eating habits

Cleaner Plate Club: More Fruits, Veggies Eaten at School

Empty plates and half-eaten scraps on thousands of cafeteria trays offer the first tangible evidence that new federal standards on school meals are sprouting healthier eating habits, a new study claims.

Based on before-and-after inspections of more than 1,000 trays at four schools in an “urban, low-income” district, students chose 23 percent more fruits and consumed 16 percent more vegetables after the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its rules in 2012, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health reported Tuesday.

And if a nutritional reset is occurring among American students, baby carrots may be the gateway food, the researchers say.

“We were surprised by the vegetable findings,” said Juliana Cohen, lead author and a research fellow at Harvard. “We thought perhaps it was because students were eating more potato-based products like French fries, which count as a vegetable (in federal standards). We were very surprised to see that potato-based products weren’t being served on study days. Kids loved fresh vegetables, especially baby carrots.”

The federal guidelines are meant to reduce sodium and fat on school menus. Researchers will not name the city in which the schools were monitored, revealing only they are in Massachusetts.

Researchers weighed serving samples then recorded what foods sat atop test trays as students paid for meals. Later, those trays were collected and remaining foods were re-weighed.

At the same time, however, the Government Accountability Office reported Thursday that participation in the National School Lunch Program dropped by 1.2 million students, or 3.7 percent, in 2012-13 when compared to 2010-2011. Analysts cited the veggie-heavy guidelines.

According to the GAO, “state and local officials reported that the changes to lunch content and nutrition requirements … influenced student participation” and that almost all states reported “that obtaining student acceptance of lunches that complied with the new requirements was challenging.”

“Implementing change to a national program is complex and no one should expect every district or school across the country to instantly make it work,” said Dr. Howell Wechsler, CEO of Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a nonprofit that combats childhood obesity. The group works with 22,000 schools that meet or exceed the USDA rules. “There seems to be no reason why all school districts can’t meet federal nutritional guidelines.”

Source: NBC news

Food addicts: New study measures out-of-control eating .

While “food addiction” is somewhat controversial, a new study is shedding some light on women who may actually fit the profile of an addict, rather than simply liking chips and dip.

Research released this week online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at food addiction among 134,000 middle-aged and older women, all of whom participated in the large-scale Nurses’ Health Study. Nearly six percent met the criteria for food addiction as established by the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which was developed in 2009 and validated in numerous trials.

Middle-aged women fared the worst. Slightly more than 8 percent of women ages 45 to 64 could be considered food addicts, while 3 percent of older women met the criteria.

The Food Addiction Scale asks questions such as: “I find that when I start eating certain foods, I end up eating much more than planned” and “I find myself continuing to consume certain foods even though I am no longer hungry”.

“We’re starting to see the patterns with food addictions that we see in other addictions, and one of them is that younger people have more addiction problems,” says addiction specialist Ashley Gearhardt, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who worked on the study along with researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health.

The women who met criteria for food addiction were also more likely to be not married and not currently smoking. Researchers suspect that former smokers have simply traded the nicotine addiction for a food addiction, a process called addiction transference.

Although addiction was strongly associated with a higher body mass index (BMI), the data also show that you can be an average-weight woman or even underweight and have a negative relationship with food. Geography seems to matter, too. Women from the eastern United States seem to have fewer problems with food addiction than those from the South or Midwest, although researchers don’t know why.

The foods of choice for these women were so-called “hyper-palatable” treats that are high in fat, sugar, salt and processing. These foods seem to trigger the brain’s pleasure and reward centers through increases in the transmission of the “feel good” chemical, dopamine.

“The major narrative with every addiction is that people have no willpower,” says Gearhardt, who was one of the developers of the Yale Food Addiction Scale. “We know that’s not true, so we are trying to better understand if there are some foods that can hijack the system, given the right vulnerabilities in a person, and this study helps us identify those individuals.”

Because the researchers looked at a large population, the data may have important clinical implications. “We are finally getting at a distinct subset of individuals who are struggling in a way that looks like substance abuse more than anything else,” says Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, who was not involved in the study. “Saying eat more vegetables and exercise more won’t work with people who are struggling like this.”

Source: NBC news