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Forcing behaviors
Gretchen Becker
Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 10:30 AMre: Forcing behaviors
Dr. Bill Quick
Thursday, January 01, 2009 at 11:29 AMI think that the concept of successfully promoting low-calorie products for kids could be achieved, if there was social push to do so. There's an interesting comic strip in this morning's newspaper, "Baby Blues" (by Jerry Scott & Rick Kirkman), which supports my point.
Panel 1: A little girl reads in a book: "No food product sold to students shall contain more than 35% sugar by weight."
Panel 2: She looks up to see a little boy with a candy cane in his mouth.
Panel 3: She says "It doesn't mention the sugar content of the students themselves" and he replies, as he licks the candy cane, "After most major holidays I hover around 90%."
This comic strip presents the issue of restricting calories in a humorous fashion, and opens the door for rethinking what kids eat. Similar educational/marketing activities could create a paradigm shift, so kids think of healthy eating rather than junk food.
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I think forcing overweight children to do anything -- eat low-calorie lunches or run around the gym or get weighed every week -- will simply make them feel more marginalized and more miserable so they'll go home and stuff themselves to compensate. Mandating offering low-calorie lunches to everyone would be a good thing, unless no one selected them so they went into the garbage.
Many overweight children have overweight parents, and when the parents get a notice telling them their child is obese, they get defensive.
We need to figure out less threatening ways of helping overweight children.