THE PLANK MARCH 30, 2009
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Top food cop Marion Nestle has a post up over at The Atlantic about the new study published in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health, showing that ninth-graders who go to school within 500 feet of a fast-food restaurant are more likely to be fat than those who don't.
Noting the National Restaurant Association's irritation at the study, Nestle notes:
I can understand why the NRA might be worried. What if cities stopped allowing
fast food outlets near schools? That's just what the Los Angeles city council
tried to do last year. With some research evidence to back up the idea, this
study might kick off a national trend.
And maybe, just maybe, kids might start eating healthier meals at school?
Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale
University, seconds Nestle's enthusiasm for kicking Taco Bell et al out of the neighborhood. As he told the NYT last week in its piece about the study:
Zoning laws that prohibit fast-food restaurants near schools are absolutely
indicated, and neighborhoods that choose to zone out fast-food restaurants are
probably taking a step to protect the future health of their children.
I've written a few times about why this nation's anti-fat crusade creeps me out--and why i think it's qualitatively different than the war on Big Tobacco. Of course, I've also acknowledged that, if there's any room to try and legislate good nutrition around the edges, it probably lies with the schools: Banning vending machines and junk- and fast-food advertising on school property seems an obvious opening volley.
That said, barring fast-food joints from settling near schools seems like a strange and problematic focal point.
For starters, the idea that the meals kids are getting in schools are a whole different level of enlightened eating than what they'll get at a burger joint seems to ignore the basic cafeteria offerings. My Kindergartener is in public school in a fairly wealthy county with lots of crunchy-granola, health-obsessed parents, and the menus are hardly the stuff of Alice Waters' fantasies: Hamburgers at least once a week. Ditto hotdogs and pizza and chicken nuggets. (Note to school administrators: I am not complaining. I love you guys. Seriously.) Yes, there are more nutritional offerings as well. But the same thing could be said of McDonald's. Presumably, the portions at school are smaller and less greasy and so less fattening than the disgusting mega-portions at fast-food places. But let's not pretend that a child deprived of his Whopper is going to start snacking on broiled chicken and carrot sticks back in the lunchroom.
In a related vein, kids tend to start getting porky at an age way before most are
allowed to leave school grounds for lunch. By the time they hit high
school, the bad habits--and a fair amount of extra poundage--are in place.
So anyone interested in hacking away at the root causes of our
fat-kids problem could probably pick a better battle.
I can, of course, already hear the logical response from objectors: Sure this move isn't The Answer, but where is the harm in trying to make it An Answer. Like all political quests, tackling childhood obesity must be looked at in terms of strategic prioritizing. From a purely legalistic perspective, I can't imagine that there wouldn't be complicated, costly, time-consuming law suits (not to mention potential PR problems) if the government moved from controlling what takes place on public school grounds to dictating where private companies who products are in no way proscribed for use by minors can peddle their wares. I'm not saying it couldn't be done. But whenever we're talking about imposing new nanny-state limitations on private individuals and/or institutions, there should be serious cost-benefit anlyses conducted beforehand. I have to think there are more obvious, more useful, and less intrusive avenues to be attempted.
Then again, if we are going down this path: I can think of countless products, services, and cable chat shows that should be banned--or at least severely circumscribed--in the name of healthier kids. I suspect you Planksters can as well.
--Michelle Cottle
4 comments
Bad offerings in school? The tater tot? The square piece of pizza or "fish" with a honey bun and a sweet tea? That's how you get a body started. I still crave that combination and I'm a svelt 165. It's like mac and cheese mixed with tuna fish or dorito sandwiches in college. Culinary masterpieces born of poverty.
- mpatrickhendri
March 30, 2009 at 1:44pm
The areas with fast food stores could also be in areas where the culture is more tolerant of weight diversity. If you want to socially engineer fat people out of America, the easiest way would be to levy a large tax on food, so the newly fat poor people will become hungry again.
