Children Obese Due to a Host of Unhealthy Pressures

Unhealthy options and pressures influence nearly every part of children's daily lives, according to studies released this week in a special supplement of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

The national studies, which include work conducted at the University of Michigan, reveal that, in most middle and high schools across the nation, contracts with soft drink bottling companies give students easy access to sugary beverages.

Low- versus high-income neighborhoods have a higher proportion of their restaurants serving fast foods and have fewer supermarkets and more convenience stores at which to buy their groceries. In the media, television advertisements steer kids to spend their money on junk food, and minority students get considerably more such exposure, the studies showed.

For the special supplement, Bridging the Gap, a national research program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and based at U-M and the University of Illinois at Chicago, produced a groundbreaking collection of evidence on factors that contribute to the escalating rates of childhood obesity.

The studies offer new insight about how current school policies, neighborhood characteristics and advertising collectively impact the childhood obesity epidemic--and together create an overwhelmingly unhealthy environment for young people.

A study by U-M Distinguished Research Scientist Lloyd Johnston and colleagues finds that the vast majority of middle schools (67 percent) and high schools (83 percent) have contracts with a soft drink bottling company, which in many cases gives students access to soft drinks all day long.

Estimates of the median annual revenue for soft drink contracts in high schools turn out to be $6,000 ($6.48 per student), while for middle schools the annual revenue is about $500 (70 cents per student).

"The financial benefits of school contracts are modest in relation to the health threat that soft drink promotions entail, and clearly the problem is most serious at the high school level," Johnston said.

Other studies by the U-M team found that physical education is lacking among older students. The average number of minutes students spend in PE each week drops from 172 minutes in 8th grade to 89 minutes in 12th grade, by which time only a third of students are even taking a gym class at some time during the school year.

Minority students from lower socioeconomic levels attend schools in which fewer students are involved in varsity sports, quite possibly because such schools have fewer resources available to offer a full range of sports and the exercise that goes with them.

The U-M studies also show evidence of unhealthy school nutrition policies and serious disparities across racial/ethnic lines and across different socioeconomic levels:

-An article by Jorge Delva, U-M associate professor of social work, and colleagues documents the great extent to which children in school have access to high-fat, high- sugar and salty foods through vending machines and snack carts in schools