PANORAMA CITY
Calif.
The federal government will spend more than $1 billion this
year on nutrition education fresh carrot and celery snacks, videos of dancing
fruit, hundreds of hours of lively lessons about how great you will feel if you
eat well.
But an Associated Press review of scientific studies
examining 57 such programs found mostly failure. Just four showed any real
success in changing the way kids eat or any promise as weapons against the
growing epidemic of childhood obesity.
“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, to say the least:
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 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 kids had reverted to their original eating
habits: soda and chips.
