Give kids chance at better health

In the past 20 years, the percentage of overweight adolescents in the United States has tripled. These expanding waistlines have resulted in everything from social ostracism and loss of self-esteem to placing young children at serious risk for diseases previously thought of as adult diseases – adult onset diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

This rapidly expanding overweight epidemic in America affects the entire population – cutting across all races and economic groups. It has been caused largely by cultural and lifestyle changes spread throughout our society. In 2001, then U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher called on government, communities and industry to respond with changes in society that would impact this epidemic.

The Maine Legislature responded this year by establishing the Maine Commission to Study Public Health, which is co-chaired by Sen. John Martin and Rep. Margaret Craven. The commission has drawn on health and education experts, food and beverage industry representatives and parent group leaders to come up with solutions to the scourge of overweight and obesity.

Martin split the commission into three subcommittees (subcommittees on: children, nutrition and schools; government involvement in nutritional choice; and state employment and nutrition) and gave the members the responsibility to develop comprehensive, scientifically based policy solutions on this issue to present back to the Legislature for consideration.

The public health debate on our nation’s weight problem breaks down into two camps: those who focus only on personal responsibility and those who focus on a combination of personal and corporate responsibility. The mantra of the food industry, “personal responsibility,” has been to hold the individual accountable for becoming obese, and to then leave any effective change up to that individual. This is counter to those who take a public health approach and believe that effective change requires both corporate and personal responsibility in order for positive change to occur – especially for children.

Our greatest challenge is to alert every parent to the dramatic problem they face when their child is exposed to tens of thousands of television ads a year, many for foods children should not be consuming – and then offered junk food at every turn from vending machines, restaurants and stores. Overwhelming marketing of junk foods and beverages on television, in schools, on the Internet and in magazines ultimately undermines parental authority. Over the last two decades, this intrusion into our lives has resulted in poor food choices and consumption of “super-size” quantities, resulting in ever-increasing weight gain by children.

To respond to these challenges to parents and children in Maine, the commission voted on and passed 28 recommendations recently to tackle obesity, a strategy which is intended to address all the root causes of overweight in Maine children.

Specifically, recommendations were made to:

. curtail marketing of junk food to kids on television and in school;

. improve the nutrient content of foods made available to children in schools;

. eliminate soda and candy from school grounds;

. make nutrition information readily available in large chain restaurants, provide children with the calorie content of foods sold in school cafeterias;

. increase requirements for physical activity in school settings;

. guarantee time for recess;

. guarantee adequate time to eat a healthy lunch in school;

. provide, improve the nutrient content of foods offered in vending machines and cafeterias on state property, provide incentives for healthy living through Dirigo Health;

. make available preventive health care coverage for state employees, among others.

Those recommendations constitute the most comprehensive plan devised by a state commission to date, and have the potential to be the standard for other states in fighting poor nutrition and physical inactivity.

Our challenge continues to be that the food industry spends millions of dollars to lobby government officials. It is easy for them – as they are an extremely profitable industry, and make more money by selling your children more food and beverages. In order to fight our recommendations, they will launch a public relations and advertising campaign that we have not seen since the tobacco industry battles. We in the public health community don’t have that kind of money. We can’t fight at their level.

What we do have, however, is the will to protect the health of the children of Maine. The citizens of Maine have the power to fight back against the corporations that spend billions of dollars a year on marketing to influence our children’s food and beverage choices. Please talk to your legislators; they want to hear from their constituents, not food and beverage industry lobbyists. Legislators need to know that you want our kids to have recess and healthy foods at school and that parents deserve to know that they, not advertisers, are determining what their kids want to eat.

Besides contacting your legislator, speak out at the public hearing of the Commission to Study Public Health in Augusta on Sept. 24, and protect your children from the corporate food and marketing industry.

Fight back for our children. Give kids a chance.

Drs. Jonathan Shenkin and Robert Holmberg serve as co-chairs of the Subcommittee on Children, Nutrition and Schools of the Maine Commission to Study Public Health. Shenkin is a pediatric dentist in Bangor and Holmberg is a pediatrician in Bangor.