Children are very prone to eating unhealthy

Mar 2, 2010 09:50 GMT  ·  By

A group of experts at the San Francisco State University has recently released a new scientific paper, showing that removing fast food from American schools could help curb the growing trend of obesity among children. Sugary beverages and junk food are considered to be primarily responsible for the wave of overweight and obese youngsters that can be seen today. Details of this investigation will appear in the March issue of the respected scientific journal Health Affairs.

“This is one of the very first comprehensive investigations that examined whether childhood obesity trends changed after new statewide policies were enacted in California,” explains SF State assistant professor of health education, Emma Sanchez-Vaznaugh. She is also the first author of the new paper. The work was made possible through a $100,000 grant, which was provided by the New Connections Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Healthy Eating Research.

“Although policymakers cannot directly influence student behavior, our study shows that governmental policies can help define the environment in which children learn to make food choices and thus shape the food behaviors, influencing overweight trends in entire student populations,” the scientist adds. She mentions that Californian public schools have a long way ahead of them before the obesity epidemic is brought under control, assuming that the political will to take action exists.

Over the past three decades, the number of obese people in the United States has more than tripled. At this point, it is estimated that approximately one in three children is either overweight or obese, with a large number of factors contributing to this. These include cultural acceptance of this disease, the omnipresence of fast food stores around schools, poor parental education, the force of habit, and so on. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in 2009 that, for the first time ever, the growing trend had leveled off, but warned against premature celebration, and added that it had no idea why this happened.