The path to childhood obesity begins before birth and gets more complicated as children become the targets of food marketers who promise delicious fun with processed foods made with questionable and even disease-causing ingredients.
Parents—many victims of the same influences—may hope schools and governments will educate and protect their children, but the reality is that parents are largely on their own.
The best option is to educate our children ourselves. Children who understand what food does to their bodies—and the problems with many of the foods marketed to them—can develop a lifelong habit of healthy eating. Experts say involving children in growing, shopping, preparing, and cooking food provides invaluable insight that can combat childhood obesity.
Those root causes largely come down to two simple and obvious factors: How children (1) fuel and (2) move their bodies. Resolving these issues, however, isn’t always simple. Other factors play a significant role.
The Cost of Childhood Obesity
Ali is on a mission reverse childhood obesity—without heaping guilt on children—by reminding people this costly killer is an epidemic we can overcome. Unfortunately, most approaches, including the new American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines that include using pharmaceuticals and bariatric surgery on children as young as 13, are bandages, Ali said. In other words, they treat the symptoms of obesity, but not the cause.
Childhood obesity is the number one predictor of adult obesity, which can lead to Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, increased mortality, premature death, disability, and decreased mental health. These are all major disease burdens for national medical systems and huge drains on public finances and population-level health.
For years, criticism has been pointed at medical schools that don’t offer thorough nutritional education. Without that insight, doctors typically focus on treating diseases that arise from poor eating and obesity rather than obesity itself. Nutritional ignorance also results in a health care system that doesn’t provide meaningful support to help people eat better and lose weight, even as taxpayers fund huge subsidies for corn growers.
Moms on a Mission
Fun and age-appropriate information is one of the key ways to empower children to make food choices in their own health interests. And while the government has largely left families to fend for themselves against food companies that sell alluring products that are cheap, easy, and riddled with problematic ingredients, some parents are trying to fill the educational void.“There’s so much education out there that’s confusing. If it’s confusing for our adults—my gosh, it’s confusing for our kids,” added Haselmayer, who suffered from bulimia as a teen. “I lived a whole decade being malnourished. I just don’t want that for my daughters.”
Part of her aim is to create a counter-narrative about farming practices—returning to what is natural and traditional—through a lens of minimal processing. She also teaches her children what happens in their bodies when they eat ultra-processed foods and why they have a hard time resisting them.
“Why would you take an illness that’s largely driven by the foods we consume and not even look at food as a solution,” Haselmayer said. “You have to attack it at multiple different angles.”
Garvin first searched the greater Seattle public library system for something she could read to her kids about gut health but could only find a book geared toward older children.
A former school teacher, Garvin talked about the microbiome for years in language her children could understand. She had corrected her dysbiosis, an imbalance of gut bacteria, and healed herself of three chronic diseases.
“The first line of defense is to build a healthy microbiome in your body,” she said. “The story of the microbiome is incredible. Our microorganisms have power and can influence almost every system in our body. We have this amazing world of bacteria living in our body, more than human cells, that has control over our health. Yet nobody is talking to children about this.”
Early Development
The microbiome is a blueprint of health, and its origins are in childbirth, ideally seeded from the mother’s vagina during delivery. Maternal flora is a byproduct of mom’s diet, so if she’s eating the standard American diet, that will contribute to an inferior colony of bacteria and fungi forming in her baby’s immune system.“Before you are thinking of conceiving, you have to think about what kind of environment you want to give your children,” Ali said. “This has to start even before a woman gets pregnant.”
The next major influences are the child’s environment, what they eat, and that seemingly inevitable first antibiotic. Kids tend to get around and put everything in their mouths, so they are certainly likely to pick up some microbes that way. Some moms may want to protect their children from germs by sterilizing everything in reach, but harmful chemicals from many cleaners can often be more problematic than a few germs.
When it comes to picking up helpful microbes, breastfeeding is superior to formula, but with more mothers going back to work shortly after a baby is born, formula feeding has become more prevalent, Ali said.
Parenting Food Fumbles
All too often, parents turn the worst foods their children can eat into the most highly prized foods by using them as behavior rewards. Sweets such as cookies, candy, and ice cream shift microbial balance even as they cause a host of other issues and feed a lifelong sugar habit.“This is the beginning of what we call emotional eating. We have to stop using food as a reward. This is very important,” Ali said. “We control what’s going to be in our pantries and refrigerators. If you buy junk, you eat junk.”
Teachable Moments
While it can be difficult to get kids to willingly abstain from unhealthy foods designed to tickle their taste buds, there is much parents can do to better prepare them for the temptations ahead.One suggestion is to involve children in every step of their sustenance, including gardening, meal planning, shopping, and cooking. Talk to them about how food doesn’t just fill our stomachs but serves many purposes.
If children understand that some foods can contribute to illness and other foods can make them feel lighter and happier, they will start to form healthier food associations. You can even teach them about different ingredients. All of this can come in handy when Big Food tries to sell them junk.
Both Haselmayer and Garvin use the word “trickery” with their young children when it comes to food packaging and marketing. When Garvin’s children notice a box with interesting characters, they sleuth the ingredients list.
Food Choices at School
Despite repeated attempts by nutritionists and parents to make adjustments to school cafeteria menus, it’s an area that Ali said continues to backslide. For some children, school-supplied lunches are the only meal they eat, which perpetuates systemic, cyclical issues surrounding poverty and childhood obesity.“The schools are where it can stop,” Ali said.
Menus often include foods fried in unhealthy oils, processed foods, unsafe food, foods with low nutrients, and even junk foods. And then there are food contaminants.
- More than 95 percent of items had detectable levels of glyphosate weed killer, the most widely used herbicide in the world.
- More than 65 percent of samples contained wheat ingredients, and all the wheat products tested positive for glyphosate, averaging 42.09 nanograms per gram (ng/g) of food.
- The average level of glyphosate in pizza was 154.51 ng/g.
School lunches can present parents with a difficult situation. Sometimes school and home messaging can be incongruent. For a child trying to eat well at school, it can feel unfair to be surrounded by peers who are not and seem to have more enticing snacks and meals. When those foods are supplied by the school, it can lead to conflicted food education.
Beyond getting schools to change their menus, parents can also raise the issue with the school administration. Principals need to hear from parents, Ali said.
Policy Proposals
There are efforts to address the problem of school lunch programs. A handful of bills were introduced in the previous Congressional session aimed at better lunch programs and installing gardens at schools. Unfortunately, they all died in committee.Change is needed outside of schools also. Ali said such changes include listing all ingredients on restaurant menus, including fast foods, and adding a “hazard” warning to high-calorie menu items, similar to the label on cigarettes.
“There’s no reason not to do this,” she said, adding that fast food and dessert serving sizes need to be reduced by half. “It’s not rocket science to figure out.”
Honeycutt recommended the government take immediate action to “supply organically grown, nutrient-dense food to our nation’s children.”
“If we are dealing with an epidemic, why is it not being looked at as an epidemic?” Ali asks. “There should be counseling, and this should be covered so that everybody is made aware again and again and again that this is important and you need to pay attention.”
