Passing the Taste Test : Youths Urged to Make Healthful Choices at Eat-Right Festival

Daniel Noon, a sixth-grader at MacArthur Fundamental Intermediate School in Santa Ana, filled his lunch plate to overflowing Wednesday with lettuce, carrots, raisins and strawberries, and complained: “I don’t have any more room.”

Only a few years ago, school-age kids like Daniel likely would have had nothing to do with fruits and vegetables. But he acknowledges that his tastes have changed.

This kind of dietary make-over is exactly what state officials and the local chapter of the American Cancer Society were promoting Wednesday as they presided over a spectacular smorgasbord of fruits and vegetables and invited some 200 Santa Ana elementary school children to dig in.

Held at the Sporting Club at Lakeshore Towers, the rally-like event was part of the state’s “Children’s 5 a Day--Power Play” program, which is advocating that everyone, including children, eat at least five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, as specified by federal health guidelines.

And there were plenty of credible role models on hand: Olympic gold medalist Florence Griffith-Joyner, Gayle Wilson, wife of California Gov. Pete Wilson, and Kimberly Belshe, director of the California Department of Health Services.

The eat-right festival had a message that was summarized by Wilson in her talk to the children. She told them that eating healthful foods not only reduces the incidence of cancer by a third, but it is a “cool” thing to do.

Parents want that same information stressed more frequently in the media, data from Belshe shows. A survey of 495 parents conducted last year shows that 93% want to require TV commercials to promote good nutrition. Also, 68% would restrict the kinds of foods that advertisers would be allowed to push to minors.

“I think it is a recognition by parents that children, like adults, are influenced by what they see on television,” Belshe said later in an interview. “I think the most commonly advertised foods are sweetened cereals and beverages, candy and advertisements for fast-food restaurants.”

Parents have good reason to worry about children’s eating habits, Belshe said, noting that her agency determined last spring that only one in four children in California eat the recommended five daily servings of fruits and vegetables.

That wasn’t the case on Wednesday, as the 9- to 12-year-olds helped themselves to the event’s featured 180-foot salad bar, which is expected to be entered officially in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest.

To stress the idea that good eating is fun, American Cancer Society volunteers dressed as carrots, corn and celery, while a rapper had the children clapping as he rhymed, “You need fuel to make your engine go. . . . Don’t want to burn out ‘cause you got to grow.”

The survey, which Belshe said is the first the state has ever taken of parents’ attitudes toward their children’s diet, also showed that 99% want nutrition and physical fitness taught in school.

Also, parents strongly disapprove of having fast foods sold at schools, a growing trend in recent years; almost all said they want only healthful foods sold on campuses.

Sue Foerster, chief of the nutrition and cancer prevention program for the California Department of Health Services, objected that “a number of school districts are capitulating” to the efforts of fast-food chains to move into school cafeterias.

Noting that variety is a central tenet of good eating, she said that “fast food doesn’t promote balanced nutrition” because “by definition (it offers) a limited menu.” She also complained that allowing fast foods to be served in identifiable wrappers promotes “commercialism on campus.”

There are some dissenters, among them Daniel Crawford, who runs food services at the Capistrano Unified School District, which in 1992 became the first school district in the state to establish a fast-food program in its high schools. Crawford said he doesn’t believe the parents surveyed understand that schools negotiate with the fast-food chains to ensure that only nutritious food is served in the cafeterias.

“We don’t serve the traditional fast-food menu,” he said, shunning such traditional fast-food fare as deep-fried chicken and potatoes.

The main reason for serving fast foods, Crawford said, is “to try to keep the kids on campus so they would not eat junk foods.”

Even Belshe takes a somewhat moderate view of chain foods, saying they need not be banned from campus if they adhere to some nutritional guidelines.

“To the extent they can provide healthy options, it is not necessarily bad,” she said.

“It would be unfair to presume all fast-food restaurants are providing unhealthy foods, when in fact more and more are responding to the growing interest of the public to eat nutritious food.”

Janis Smith, spokeswoman for Irvine-based Taco Bell, which provides food to more than 2,500 schools nationwide, observed, “The first step in good nutrition is to get kids to eat and not skip meals. Kids love Taco Bell food and therefore we find (at schools that have Taco Bell) kids are eating lunch more (often) than they would otherwise.”

Barry Sackin, director of food services for the Anaheim Union High School District and Anaheim’s elementary schools, agreed that a key issue is to serve school kids the food they want. The purpose of Wednesday’s lunch was to demonstrate that fruit and vegetables “are good to eat and fun and colorful,” he said. “We are refocusing our energy on training children to make healthy choices.”