from two important fronts: exercise and nutrition.
Fellows co-founded Rocket Kidz and Rocket Chix, programs that encourage children and women of any skill level to participate in triathlons.
Rocket Kidz hosts two triathlons annually in Baton Rouge, and many of its participants are the children of women who entered the sport through Rocket Chix. This fall, Fellows is also planning a children’s marathon program in schools, which encourages kids to run 25 miles over an eight-week period and complete the last 1.2 miles at Louisiana Marathon in Baton Rouge on Jan. 15, 2012.
“Our goal is to get kids active,” he says.
Meanwhile, Fellows is also one of the few local restaurateurs to buck the high-fat formula in favor of a low-fat, vegetable-centric menu. His successful Main Street Market eatery, FRESH, and forthcoming FRESH food truck serve salads made to order.
“The idea behind FRESH was that we made all the dressings extremely low-fat to begin with, but we weren’t going around touting it as ‘healthy.’ We just wanted to make it taste great,” he says. “Now I think people are kind of taking their heads out of the sand and making better choices. I think if I pushed it to be even healthier—like taking away carbonated drinks—I wouldn’t get any pushback.”
Parents concerned with childhood obesity point out that getting kids to eat better is challenging because it involves not just the home front, but schools, restaurants and social activities.
“Sometimes that’s the most challenging—when they’re with their friends,” says stay-at-home mom Stephanie Sterling. “You don’t want to be so restrictive that it feels to them like punishment.”
Two years ago, Sterling made a personal commitment to eat better and to bring better choices and more awareness to her sons, William, 6, and Jonathan, 3.
She constantly reads labels, tries to limit sweets and fast food and generally serves lean meats and simply prepared vegetables and starches for dinner. An avid runner, Sterling exercises frequently with her children by pushing Jonathan in a jogging stroller while William rides his bike.
“If they act like they don’t want to eat something that’s good for them, I tell them it’s ‘muscle food,’” says Sterling. “It gets their attention when we talk about how healthy food will make them stronger and faster.”
Overall, she thinks her strategies are working. William has begun to ask questions like, “Which option is healthier?” Jonathan asks for bites of his mom’s lunchtime salads. She says her aim is to achieve balance, not perfection.
“I’m passionate about this issue, but I try to keep things realistic. I think there’s a lot to it,” she says. “Ultimately, they’re not going to be eating every meal with us, so I want them to be able to make informed decisions. When I was a child, this was not part of the conversation at all.”
With well-known chefs Jamie Oliver and Alice Waters pushing healthier school lunch menus, and the Obama administration passing school lunch reform in December 2010, more parents are considering what their children eat at school.
During the 2010-2011 academic year, Renee Verma led a small committee at the University Laboratory School to improve lunches. As a publicly funded school associated with LSU, the institution faced bureaucratic hoops, including an approved vendor list. Moreover, the committee was asked to maintain current costs—about $2.50 per child.
Verma was not dissuaded. The committee surveyed parents online about what changes they wanted. One suggestion was for more fresh produce, so volunteers test-marketed raw vegetables to elementary school students. Edamame and carrots were overwhelming favorites.
The school also switched to low-fat milk and yogurt, began serving fresh fruit instead of canned, and substituted ground turkey in recipes calling for ground beef. Baked chicken replaced fried. And cafeteria manager Joanna Krumholt made fresh cole slaw from heads of cabbage grown in the adjacent school garden.
“I think it’s really important to be strategic. Healthy school lunches don’t have to break the bank,” says Verma.
“And it’s like anything, when you’re taking on a big issue. Small steps really matter.”
