Obesity is rapidly becoming the major health crisis of the
next generation. What parents can do to help kids control their
own weight:

Walk Don’t Run

It’s simple, it’s cheap, and studies show that walking may be
the best exercise for reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke
and diabetes

Pumping Preventive Iron 
By Shannon Brownlee

At 16, Lloyd Lamb already knows a thing or two about cruelty
and loneliness. The Marion, Ind., 10th-grader is bright and
outgoing. He plays golf and wrestles. He is also 5 ft. 8 in.,
weighs 200 lbs. and at times suffers the taunts of classmates.
Lamb says he works hard to ignore them, but there are moments,
he admits, when he gets "depressed and lonely." 

There must be a lot of lonely kids in America these days,
judging from the skyrocketing rates of childhood obesity.
According to the latest federal figures, the percentage of
youngsters ages 6 to 11 who are overweight has tripled since the
1960s, to 13%. As many as 1 in 7 kids is obese, and doctors are
seeing dangerously obese children as young as age two. 

"We’ve never had a population like this before," says Naomi
Neufeld, a pediatric endocrinologist and director of Kid Shape,
a nonprofit weight-loss program in Los Angeles. "Children who
are overweight are 20% to 30% heavier now than they were even 10
years ago.
We can’t even imagine the medical costs we will be seeing in the
future. It feels like Armageddon." 

That’s hardly an exaggeration. Last month the Surgeon General
issued an urgent call for the nation to fight its growing weight
problem, a move that was sparked in part by the epidemic rates
of childhood obesity.

Overweight children are more than twice as likely to have
high blood pressure or heart disease as children of normal
weight. Even more alarming is the number of children with Type
2, or non-insulin-dependent, diabetes. Once known as adult-onset
diabetes-before so many children started getting it-Type 2
diabetes puts kids at risk for very adult ailments, including
blindness, nerve damage, kidney failure and cardiovascular
disease. 

What can parents do to protect their children from the
dangers of too much poundage? A lot-especially if they start
early, before their kids get into the habit of eating high-fat,
high-sugar foods and out of the habit of exercising regularly.
Kids are most vulnerable to ballooning weight in early childhood
and then again in adolescence, says Dr. William Dietz, director
of the division of nutrition and physical activity at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Children normally lose fat from ages one to six or seven.
When they start putting on excess pounds as toddlers, they are
at heightened risk for obesity in adulthood for reasons that are
not well understood. 

Genes certainly contribute, but there’s much that parents can
do to influence the way their children eat and to lower the
chances they will end up obese. Young children are keenly
attuned to how many calories they need to grow and maintain a
normal weight; they know when they are hungry and when they are
full. But most kids quit listening to those internal cues by the
time they reach school age. The reason? Parents, says Leann
Birch, a psychologist at Penn State University. "There are
things parents do with the best of intentions that turn out to
be counterproductive," she says. A familiar example: insisting
that children clean their plate, a rule that can teach kids to
eat when they are not hungry. 

Parents can influence what their children like to eat. Kids
are born with a sweet tooth and a salty one, but they have to
learn to enjoy other tastes. They often need repeated
introductions to such healthy fare as beans and other veggies.
Using dessert to bribe kids into eating nutritious food can
backfire, says Birch.

"If kids are given one food as a reward, they will learn to
prefer that food," she says-and they will learn to feed the
vegetables to the dog. 

A better technique is to put several items on the plate and
get kids to try a bite of each. Birch also recommends that
parents learn to serve appropriate portions (two sites that
provide excellent guidelines: www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines
and www.cspinet.org/kids/index.html. Parents should limit the
amount of treats and junk food in the house, she says, including
soda and fruit juice. Restricting access to a pantry full of
fatty snacks and sweet drinks can make forbidden foods seem all
the more desirable. 

The flip side of the weight equation is, of course, exercise,
which American children are getting less of than ever before,
due at least in part to television, computers and video games.
According to a recent Nielsen report, kids between the ages of 2
and 11 watch an average of 20 hours of TV per week, an activity
that doesn’t burn many calories and tends to encourage snacking
by exposing kids to all manner of food and beverage advertising.
Simply turning off the tube can help kids keep off the excess
weight. 

In a landmark study published in 1999, Thomas Robinson, a
pediatrician at Stanford University, compared the TV habits and
weights of two groups of third- and fourth-graders. Half the
kids, most of whom were of normal weight, attended classes that
taught them how to monitor their television and computer time
and to replace it with other activities. At the end of the year,
kids in the special program had gained an average of 2 lbs. less
than the control group. Obesity experts recommend that parents
remove the television from their children’s rooms and set strict
limits on time spent in front of a screen, including the
computer. Giving kids alternatives to zoning out in front of a
screen is key, says Robinson. 

Once a child has gained too much weight, it’s time to get
outside help. Many parents turn to weight-loss camps for kids,
an industry that seems to be growing as fast as America’s
waistline. Camp can seem like the answer, especially when an
overweight child comes home as much as 50 lbs. lighter-but
beware. Kids who lose in the summer often gain it right back
come fall. 

Parents should look for a camp that teaches kids to make
lasting changes in their eating and exercise habits. Lloyd Lamb
attends Camp Vanguard, in Lake Wales, Fla., where he has learned
to look at the labels on food for fat content and to walk after
meals. He lost 40 lbs. last summer, his fifth at the camp. His
parents have also learned to follow a healthier diet. 

Indeed, any program that treats kids successfully has to
involve the entire family, says Leonard Epstein, a psychologist
at State University of New York at Buffalo and director of one
of the most successful pediatric-obesity programs in the
country. "You really need to include the parents as part of the
treatment, he says, if only because parents of obese children
are often overweight or obese themselves. Usually, the entire
family could stand to modify its diet and reduce high-fat foods
and sweets. Epstein encourages families to build exercise into
their daily lives, taking walks together after dinner, for
instance, or turning off the TV on weekends. 

If parents want to protect their kids from obesity, they need
to look beyond the home to their children’s schools, where phys
ed and recess are going the way of art and music. At the same
time, hundreds of cash-strapped school districts around the
country have turned to soft-drink bottlers, who offer as much as
$100,000 a year for exclusive "pouring" contracts to place
vending machines in school hallways. Principals have opened
their cafeterias to such fast-food franchises as Taco Bell and
Burger King. "If your task was to make the American child as
unhealthy as possible, could you do much better than fast food
and soft drinks in the cafeterias?" asks Kelly Brownell, a
psychologist at Yale University. 

Parents can try to change some of these things, but they can
do only so much by the time their children reach adolescence.
Restraint and self-control have never been America’s strong
suits. It’s tough for parents to teach teenagers to listen to
their bodies, to eat when they are hungry, to taste what they
are eating, to eat appropriate portions and to leave food on
their plate. Lasting behavioral change cannot be imposed from
the outside. These are internal battles and will ultimately have
to be fought by the kids themselves, one chubby bulge at a
time. 

Reported by Ellin Martens/New York, Jeanne
McDowell/Los Angeles and Maggie Sieger/Chicago