A North Portland school battles childhood obesity with parents and pears

The chubby boy considered his options in the Clarendon-Portsmouth cafeteria line, passing on the burrito or breaded chicken sandwich in favor of a sausage-studded slice of meat lover’s pizza.

On his way to sit down, he paused at a blue plastic cart laden with more food. He used tongs to pile lettuce on his plate, then grabbed a banana and several pieces of broccoli.

Kids were wary when the carts showed up a couple of years ago, but a stop at the fruit and veggie bar “is a part of the routine now,” said Antonio Lopez, principal of the North Portland school, which serves 470 students from kindergarten through grade eight. “Some kids, they just pile a lot of fruit on.”

The key to that new habit “is accessibility, really, and encouraging them,” Lopez said.

A group of Portsmouth parents and employees wants to give their entire community access to healthier food and encouragement to eat better and move more. They’re teaching students and parents how to cook healthy food and read nutrition labels, promoting walking and trying to increase the number of neighborhood stores selling produce.

Clarendon-Portsmouth is one of many U.S. schools that are making the fight against obesity a part of the curriculum, like math or English. If that sounds unrelated to education, Lopez says, just look around his school, which regularly has a few students who weigh more than 200 pounds.

“We know there is a crisis with childhood obesity, especially with the Latino population,” which makes up 60 percent of his students, Lopez said. “If you walk around the school you can see it. Really, from kindergarten on, you start seeing the patterns already developing.”

Those patterns of eating more and moving less are making 200-pound grade-schoolers common sights nationwide. Almost 17 percent of U.S. children are obese, defined as being above the 95th percentile on traditional body mass index growth charts. (Calculate your child's BMI percentile here.)

While the child obesity rate hasn’t changed much in a decade, more kids who are obese are extraordinarily heavy. National surveys show a 50 percent increase between 1999 and 2008 in the chances a 6- to 19-year-old boy will be above the 97th percentile of BMI. And a new Kaiser Permanente Southern California study found almost 6 percent of children suffer “extreme obesity,” roughly equal to being above the 99th percentile on BMI-for-age charts. That rate tops 11 percent among African American teen girls and Latino males ages 6 to 19.

No one knows just what health problems those very obese children will face, but the future is not likely to be good. Obese kids are at much greater risk of being obese in adulthood, which can lead to heart disease, diabetes and some cancers. And some of those problems are already hitting in childhood, said Dr. Phil Wu, a Tualatin pediatrician who leads an effort to curb childhood obesity among Kaiser Permanente members.