- cthulhu2008
March 30, 2009 at 1:54pm
Two comments...
First, a stats geek aside: I'm not convinced that the results aren't due to omitted variable bias (i.e. drawing causality where only correlation is present because you didn't include a measurement of the true cause in the analysis). Michelle gave one good reason: nutritional behavior is already pretty well ingrained by high school (I don't think my eating habits changed substantially until the buffet freedom of college). Another -- or rather a logical extension of Michelle's point -- is that I'd bet a bag of arugula that proximity to a fast food restaurant is a decent proxy for the socio-economic makeup of the school, which of course is a major factor in childhood obesity. Finally, do that many high schools let their kids go off campus for lunch all four years?
Second, my parental perspective: I am against selective zoning restrictions in particular (I think that banning fast food restaurants would be ineffectual at best, and height & density zoning restrictions have probably made obesity worse), and I'm skeptical of the more heavy-handed solutions to childhood social issues, but I'm all for tools like TV ratings and special porn domain extensions to make our jobs a smidgen easier. For God's sake, parenting is hard enough as it is, and while my preferred solution to the onslaught of audience-honed TV commercials, malicious internet sites, and greasy foods would be to turn off the TV, shut down the computer, and drive by the In-N-Out, at some point we parents have to acknowledge that we're not omnipresent in our kids lives, and that raising them in a hermetically-sealed cultural bubble is more dangerous than tater tots at school or the occasional nonsensical Saturday morning cartoon. That said, we're a culture of liberty, so among other reasons the main rationale for my opposition to public policies narrowly tailored to alleviate a perceived childhood ill is I think we're cheating our children when we teach them that the road to responsible livelihood is to simply legislate away all the irresponsible alternatives.
I make one exception to this attitude, though: commercials aimed at children. I'm not going to pretend they're a new phenomenon, but YouTube has allowed me to compare the ones I undoubtedly saw as an eight-year old with those my sons see today, and the modern ones are without question more pernicious than their 80s ancestors. I'm also not going to pretend that banning ads aimed at children will be a panacea or would even be airtight in practice. However, preying on people without fully-developed critical thinking skills just strikes me as low and despicable. Germany has a ban on childhood advertising in place, and their toy industry seems to be doing just fine. At the very least, can elementary schools do a few weeks of teaching how to see through commercials, read the fine print, and maintain a healthy bit of skepticism about the claims made on TV and the internet?
- primwallflow
March 30, 2009 at 2:10pm
The first thing we need to do is pass a Constitutional Amendment turning everyone under the age of 18 in the United States of America into a slave.
Think of the advantages. Much of the racism and hostility lingering from the slavery of African-Americans will steadily dissipate once slaves (kids) include people of all races and slaveowners (adults) are also multi-ethnic by statute.
Formally enslaving our children will permit more rigorous clinical studies to gauge the effects of diet, education, sunlight, sleep, exercise, television, genetics, diety mythology, and a thousand other variables on human development. Don't wanna eat your vegetables? Tough. You're a slave. We need the data.
Speaking of clinical studies, imagine how much easier it will be to find trial subjects when concepts like informed consent are a thing of the past.
Parents lacking the gonads to enforce discipline on their own suddenly will have the U.S. Constitution on their sides. "Sorry, son," I'd love to let you sit there on your fat ass and Twitter instead of doing 300 push-ups but, well, you're a slave. Don't whine to me; blame the Founding Fathers, just like Scalia does."
Somewhere along the way this once-great nation went astray. Whereas at one time children built and sailed ships, dug wells, cleared and planted farmland, impressed the hell out of Native Americans, fought and won a Revolutionary War, and gave birth to dozens of kids of their own, all before they were 12 or what not, we now have kids sucking their thumbs well into their 30s.
Never have the political, economic, and moral advantages of a system of slaves been more apparent.
- williamyard
March 30, 2009 at 2:13pm